macOS Monterey on Dell Precision T1700 (OpenCore 0.7.5)

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https://preview.redd.it/dvyu7staxc081.jpg?width=2016&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ba085666918b2446ccd5cfd3ac70c092f6ecfd6f

Successfully installed the latest macOS 12 Monterey on my Dell Precision T1700 workstation. Complete with hardware acceleration (notice the Metal Family: Supported in the screenshot)!

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My main tip: If you have an old machine, chances are somebody already worked out the right configuration. So Google before spending a lot of time configuring yourself.

In my case, after a couple of days of failure, I googled something like "Dell Precision T1700 opencore" and got https://github.com/cube-builder/dell-precision-t1700-opencore-catalina amongst the answers which have a link to https://github.com/cube-builder/dell-precision-t1700-opencore-big-sur that became my base for Monterey installation: I mainly

• Updated the configuration appropriately i.e. use SMBIOS iMac17,1 instead.
• (After successfully installed macOS) Updated OpenCore to the latest RELEASE version + kexts with the help of ProperTree.

Diff-ing the config file with my own config file following of the Dorstania guide, it turned out the crucial config is the XhciPortLimit one must be set to false! So I might have misunderstood the guide.

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Post-installation problem: Really sluggish machine! It takes 10-15 seconds to close a window. Need graphics hardware acceleration!

A bit of research yields the fact that I cannot use my dGPU (NVidia Quadro K6000) in macOS Monterey because the drivers had been removed. So 3 choices:

1. Reinstall macOS Big Sur in which the driver is still available.
2. Patch macOS Monterey system image to insert the necessary driver in Big Sur
3. Make the most out of the iGPU

Both 1 & 2 are undesirable, especially 2 since this means reinstallation of Monterey everytime I f*ck up.

So I set out to do 3. Most guides such as https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Post-Install/gpu-patching/intel-patching/ are not very clear about the hardware requirement since they only talk about the configuration but miss the very crucial detail mentioned in a comment in https://www.reddit.com/r/hackintosh/comments/lawv62/graphics_8_mb/

You can't use the IGPU through the DGPU ports.

So I got a DisplayPort cable (since the mainboard only provide VGA and DisplayPort output options), a DisplayPort-supported display, connected the mainboard's video output (instead of the NVidia's video output) to the display's input port and voila, it worked like a charm.

(In my research, I have to read up about PCI. Unfortunately, I lost the link to a very nice post on tonymacx86 which explains where those PciRoot(0x0)/Pci(0x2,0x0) and PciRoot(0x0)/Pci(0x1b,0x0) come from and how to retrieve the information using IORegistryExplorer.)