I successfully upgraded my Hackintosh to OS X 10.11 and it appears everything is working as expected including audio and Intel SpeedStep. I performed a clean install of El Capitan by using this guide; I was pleasantly surprised to discover that in 10.11 you can restore all of your applications/data/settings from a Time Machine Backup using the Migration Assistant. Initially I had trouble getting the new OS X installation to boot correctly; the Unibeast application used for making the installer has changed to the Clover bootloader. Clover has support for booting in UEFI mode and it seems some ASRock boards have issues booting from it. To fix this I had to create a manual entry for the Clover bootloader in my UEFI Boot menu; it’s not enough to just configure the drive as first boot device in the BIOS. I found the necessary commands thanks to the following guide (under section 4.1).

After booting from the Unibeast USB and selecting “Start UEFI Shell 64” you will be greeted by the following screen:

On this screen we have entries for FS0, FS1, etc. which are the partitions detected; we need to find the one that corresponds to the EFI partition of the drive where OS X was installed. If you look at the strings beginning with “PciRoot (0x0)”, you will see some of them contain “/USB”; you can rule those out since that is the Unibeast USB. For my particular system I found the EFI partition under FS2.

For example, lets enter the partition FS2 and check the contents:

If we see a directory labeled EFI in the ls output, then we’ve found the right partition. Now we get a list of the current boot entries with:

You should get output similar to the screen below; this is from my Hackintosh after I already added Clover to the UEFI Boot menu.

Use the following commands to add Clover to the ASRock UEFI Boot menu:

After going back into the BIOS, you can change your first boot device to Clover and OS X should boot normally.

Since upgrading my Hackintosh to Yosemite, I’ve noticed a few instances where my Apple Trackpad becomes unusable; it will show as connected but the cursor will not move or move erratically and multi-touch gestures will not work. I am using the IOGEAR 4.0 Bluetooth dongle as recommend by tonymacx86. This usually only happens when I do a Time Machine restore (after failed attempts to optimize kexts or settings) but it happened today while tinkering with CPU power management.

I haven’t been able to find any useful information related to this but through trial and error I’ve found an odd solution.

1. Remove all paired devices under System Preferences > Bluetooth
2. Shutdown the Hackintosh
3. Remove the USB dongle
4. Power on the Hackintosh and shut it down again after it finishes loading
5. Reconnect the USB dongle and power on the Hackintosh
6. Repair your devices

While using my Hackintosh today, I noticed that I only ever have the minimum frequency (800mhz, 8x100bclk) and the maximum non-turbo frequency (2.8Ghz, 28x100bclk) for my Intel i5-4440S. I was using iStat Menus to check this info and based on this, I spent a great deal of time trying to figure out how to make it work properly. I only learned much later that most utilities only report the min and max frequency and nothing in between.

Initially I tried changing the smbios to iMac 14,1 since that is closer to my system than the MacMini 6,2 definition; the iMac is Haswell and the MacMini is Ivy Bridge. Eventually I stumbled onto http://www.tonymacx86.com/mavericks-desktop-support/128926-mavericks-native-cpu-igpu-power-management.html – a complete guide to enable proper CPU power management and well as the correct utilities to check with.

I downloaded the ssdtPRGen.sh script to generate an SSDT file to enable the proper CPU power management:

This generated the following output:

You can see in the output above that it correctly detected and generated the missing P states in-between the min and max frequencies as well as the turbo frequencies.

Since I originally used the Multibeast option “Patched AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement”, I restored the original AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement.kext from my Unibeast installer.  Then I used Chameleon Wizard to disable the “Generate P-States” and “Generate C-States” options and enable “Drop SSDT” so the ssdt.aml generated earlier is loaded by the bootloader (ssdt.aml needs to be copied to your /Extra folder, which ssdtPRGen.sh will do for you).

The Intel Power Gadget and AppleIntelCPUManagementInfo.kext can be used to verify whether or not power management has been correctly enabled. Below you can see the outputs from my system:

I’ve successfully upgraded my Hackintosh to OS X 10.10 and everything works the same as before. The process was basically the same as my original Mavericks install. All you need is to create the Unibeast USB installer by following http://www.tonymacx86.com/445-unibeast-install-os-x-yosemite-any-supported-intel-based-pc.html. It is important to note that the new Yosemite based installer seems to have removed the option “Restore System from Backup”; so you will to keep your older Mavericks based Unibeast USB for doing full Time Machine restores.

Initially I had trouble with FakeSMC and audio not working; turns out this was because I forgot to check the new option in Multibeast for “Kext Dev Mode”. After reinstalling with that option enabled, sensor monitoring and audio was working.

It’s been over a week since getting my Hackintosh up and running; ever since downgrading to v2.4.14 of the AppleIntelE1000e kext I haven’t had any issues. Everything works and it feels like a real Mac.

Below are some pictures of my build; I installed a Noctua NH-U9B SE2 for as CPU cooler and added a pair of Noctua NF-S12A PWM fans at the bottom. Everything is arranged to blow up from the bottom. The NF-S12As are controlled by PWM and set to ~900 RPM; unfortunately the Z87E-ITX doesn’t appear to support voltage based controls for 3 pin fans attached to the CPU fan header. I set the CPU fan to run at full speed and used the low noise adapter to lower the CPU fans to ~1100 RPM.

My early 2009 Mac mini had recently died and I decided to try building a Hackintosh to replace it instead of buying a new Mac mini. The current Mac minis have not been refreshed since 2012 and are still using Ivy Bridge CPUs.

I had an NCASE M1 that had been sitting in my closet for the past six months so it seemed like a good time to finally put it to use. I was originally going to use a Gigabyte H87N-WIFI or Z87N-WIFI board based on the recommendations from TonyMacx86’s Buying Guides but a friend of mine had an ASRock Z87E-ITX he was not using; I went with that board instead to keep the build cost low.

The build components are:

• Intel Core i5-4440S
• ASRock Z87E-ITX
• Crucial Ballistix Sport 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3 1600 Low Profile
• Intel X-25M 120GB SSD (taken from my dead Mac mini)
• Slim slot loading ODD (also from my dead Mac mini)
• Corsair CS450M 80 PLUS Gold PSU
• NCASE M1

While waiting for parts to arrive,  I prepared the installer using my Macbook Pro by following the instructions at http://www.tonymacx86.com/374-unibeast-install-os-x-mavericks-any-supported-intel-based-pc.html. Since I was downloading Mavericks from fresh the App Store to make the Unibeast installer, it was already updated to 10.9.3 – so I didn’t need to update after getting my Hackintosh up and running.

After receiving all of the components,  the first thing I did was flash the BIOS of the Z87E-ITX using a beta bios found at http://www.tonymacx86.com/general-hardware-discussion/117344-z87e-itx-updates-15.html#post762323 – looking through that thread you will see user WonkeyDonkey has done most of the work in figuring out how to hackintosh the Z87E-ITX.

Now I was ready to try installing Mavericks. I had my monitor connected to the ASRock via Displayport; I found that after the BIOS screen that Unibeast installer screen was just black. Normally you would see something like this:

This is the screen where you press Enter to boot from USB or type in other boot parameters if you have issues reaching the installation. I also tried connecting the monitor via DVI and HDMI; both of those connections allowed me to see the Unibeast installer but would kernel panic every time despite the boot flags I tried. I left the monitor connected via Displayport and despite not being able to see anything I was still able to just hit Enter at the black screen and proceed to the Mavericks install. After completing the Mavericks install, I found that I could not boot off the installation using the Unibeast USB stick; I got a kernel panic every time (it was also tricky trying to select the install and type boot flags since the screen was completely black). Eventually it dawned on me that there was something different about the Unibeast USB environment and the new install of Mavericks sitting on my SSD; Unibeast has an Extra folder under / which contains kexts that are needed for it to boot properly on most systems in order for you to run the install. So I decided to try making the Extra folder on the Mavericks installation and copy over some of the files:

After doing this I could finally boot from the Mavericks installation and run Multibeast with the following settings:

I removed my Unibeast USB and restarted Hackintosh;  it booted correctly from the SSD and the boot loader was no longer showing a black screen. Everything seemed to work pretty well and I started reinstalling my apps. Then I realized I didn’t set up the audio. Unfortunately I’m not sure exactly how I got the audio working. I forgot to install the ALC1150 kext during the first run of Multibeast; I opened it again and chose just the ALC1150 and “Optional EFI Installed Bootloader Support”. After the reboot the audio was still not working. Then I tried running Multibeast again with ALC1150 and the DSDT.AML that is included in the zip with the 2.30A bios from the post I mentioned earlier. This just made my Hackintosh freeze at the Apple logo so I had to boot from Unibeast USB and use the Terminal to delete DSDT.AML from my /Extra folder. After doing this and booting into Mavericks again I found that the audio was working perfectly. Weird.

So far it appears to be stable and everything I have tested works: Bluetooth pairing with Apple Wireless Keyboard and Apple Magic Trackpad, ethernet, audio, hardware monitoring via iStat Menus, Intel SpeedStep and even Sleep (although it seems it will not wake up via Bluetooth, need to push power button to wake it up).

EDIT:   My Hackintosh appears to hang during heavy network loads and it appears the version of AppleIntelE1000e I used is unstable (see http://blog.thireus.com/tag/appleintele1000e-kext). I’ve installed v2.4.14 instead and it seems to be ok.