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EFI/CLOVER for Gigabyte Z170X-Gaming 5 based Customac

Important update : I don't maintain this project anymore, as I have switched to an OpenCore configuration due to better memory management.

This is to document the software part of a Customac build, especially the CLOVER folder in the EFI System Partition of my SSD.

Philosophy of the build and hardware choice are described more extensively (in French) in a series of articles on my blog.

To sumarize the hardware :

• Motherboard : Gigabyte GA-Z170X-Gaming 5 (rev 1.0)
• CPU : Intel Skylake Core i5-6600K 3.5 - 3.9 GHz
• Graphics card : <del>MSI GTX960 GAMING 2G</del> (starting from version v/2.0) : PowerColor RadeonRX580
• Wifi/Bluetooth : built from a genuine Apple Airport card, which uses a BCM94360CD chipset.

Particularity of this configuration : I can use a vanilla macOS installation (High Sierra 10.14 latest production release) ! SIP is enabled like in a stock Mac.

I keep the Clover version relatively current, but do not systematically update, unless a new macOS version is released (going from 10.14.0 to 10.14.1 for instance).

Points which require personalization

BIOS

This board is notoriously picky regarding memory, so you might have to configure the BIOS with a single memory stick at first. I currently use BIOS F20, which runs OK after forcing the board to stick to the memory speed of 2133 MHz during initial startup.

Most settings can be seen in this photo album. If you have a non K CPU, you will probably have to disable (at least during initial installation) VT-D.

USB

This motherboard has a lot of USB ports. More than macOS can natively handle. To have a reliable and easily upgradable machine, you must compromise and prevent the use of some of the physical ports, in order to respect a 15 ports limit inherent to macOS's controller.

Other approaches can be seen in issue #9, but here is my recommandation for setting up USB.
You will need to:

• download the full archive of the GA_Z170X_G5_Injector.kext,
• make your ports choice with the help of the included drawings, in order to respect the logical limit of 15 ports. It must be noted that physical USB3 ports use 2 logical ports: one for USB2 and one for USB3.
• once you have made your choice, edit the Info.plist file included inside the .kext and put the modified GA_Z170X_G5_Injector.kext into the kexts/Other folder.

CPU

If you have another CPU model than the one I use, you will probably need to run ssdtPRGen.sh to generate your own SSDT-CPU.aml (and SSDT-CPU.dsl for your own documentation) in order to take full advantage of the processor.

iMessage, iTunes, AppStore…

Some personal details, especially SMBIOS SerialNumber, BoardSerialNumber and SmUUID from config.plist, are not published in this public repository. There are good references on generating appropriate values, but take care that Clover Configurator might mess with other settings.

Additional notes

For increased legitibility, sources or .dsl of DSDT/SSDT patches (which are .aml files in the ACPI/patched folder) are available in the patched-sources folder.

About license

This work is published for informational use only. Any component shown here retains its own licence.