Coffee Lake is here and I’ve successfully installed macOS High Sierra featuring the i7-8700k and Gigabyte Z370 AORUS Gaming 7. The i7-8700k was out of stock everywhere during it’s release month and despite that I still managed to get my hands on one following the steps I detailed here. I haven’t had much free time lately so I’m posting this build a little later than I would have liked.
Coffee Lake works out of the box in High Sierra 13.X requiring no special changes/hacks. Running Sierra 12.X is another story requiring a FAKECPUID spoof to Kaby Lake for Coffee Lake to be gotten up and running. The iGPU works with full graphical acceleration as does sleep/wake functionality on both the UHD 630 iGPU and a Nvidia/AMD dGPU. Sound, Ethernet, iMessage and HWMonitor to monitor temps, voltages, fanspeeds are all working fine on this Gigabyte build. The total cost for this built was about $1200 excluding the monitor, I was able to get the motherboard $40 off and the RAM I purchased when the prices were lower.
THE BUILD
INTEL I7-8700K PROCESSOR @ 5.0GHZ
Performance wise, Coffee Lake performs surprisingly well on a hackintosh all 6 cores and 12 threads are working. I managed to overclock my CPU to 5 GHz simply using the Auto overclock feature on my Gigabyte motherboard. I probably could squeeze a little better of a score with a manual overclock, faster RAM timings and a potential delidding. The CPU crushes the performance of current Mac’s offered which is subject to change when Apple releases the iMac Pro.
Cooling my i7-8700k @ 5GHz is the Dark Rock Pro 3, which I managed to get two of on sale last year. I still use them for i7 builds because of their combination of looks, quietness and performance for an air cooler.
I think this is one of the best looking motherboards by Gigabyte so far with a much better color scheme then the Kaby Lake Z270X Gaming 7. I chose this board particularly for it’s looks and overclocking potential, which I was able to get my i7-8700k simply using the auto overclock feature. Luckily the Z370 Gaming 7 uses an Ethernet and Audio Chipset that are very compatible in macOS, unlike the Z270 variant which used a Creative 3D Audio Chipset which can be a little more tricky to get working for beginners. Audio and Ethernet have so far worked reliably without any breakage on the Z370 AORUS Gaming 7.
Also USB 3 speeds work on all the ports up to 5Gbps through my testing in macOS, however, I don’t have any devices to test the Gen2 port or 10Gbps so can’t verify if that can be gotten working or not at this time. USB-C port is functional as well. Although there is one problem with the USB 3 ports and it’s something I noticed back in Sierra 12.6 even with Gigabyte’s Z270 chipset as well as certain MSI motherboards. The problem is that if I have flash drives plugged in the rear IO USB3/3.1/USB-C ports, they will eject upon waking from sleep. This only affects USB 3 flash drives, USB 2 drives work fine in any port of the rear IO. The front USB headers don’t have this issue and this is where I plug in my flash drives as I rather not reach behind my computer to plug in a flash drive everytime so the issue doesn’t really bother me.
I already had a AMD RX 560 laying around so I decided to go with the matching Gigabyte theme for this build. I was originally planning to get a GTX 1060, but quite a lot of Hackintoshers have been complaining about the GTX 1060 under performing or sleep not functioning properly. I do also have a mini GTX 1050 Ti which I also tested in this build that doesn’t suffer from this issue. Also Nvidia card’s are a little more tricky to get working in High Sierra you will need to enable SIP for the installwhen you reach that step.
Fractal design makes good cases and this case with it’s mesh front panel caught my eye. When I first slid it out of it’s cardboard boxing I was surprised at how small it was for a mid tower. At 17 inches tall w/ without the feet and 15.5 inches deep it can pass for a micro ATX sized case.
Cable management is tidy in this case. There’s plenty of nooks to stuff cables into and I didn’t even bother to use zip ties as a result.
A reliable and highly recommend NVME Drive and and the fact that it I knew it worked in High Sierra OOB and give me no problems.
Corsair RAM continues to be a great choice for hackintoshing even with Coffee Lake as the LPX is pretty much on the compatibility list for every motherboard which is a good thing to avoid memory corruption kernel panics. Since switching to this brand from the Kingston ram I used in Sky Lake I haven’t had a single Kernel Panic related to memory issues.
If you don’t want to spend too much on a power supply, while also not getting something terrible then the EVGA BQ 600W is a good choice because of how quiet it is for a power supply that doesn’t’ have zero spin technology and the fact that it’s a power supply that doesn’t make that annoying clicking noise when turning on and off.
GIGABYTE Z370 HACKINTOSH GUIDE
Getting a Gigabyte Coffee Lake hackintosh like this one working is fairly straightforward. Even using a different Coffee Lake CPU or Gigabyte motherboard should be fine as their all pretty much the same.
Above is my Hackintosh Clover EFI that you will want to download and use for your Hackintosh’s EFI Boot Partition.
BIOS SETTINGS
These the are the BIOS settings you will need to change after creating the macOS installer and before first boot:
- Save & Exit → Load Optimized Defaults
- M.I.T. → Advanced Memory Settings Extreme Memory Profile(X.M.P.) : Profile1
- BIOS → Fast Boot : Disabled
- BIOS → LAN PXE Boot Option ROM : Disabled
- BIOS → Storage Boot Option Control : UEFI
- Peripherals → Trusted Computing → Security Device Support : Disable
- Peripherals → Network Stack Configuration → Network Stack : Disabled
- Peripherals → USB Configuration → Legacy USB Support : Auto
- Peripherals → USB Configuration → XHCI Hand-off : Enabled
- Chipset → Vt-d : Disabled
- Chipset → Wake on LAN Enable : Disabled
- Chipset → IOAPIC 24-119 Entries : Enabled
Based on the GPU you’re using change the following settings:
Dedicated graphics card:
- Peripherals → Initial Display Output : PCIe 1 Slot
- Chipset → Integrated Graphics : Disabled
Intel iGPU:
- Peripherals → Initial Display Output : IGFX
- Chipset → Integrated Graphics : Enabled
- Chipset → DVMT Pre-Allocated :128M (if this setting isn’t showing then: 1. Set Integrated Graphics: Enabled. 2. Save and Exit BIOS by pressing F10. 3. Reenter BIOS upon computer restart and it should be there.
GIGABYTE COFFEE LAKE HACKINTOSH INSTRUCTIONS
Follow the guide Guide to fresh installing macOS High Sierra on a Hackintosh (10.13 Update) with these special instructions:
- Follow Step 1 normally
- At Step 2 use the Gigabyte EFI instead of the one offered in the Guide when doing the transfer or copy/paste into the EFI partition
- Skip Step 3
- Step 4 use the BIOS settings above
- Continue following the guide as normal
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