One nice enhancement.

The best thing about Apple’s troubles – a CEO with the charisma of a sponge, a stock down over 30% from its peak, more cash than it knows what to do with, a tired cell phone offering, a lack of innovation and failure in the TV market – is that these many distractions mean fewer updates of OS X, the OS powering Macs and Hackintoshes. Because, let’s face it, every ‘enhancement’ since OS Snow Leopard (10.6) has been so much fluff and noise. SL (Intel machines only) can still be bought from Amazon for some $40 but will almost certainly not run on the latest Macs. It’s fine with Hacks and offers one huge feature missing from Lion and Mountain Lion – Rosetta, the PPC G3/4/5 emulator which allows it to run any old apps from your PPC days on an Intel Mac or Hack. You know, apps like HP’s DJ30/90/130 color management utility which will not run on anything later and is essential for debugging whatever ails your HP DesignJet dye ink printer.

As I still have a ten year old PPC iMac G4 for DesignJet maintenance, the loss of Rosetta is not such a big deal, so it was with trepidation that I approached the latest minor upgrade of Mountain Lion 10.8.3. What else would now be broken by Cupertino’s policy of planned obsolescence?

When performing the upgrade I did so by downloading the complete (Combo) update from Apple here rather than the incremental upgrade which is what is applied if you upgrade through the App Store. Hackintosh community chat has it that a Combo upgrade is more reliable than an incremental one. I have no idea if that is true, but this approach avoids being forced to upgrade to the latest version of iTunes, an app which Apple has never got right.

After a week of running I can say it seems fine and there is one significant enhancement. Because one of the new 2012 iMacs uses the nVidia 660M GPU, Apple has had to provide native support in OS X for the nVidia 660 GPU family to run OS X on that machine. The GTX 660 is one of nVidia’s finest bang-for-the-buck mid-range GPUs, with the 660M in the iMac being – yup, you guessed it – a crippled version. The iMac 660M version has but 0.5GB of memory, compared with 2GB (3GB on some EVGA cards in the US for $30 more) for the aftermarket cards. I would bet the clock speed is lower too, heat being any iMac’s bugbear, but cannot confirm this. The Zotac GTX 660 I am using (not the 660 TI) retails for $215, which includes two powerful variable speed integrated fans which are exceptionally quiet. These aftermarket cards all support up to two 2560 x 1600 pixel displays and include HDMI and DisplayPort in addition to DVI sockets. The Zotac board is recommended over the competitors’ if you have limited space in your box. It is considerably shorter, making a major difference to the accessibility of the motherboard’s SATA sockets in my Antec Sonata III enclosure. Non-trivial.

To put the sophistication of these latest GPUs into context, the Intel i7 Ivy Bridge CPU has some 800,000 transistors. The nVidia GTX660 CPU has 2.54bn – three times as many! Little wonder nVidia is making serious progress in the world of supercomputers, where its graphics chips are delivering cost effective performance at state-of-the-art throughputs.

My three monitors remain the estimable Dell 1650 x 1080 21.5″ 2209WA IPS ones, now some 4 years old, because they are easily calibrated and the dot pitch is fine for my purposes. Plus I like the bigger default fonts these deliver. If you use newer 1920 x 1200, 1920 x 1080, 2560 x 1600 or 2560 x 1440 displays, a card like the GTX 660 will easily crunch through graphics which might leave earlier nVidia GT2xx, GT4xx, 98xx or 88xx cards running out of steam.

I wrote about updating my HP100 Hack to nVidia’s latest card here and that hardware and OS needed nVidia’s separate drivers to make the card work. Now, with 10.8.3, the drivers come with the OS, so no external drivers are necessary. The benefits are twofold. My Hack is now more stable – looking to be as good as in the Snow Leopard days of yore – and the CPU’s idle temperature has fallen from 104F to 94F. Nice. The start-up problem where 10.8.2 frequently refused to recognize my third display, driven through a DisplayLink USB dongle, is gone. And the i1 DisplayOne Lion colorimeter display profiling software continues to work fine.

The Zotac GTX 660 in the HP100. Lots of room.

The native GTX660 support works for all nVidia cards, whether Asus, EVGA, MSI, Gigabyte (all per chat boards), Zotac (mine), PNY (tested and owned by reader PB) or any other brand. The chips are the same. Once you upgrade your Hack to 10.8.3 you can delete these two lines from your Boot Drive/Extra/org.chameleon.Boot.plist file on your Hackintosh as the presence of native drivers no longer requires the Hack to be informed that a 660 Kepler card is installed (thanks to reader PB for the tip):

The above lines can be deleted.

nVidia also released an update to its CUDA driver, which you can download through the related System Preferences pane, after which you will see this:

Latest CUDA driver.

The System Information->Displays data is also updated to reflect the use of native nVidia 660 drivers:

Let us all hope that Apple remains seriously distracted with its other woes and leaves OS X alone for good and all, instead of adding dumb gesture support, hidden Library directories and poorly implemented voice recognition. They might like to start by fixing the joke that is Siri on the iPhone. I use Google search on my iPhone – it’s everything Siri is not. Fast, accurate, a joy to use for voice search with excellent speech recognition. Even if you speak English, like me, not American!

Technologically unchallenged.

HP100+

One of the best indicators that the desktop PC has peaked is the falling sales of PC hardware and the poor upgrade rates to Windows 8, the latter as much a function of a mediocre product as it is of ‘free’ competition from the scummy people at Google in terms of their Cloud apps.

And while I have been diligent in seeking out the services of ace Hackintosh builder FU Steve in keeping my Hackintosh at 90% of the state of the art (90%, as Ferrari pricing takes over at anything higher and you get performance you cannot use) the state of play right now suggests that future enhancements will be few and far between.

Sure, while I could add a couple of silly priced EIZO monitors, which I would never do, there is nothing I can currently do to my Hackintosh, the HP100+, to improve it for my purposes, which leaves me without a tech challenge. Disappointing.

Desktops have peaked.

I could add a wild and crazy $$$$ GPU, but I do not game. I can scarcely tell the difference with the latest nVidia GTX 660 card installed on what I do, which is mostly LR and a bit of PS.

I use a SandyBridge i7 CPU and IvyBridge, the latest iteration, adds nothing in a desktop. Nor, I suspect, will Haswell in 2013 where the stated goal is lower power consumption. I’m green, but not so green that I’m about to rip out the guts of HP100+ to save a few watts in power consumption, installing a new motherboard and CPU.

I could have FU install a Xeon CPU and motherboard, at Rolls Royce prices, but the only plus of that is in massively multi-threaded math operations, and I have no need of that. LR and PS use four threads poorly, never mind sixteen.

I could ask El Supremo to add BluRay but the reason I passed on my BluRay player to a friend is that on the 42″ 720p Vizio TV (5 yrs old and it continues to delight daily) I could not tell the difference from regular DVDs, so BluRay is not something I could make use of.

The other thing which is currently useless is Thunderbolt, as so few peripherals support it. Those that do are overpriced, and I already have USB3, which is half as fast, running fine (not a pretty story, but I got there. As Churchill said of American democracy, we will try everything else before settling on the right answer, which is how FU got USB3 to work!). The only thing I use USB3 for where the speed is actually exploited, is to import images from SDHC and CF camera cards into Lightroom.

This sort of reminds me of film camera days. I was happy with my Leicas for 35 years because there was nothing else out there that was better for what I mostly do, meaning street snaps. And technology was only improving for film emulsions, not for hardware. Then digital came along and I have been chopping and changing, but seem to have stabilized on the two big Nikon DSLRs, both obsolete, and the two small Panny MFTs, the latter increasingly my son’s province. Then of course I got into converting old classic-era Nikkors with chips and that effort was super successful, the lenses are to die for and there’s nothing more I need optically. Forget believing that today’s optics are better. They are not.

Yours, technologically unchallenged ….

Never easier.

The ease with which full function wi-fi can be installed in a Hackintosh has never been greater or the cost lower.

What follows assumes you use an Airport Extreme (AEX) or Time Capsule (TC) wi-fi router. My AEX is a Gen 1 (2008), single band only, but Gen 4 AEX/TCs and later are dual band, meaning that they can support both 2.4GHz and 5GHz (802-11n) devices simultaneously. With the advent of iPhone 5 most of my ‘go to’ devices now support 5GHz, including Hacks, iPads and iPhones, so dual-band is not a requirement. We do have two devices in the home which are 2.4GHz capable only, the xBox 360 and the old iMac G4, and these are set to receive their broadband signal directly from the A&T Uverse router which is 2.4GHz, 802-11b. As usual, the Telephone Company is a decade behind. Everything else looks to the Airport Extreme and now uses the 5GHz band.

The Hackintosh wi-fi issue has become much simpler over time. First one used an external USB wi-fi dongle with the associated (awful) Realtek software. Then TP-Link came along with internal PCIe cards which delivered Airport capability and, later, when OS X Lion came along, AirDrop functionality after you messed with Pref files some. You would buy the TP-Link PCIe card then an aftermarket wi-fi card which was an SOB to install in the card owing to the fiddly connectors. After application of cable ties and solder for the joints you destroyed, the card worked fine.

The other day I learned from the excellent Tonymacx86 Hack forum that TP-Link now makes a dual band wi-fi card which integrates the PCIe card and the wi-fi card. The model number is TL-WDN4800 and Amazon has it for $35 – which is less than the previous card + wi-fi card combination cost and is a plug-and-play installation in any Hack. B&H Photo also carries the card for a similar price. (Prices seem to fluctuate daily by a few dollars). The card comes with regular and low-profile brackets, the latter for use in Hacks built in Micro ATX cases.

Here are the old and new cards, antennas removed:

And here are the before and after results on one of my Hacks – the one with the botched old card installed, one antenna missing, replaced with the new card. A two minute job:

Clearly, having three working antennas does no harm. Comparing the speed of the new card with a properly installed old one at a like location, the new card consistently reports download speed 10% higher than the old, possibly attributable to superior antenna design.

There is but one quirk. The Airport Extreme defaults to channel 149 with 5GHz wi-fi, whereas the new TP-Link card only goes up to 48. So, go into Applications->Utilities->Airport Utility->Airport Extreme->Edit->Wireless->Wireless Options and set Radio Channel to 48, then Save. Your new TP-Link card will now be visible to the Hack in which you installed it.

Setting the Channel to 48 in Airport Utility.

Benchmarks and observations.

Ace computer builder FU Steve reports on benchmarking results for the HP100, now renamed the HP100Plus.

Power consumption:

The first thing I did with the Hackintosh HP100Plus was to finally measure real power use. Theoretical tables where you list your components seem to assume that everything is running full bore simultaneously, which is clearly unrealistic. So I used a Kill-a-Watt power consumption meter (Amazon – $20) and inserted it between the HP100Plus (computer only, not the displays) to determine real, live power use in a variety of situations. HP100Plus uses a stock 500 watt power supply which has done fine with the old nVidia 9800GTX+ card and the new nVidia GTX 660 is benchmarked at a lower wattage than the old card. That means power use should not be an issue, but nothing beats this test method.

The Kill-a-Watt monitoring real time power use.

Here’s a table of findings:

HP100Plus power use.

So none of these activities remotely tax the 500 watt power supply, with the most demanding being the Unigine rendering test which uses the most sophisticated graphics around. To put these data in perspective, the CPU’s operating limit is 191F, and HP100 is running the Core i7 CPU at 4.3GHz, or 23% faster than the stock frequency of 3.5GHz – a modest overclock made possible by the use of the excellent Coolermaster 212Plus after market CPU cooler. The rest of the innards include a Gigabyte Z68 motherboard, a Core i7 Sandybridge 2600K CPU, 16GB of 1600MHz RAM, two SSDs both 120GB (one SATA 3, one SATA 2), two 1TB 7200 rpm SATA 3 HDDs, a USB socket card, and a wireless Airport card. Bottom line? Even for gamers, 500 watts should be sufficient.

Benchmarks:

Traditional GPU performance benchmarking apps like Cinebench do not cut it. The app fails to test all the great new technologies in the Kepler cards being put out by nVidia. The GTX660 has some 2.54 billion transistors, compared to a mere 800 million for the Core i7 CPU, and four times the memory of the old 9800GTX which HP100 used to use. The new standard in GPU performance measurement is Unigine which has immensely sophisticated video graphics – right down to fields of swaying grass blades – so that is what I used. Unigine refused to run on the 9800GTX+ as that card simply cannot hack it, so there are no comparative data.

In addition to installing nVidia’s drivers for the GTX 660, as explained yesterday, I also installed their CUDA drivers which make the best use of the latest rendering technology in the new card. CUDA speeds complex math calculations and will halve the time in ripping and encoding a movie, typically from 14 to 7 minutes. For reference, my system rips (no compression) a 4GB movie in 6.4 minutes.

Luxmark is another rendering benchmark tool which I ran to simultaneously test CPU and GPU functions.

And finally, while Cinebench is outdated, I ran the GPU test this one last time and the HP100Plus came in top of the heap.

Here are the screenshots:

Note that in the Cinebench run I have also tested the integrated HD3000 GPU which comes with every i5 and i7 Sandybridge CPU. The current Ivybridge comes with the better HD4000 GPU and can be expected to maybe deliver twice the framing rate of the HD3000. Call it 25fps, still leagues below what the GTX 660 delivers.

The CPU speed for all tests was 4.3GHz – not all the apps report it correctly. Like tests without CUDA installed came in a few percent lower. Not dramatic, but why not install this enhancement?

Finally, Novabench is yet another benchmarking app and in this case I was able to run it on the old and new cards.

The significant change here is the doubling of the Graphics Tests score, much as predicted on theoretical grounds in yesterday’s piece.

Lightroom 4 and Photoshop CS5:

In practical use there is little change from the 9800GTX+. The old card was already blindingly fast in these relatively undemanding tasks. The main advantage of the new card is that it will be able to far better drive larger monitors. Thomas’s three Dells are 1680 x 1050, and good 27″ displays are now sporting 2560 x 1440 pixel densities. That’s twice the number of pixels per square inch, and a lot more square inches to cover.

Other sockets:

The GTX 660 comes with two DVI sockets, one DisplayPort and one HDMI. Thomas currently has two Dells connected to the two DVI sockets with the third driven via USB using a DisplayLink adapter. I have read that the HDMI and DisplayPort outlets can be used at the same time as the two DVI ones to power two additional monitors, but until he gets the cables to test that I cannot comment. The advantage of this approach is that if it works, higher resolutions can be supported, as the DisplayLink is limited to 2048 pixels on the long side. That said, it has been super reliable, requiring only the occasional driver update as Apple introduces new major OS X releases.

Use with MacPro:

The GTX 660 only works with OS X Mountain Lion. It is not supported in Lion or earlier versions and it seems nVidia has no plans to release drivers for those. The latest builds are rumored to include nVidia drivers and at least one much maligned and disregarded MacPro user has reported success in installing the GTX 660 in a MacPro chassis with the latest version of 10.8.2 (with supplemental updates). I have not tested it but any MacPro user still poking along with older video cards should try the upgrade or, better yet, build a HackPro.

PCIe x16:

To make sure you are using the fastest 16-bit bandwidth to communicate with the GTX 660, make sure to turn off TurboSATA/USB3 in BIOS – Integrated Periipherals. Your USB3 devices will still work fine if the USB3 driver is installed. By doing so you will ensure that the x16 data path is used, rather than the x8, which will be the case if only one card is installed and the BIOS is wrongly set. Also make sure that the card is in the x16 slot, not the x8. On the Z68 Gigabyte motherboards, the x16 slot is the one nearest to the CPU.

PCIe = x16 correctly set.

Does it make a difference? Yes. In the Unigine bench test an occasional minor stutter at x8 disappears at x16.

Use of two SSDs:

HP100Plus uses two 120GB SSDs which store the OS and all apps, cloned nightly using CarbonCopyCloner. I highly recommend this setup as it makes major upgrades, like this one, very easy. The backup drive is used as a test bed and if anything blows – as it usually does – can be restored in a matter of two minutes using an incremental restore using CCC. I mean two minutes! Ask me how I know …. Life is simply too short to do major upgrades using spinning disk drives.

Cold start:

The time from the Apple logo splash screen to the Login screen is 14 seconds. For comparison the 2012 MacBook Air takes 10 seconds.

Warranty:

The Zotac USA warranty is for two years. No need to waste money on AppleCare ….

Thank you, FU Steve. Here’s until the next time you decide I need something upgraded.

Update March, 2013:

Apple has just released OS X 10.8.3 which now includes native GTX660 support for nVidia cards, whether EVGA, Zotac, PNY or any other brand. They did this as one of the 2012 iMac variants use the 660M GPU, the mobile (and less speedy) version of the real thing. Once you upgrade to 10.8.3 you can delete these two lines from your Boot Drive/Extra/org.chameleon.Boot.plist file on your Hackintosh as the presence of native drivers no longer requires the Hack to be informed that a 660 Kepler card is installed:

The above lines can be deleted.

nVidia also released an update to its CUDA driver, which you can download through the related System Preferences pane, after which you will see this:

Latest CUDA driver.

The above System Information display is also updated to reflect the use of native nVidia 660 drivers:

I can confirm that all works well with 10.8.3.

More graphics performance.

The bronze Zotac GTX 660 with the geriatric 9800GTX+ in the foreground.

The roar of the tuned V8 in the driveway followed by four loud raps on the door could only mean one thing. Ace computer builder FU Steve was dropping around to regale me with the latest and greatest in the Hackintosh world. When we last saw my Hack, the HP100, it was sporting an overclocked Sandy Bridge i7 CPU running at 4.3GHz, an ancient Nvidia 9800GTX+ graphics card with 512MB of memory, 16GB of 1600MHz RAM and three Dell Ultrasharp displays. Used mostly for my day job of managing money, it is a blast to use with Lightroom 4 and Photoshop CS5, never so much as missing a beat.

But FU was not about to leave well enough alone.

“Come on pal, we’re off to Fry’s in Palo Alto to pick you up a Kepler graphics card.”

“Eh! what?”

“Well, if you got your nose out of your spreadsheets now and then you would know that your graphics performance is indistinguishable from a bilge pump. Both suck.”

Well, it seems fine to me, but who am I to argue with a man who eats silicon for breakfast?

“Before we leave, be sure to download a fresh version of 10.8.2 to your MacBook Air. It takes a while and we will be needing it for the fresh system install we will be doing for the new card.”

A brand new roadster graced the driveway of the modest abode, and a question to FU about cost returned an insouciant “Oh!, a few dozen AAPL shares”. Given that the man has been accumulating these since El Jobso was knee-high to a grasshopper, that translates to ‘Free’, or as close as it gets.

“I had the manifolds ported and polished” quoth FU, as he blipped the throttle to the disgust of all within a couple of blocks.

As we hit the tunnel joining the 92 to the 280, FU hit his usual 120, shifting down as we hit daylight on the most beautiful freeway in the US. After the backfires on the overrun I leaned over and asked:

“So Kepler, Schmepler, why do I care?”

“Because, my dear boy, one day you are going to junk those 1680 x 1050 Dells of yours and get a coupla 27″ 2560 displays. Trust me, you don’t want to be poncing about with that 9800 GPU of yours when you do. Kepler cards are Nvidia’s state-of-the-art and they just came out with the economy priced GTX 660, perfect for all who do not do 3D rendering. Your graphics speed will double.”

I buttoned it, visions of vast outlays dancing in my head as we passed seemingly endless miles of real estate on the east side of the freeway, all belonging to that academic powerhouse – and dormitory for half of Beijing – known as Stanford University. Rumor has it that railroad baron and financier Leland Stanford had offered snotty Harvard a chunk of coin to endow a few buildings and scholarships. They had turned their Brahmin noses up at him and his scruffy appearance, so he built Stanford instead. Old man Stanford would doubtless be appalled to learn that his creation was now the leading repository of Chinese intellectual property theft. Rocketing past the radio telescope and the linear accelerator, we exited on Page Mill Road at a brisk 90 as FU slammed on the binders for the left turn onto Page Mill and Fry’s on the other side of El Camino Real.

“Tell me, FU”, I asked, “what do you do when the cops pull you over?”

“Ain’t gonna happen pal. Ever check my license plate? 11-99 Foundation, dude, 11-99 Foundation. You help the cops’ pension fund along and they look after you.”

Hmmm.

Parking in a handicapped spot at the entrance – “They always get the best spots” – FU took a sharp left on entering Fry’s and made for the GPU section.

GPUs at Fry’s.

“I say, FU, shouldn’t I be buying at Amazon? You know how frugal I am.”

“Screw Amazon, mate. Since they started charging us hard-working Californians sales tax, Fry’s has become competitive on price plus we get to rack the V8 out on the freeway.” In truth, it was a perfect California day and there was a light spring in my step. FU was onto something.

“Now here’s the scoop. Nvidia came out with the GTX 660Ti a while back and it’s the bee’s knees for video. But as video is not your thing their latest, the GTX 660, will save you $80 and still double your speed. As for who comes up with their naming conventions I can only think it’s some schmuck in Redmond.”

We had our choice of EVGA, PNY and Zotac and I started reaching for the EVGA – the EVGA 9800 having served so well – when FU stepped in.

“Get a life, matey, get the cheapest one. All use the same Nvidia chips, just packaged in different wild colors for the zit set. Here, grab this Zotac at $229. After the $15 rebate, which I doubt you will ever see, your price with CA sales tax will be $235. Up yours, Amazon. Get yer plastic out.”

It was such a perfect day that even FU noticed, never exceeding 85 on the way back, though he did chuck it about a bit on Canyon Road coming back down through Hillsborough, almost taking out a couple of dowagers out for their afternoon constitutional.

“No prob, dude. Inherited wealth. Parasites. Never worked a day in their lives.” was all I could get out of him.

“Now here’s the thing with these Keplers. They are pretty new and a bit of a pain to install, so rather than go through with that we are going to do a clean OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.2 install on your boot SSD, after checking it’s cloned and bootable to the backup SSD, rather than futz with incremental changes. The long way is always the shortest with these things.”

So while FU proceeded to open the HP100 and pull the 9800GTX+ which has served me so well, he instructed me how to make a bootable OS X installer flash drive using the MBA and TonyMac’s tools, specifically Unibeast.

The new card is considerably shorter, making access to the poorly designed horizontal SATA sockets on the Z68X-UD3H-B3 (rev 12) motherboard easier. Further, though it sports two fans to the 9800’s one, it’s incredibly quiet. Technology marches on. FU took all of three minutes to remove the old card, plugged in the 6-pin power supply to the Zotac, but left the Zotac loose.

“We will boot without a graphics card, using the native HD3000 GPU in your Sandy Bridge i7. Then we will add the tweaks for the new GTX 660 and you’ll be off to the races”.

We repaired to the garden to blow the froth off a couple while the MBA did its thing preparing the flash drive installer.

“The other thing you have to do with the GTX 660 is to be sure to download and install Nvidia’s 10.8.2 drivers. These will come native in 10.8.3 as Apple uses the same GTX 660 in its latest iMac’s (needless to say, these remain unobtainable thanks to another Cook cock-up) and then run TonyMac’s Mountain Lion Multibeast, setting GraphicsEnabler=No in the system options. Forget that and the Hack will not boot. That changes the chameleon.boot.plist file so that it works. After we have HP100 running on the HD3000, we will make those changes, insert the Zotac GTX 660 and off we go.”

I let him ramble on happily, making for another couple of beers. ‘A man has to know his limitations’, as that jerk once put it.

Once the installer was ready, some 20 minutes plus the time to re-download a fresh version of Mountain Lion, it was plugged into an available USB socket on the HP100, booted from and the installation process in the above Unibeast link followed. FU then installed the new nVidia drivers, or ‘kexts’ as Apple calls them, did the GraphicsEnabler=No step using TonyMac’s Multibeast app, restarted and, hey presto! We have the Kepler GPU running.

Here are the theoretical comparison from Hardware Compare:

Thanks to reader PB for the source.

Non-trivial performance increases. Note especially the last metric addressing performance in high resolution applications – meaning with bigger, more pixel-laden displays. This is a key reason Apple has used the GTX 660 in it’s high definition Retina Display MacBook Pro laptops, albeit using the lighter-duty GTX 660M mobile variant. (Can you say ‘overheating’?) In addition to sporting two DVI connectors, the GTX 6600 also has HDMI and DisplayPort outlets so that the USB connector HP100 has used for the third display can be removed and a DisplayPort cable substituted, allowing the enhanced performance to be delivered to all three displays. This remains to be tested.

As the GTX660 uses slightly less power than its predecessor, no changes were made to the stock 500 Watt Antec power supply used by HP100.

The Zotac GTX 660 in the HP100. Lots of room.

I’ll publish test data, including power consumption, in Part II, along with subjective operating impressions using Lightroom 4 and Photoshop CS5.