I built this machine based on tonymacx86's Customac Pro recommendations:
PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant
General consensus is that Unibeast is easier than Clover, so I followed tonymacx86's guide to install Yosemite and the nVidia driver, which took an awful lot of trial-and-error in the BIOS settings. I was eventually able to bring everything up to date and restore my Time Machine backup from my MacBook Pro. Everything was great, except that every so often the entire system would freeze. It got to the point where every single time I used the machine, this would happen. It could be a few minutes or a couple of hours, but a freeze was certain. I tried memtest, moving RAM around, adjusting BIOS settings and even restarting the entire process to no avail.
So I said, "balls to this" and reformatted my Yosemite SSD. This machine was now a Windows PC only!
Until I started missing OSX, so I looked into Clover. I had been put off by the amount of steps and reading it needed, but it didn't seem so bad now considering the amount of messing around I had to do with Unibeast. I started again, nuking my Windows SSD as well, since Clover wants everything to be UEFI instead of Legacy BIOS. I ended up following guides from http://www.rampagedev.com/ which made everything much easier than expected, aside from accidentally skipping steps or misreading a few instructions. Rampage Dev even provide specific post-installation instructions for individual motherboards. I had to remove my GPU to get it working initially, update to 10.10.4, install the latest nVidia driver, then pop the GPU back in. Because Clover makes changes on the EFI partition, I was able to update Yosemite without breaking my setup. To get the GPU working I had to mount the EFI partition then modify the boot arguments in the plist file to include nvda_drv=1. I didn't bother trying to get sound working since I have an external USB sound card anyway.
It's been going for a couple of days, back and forth between Windows 8.1 with no problems. As of writing, it has been up for 14 hours and even managed to sleep for a few of those, waking up with no issues. The only issue, and I consider this only a slight problem, is that it takes 45-60 seconds to shut down. I can live with that.
So, if you have the same build as I do, I recommend giving the Rampage Dev guides a try. Just remember:
- READ the instructions. You missed something, even if you definitely didn't. You ticked a wrong box or such like. Check everything again, you'll find the mistake!
- If you're still stumped, check the comments. The devs on that site are quite active and have replied to most questions posted and your question might already be there.
- Take the GPU out until you've updated Yosemite and installed the latest nVidia drivers.
- Mount the EFI partition, open the plist file and add the boot argument nvda_drv=1. You can do this manually at every boot, but that's a pain. If you don't do either of these, you won't be able to use the nVidia driver even if you select it in System Preferences.
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