Thursday, December 1, 2011

The KEEX-6100 ROARS!

Nearly Complete
Just a quick update on the Sandy Bridge ECX Board: KEEX - 6100:

Using the Unibeast Method developed by the amazing tonymac, installing Mac OS 10.7.2 is quite easy once you make a few modifications to the bios.

If you have any interest in hackintoshes then there is no better place than Tonymacx86

For this board make sure you:

1) Enable AHCI as per tonymac's instructions

2) Disable the Onboard Audio (it causes a kernel panic every time and drove me crazy until I realized what was causing it).  Even if this can not be fixed, it is not a big loss as the onboard audio is no better than USB audio would be

3) Set either the display port or HDMI (which ever you use) to Display option 1.  If you leave the LVDS as the primary and secondary disabled (default) there is a weird quirk where the image disappears after boot and only returns if you unplug and replug the monitor.

4) I am getting assistance in trying to solve this problem, but for now S3 sleep does not work.  Change BIOS power settings to allow for only S1 sleep, which works fine.


View of iMac G4 and Keex-6100

iMac G4 with TMDS to DVI, DC-DC upconversion

Lion (10.7.2) on the iMac G4's native LCD

The KEEX-6100 identified as a Mac Book Pro
As the KEEX-6100 uses a mobile chipset it was identified as the new MacBook Pro.  The chipset, processor, onboard intel graphics are all supported natively by Lion.

Gigabit Ethernet/LAN Works with simple kext addition.  The PCI-Express Broadcom Wifi Card works great.  Whats more is that you can hook this card up to the native Wifi Antenna (located outside the faraday cage, but inside the plastic dome), this gives a very strong signal.  Preliminary fit testing shows everything fits.  Only wake from S3 remains (wake from S1 sleep works fine as noted above).

I have put a card in the CF slot, which is only recognized when the computer's SATA settings are IDE and not AHCI.  Though this is as easy to change in the bios as boot priority, it is a little cumbersome.  I have put Windows 8 Developer Preview on the CF Drive and will see if dual booting is a possibility.

Over at tonymac x86 forum, a very knowledgable modder, offered to help with sleep and has himself gotten the onboard audio chipset to work (on a different board).  So, onboard audio ay in fact be an option. I am giving some thought to internalizing the internal board of the griffin powerwave adapter.  I have only the area between the bottom of the dome and the optical drive, but the board seems thin based on the size of the case.  I am going to hold off finalizing the rear ports until I choose which audio option to go with.