E6420 (NVS 4200M) and Catalina

[Dellintoccio]

Hello there! I'm new here and i hope i can receive a solutions about my problems!

I've managed to work my wifi atheros card in Catalina and work like a charm but I'm trying now to get work my nvs 4200m on Catalina! I saw pinned topic that bring nvs on Catalina and i wondering if i can do the same! Is this possible?

 

Second but less important is:

I can listen audio from the jack but i can't listen anything from the speakers, anyone have idea about it? I'm actually using AppleAC kext for audio!

 

Thanks in advance!

 

My laptop spec:

Dell E6420

I7-2720qm

8GB Ram

Intel HD 3000 & Nvida NVS 4200m

HDD Toshiba 1TB

 

[Hervé]

Answer is no as stated many many times on the forum. NVS 4200M is Fermi and Fermi graphics are not properly supported beyond OS X El Capitan/macOS Sierra. On the E6x20 laptops, you just cannot get them supported past El Capitan 10.11. If you add to that the fact that nVidia support for Metal starts at Kepler cards, that pretty much closes the discussion re: Fermi cards on Mojave or later.

 

In addition -and again, this has been stated numerous times over the last couple of years-, Intel HD3000 was last officially supported in macOS High Sierra. 'dropped in Mojave and later. Workarounds exist for Mojave and Catalina through patches that basically install missing SNB graphics kext from High Sierra and replace some graphics-related frameworks. Process was easy and worked Ok in Mojave and Catalina up to 10.15.3 but things got complicated from 10.15.4 and now require to use dosdude1's patcher; we've posted about this in the Graphics forum section and you may also Google for this.

 

All in all, I'm of the opinion that it's not a great idea to run Catalina or later version on HD3000 laptops, given that this iGPU was already buggy past Yosemite (since El Capitan, everyone experiences glitches, pixelisation and black horizontal lines across the screen over time). There is no known and definitive solution but having 8GB of RAM and a therefore a minimum of 512MB VRAM does somehow improve things a little. My personal experience is that the buggy behaviour happens and worsens the longer you use the laptop without reboots and the more you repeat the sleep/wake cycles.

 

With regards to audio, what you describe is well-known and it's long been stated that you need to cache (not inject) CodecCommander kext from /L/E (or /S/L/E if you must).

 

Do think of using the forum Search facility before posting; all these points have been discussed at great length and answered before.