dutchcow Posted January 25, 2013 Share Posted January 25, 2013 I try to reboot or shutdown the screen goes black, hdd activity stops and it sits there forever. If I press the power button I get greeted with the login screen again. I've ran a full myfix, twice. Rebooting via a shell also doesn't work (shutdown -h now and shutdown -r now). What is wrong with my installations? I'm tempted to reinstall as it's driving me nuts. On top of that OSX always boots in verbose mode, no matter the setting in Chameleon. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Administrators Hervé Posted January 25, 2013 Administrators Share Posted January 25, 2013 Do a search on the forum, that has already been greatly discussed and resolved. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dutchcow Posted January 31, 2013 Author Share Posted January 31, 2013 I've fixed the not being able to restart by deleting and re-installing EDP. But my laptops still boot with seemingly fixed chameleon flags, my D820 always boots with -v -f and my D630 with -v, I have to edit them at each boot. Which is just annoying, nothing too bad. Fixed thanks to Hervé; > That verbose boot could be a side affect of multiple OS X partitions on a drive where the 1st partition boot plist takes precedence... I think that is my problem too, I will figure that out, could it also be in/on the EFI partition? What does strike me as odd is that my D630 seems to be so much slower in day to day usage than the D820, even though they have pretty much the same CPU benchmark wise, and the D630 has an nvidia over the D820 Lion is much snappier on the D820, it makes me sad I cant seem to get Lion to work as well on the D630 as on the D820. Could you and others maybe share some performance tricks EDP doesn't automatically use? I've played around with some strings in chameleon but the geekbench differences are not significant. The geekbench numbers are very close, but the D630 always scores higher, its just slower in actual usage. Overall the graphics on the D820 seem faster than on the D630 with the same OS install (just bare osx for testing now) and EDP, nothing else, all stock settings. If anything they should perform the same right? Both machines even have the same RAM and HDD, the only big difference is GPU, and a X3100 shouldnt perform faster than an nvidia, graphics feel sluggish on the D630 somehow. I've ran htop and checked sysload loads and processes on both machines and they are similar, as well as the memory usage. The D630 allocates about 200MB more RAM at 900MB vs 700MB on the D820 running idle. I just can't figure this one out. Should I have bought a D630 with Intel graphics instead? I hope not. If anyone can help please do Edit: On a positive note, following Dell excellent service manuals I was able to clean both laptop's fans inside out, the heatsinks and replaced the thermal paste with new, Dell puts way too much on there. The results are pretty 'cool' for such a quick job, 30 minutes per laptop with a cup of coffee and the service pages open on another laptop. I got my idle temps in the lower 30s and 50s on load, the nvidia however didn't get much cooler and idles at 55. So if you're bored and have a screwdriver, clean out that laptop and enjoy the silence. Edit 2: The problem lies in OpenGL or somewhere near. I did some Xbench testing both laptops running Lion 10.7.5, the D820 scores 111 overall and D630 87 (just doing the 3 graphics tests) I find its weird the GMA is faster than the D630 specially for the OpenGL squares, the D820 scores nearly 200 there and the D630 not even 90. This must have the impact I'm feeling but not seeing in Geekbench as it only seems to test disk and cpu stuff and not graphics. What kind of things can I try to improve this poor OpenGL result? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Administrators Hervé Posted January 31, 2013 Administrators Share Posted January 31, 2013 No experience with the D820, but your D630 should not feel sluggish. Is SpeedStep working Ok? what CPU in those laptops? Regarding T° readings, they look terrific but suspiciously low for a D630 with nVidia GPU. Did you set your Tjmax to the correct values in the plist file of /Extra/IntelCPUmonitor kext? For a T7500, Tjmax is 100°C and other CPUs may have a different value -> refer to ark.intel for the correct values. My D630 nVidia never reports CPU T° lower than low-50s and GPU T° lower than high-70s... And all that despite a thorough cleaning, renewal of thermal paste + copper shim on the GPU. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dutchcow Posted January 31, 2013 Author Share Posted January 31, 2013 I think speedstep is working fine, I see the bars change to full when I'm doing heavy lifting and sometimes the fan kicks in a bit louder than the normal humming. I got a T7100 which scores about the same as the T5600 in the D820, overall it's a joy to use the D820 because its snappy as can be. I did just install GeForceGLDriver.bundle to try and it cut my Xbench scores in half, but the GUI experience seems faster somehow :S I will remove it again and re-test to see if I'm not dreaming and then try another patch I found, other than that I have no clue howto solve this, it happens under SL/L/ML. I have no OpenGL problems in Linux or Windows (I kind of assume its todo with OpenGL at this point). Do quite like learning this side of 'unix' though. Not too much of an Apple fan (hope nobody will hate me for that) but I like OSX a lot, the OS is great and having 'unix' underneath adds extra value to me. But I understand Apple can't have the user experience ruined by 10.000 hardware combinations like Microsoft. Anyways I'm rambling! As for the cooling, both my heatsinks were covered in a layer of hard old grease, I removed that and applied some bottle of cleaning agent that came with the thermal kit, I have no idea what it does exactly but it makes the paste bind much better. The TJ speed is reported at boot at 75 on the T5600 I think and I'm sure it's a 100 on the D630. (Just checked on the Intel site they're both 100, will check the info files) On my D820 I had actually ordered a new CPU fan because it didn't came on when I tested the laptop with the keyboard still loose to see if it all worked. I only found out after putting in a replacement that arrived this morning it also didn't worked but the laptop booted up fine. I booted up Linux and ran i8kfan 2 2 and low and behold the fan came to life! Right now, and I'm not joking the machine is idling in a 21C living room at 29C. The D820 is a seriously cool machine, if it wasn't for the low res screen I'd be using it right now. They can be had for spare change secondhand. Could you possibly share your Extra stuff for one your non sluggish D630's for me to test? I've also triple checked the bios and simply disabled all hardware I don't use on both laptops and made sure the advanced core stuff is disabled. BIOS config, software and nearly all hardware they are identical laptops. Thanks for the help so far by the way! I hope I can also help some people out with my gained experience troubleshooting. I can only say buying little apps like SuperDuper! is def. worth the money when playing about. Having a live copy of your install you can boot into on any machine at any time is just very comforting Oh, another little snag I noticed on the D630 is that sometimes the keyboard repeatsssssssss like that until I press another key, using the myHack PS2 kexts resolved this. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Administrators Hervé Posted January 31, 2013 Administrators Share Posted January 31, 2013 Tjmax of both T7100 and T5600 is 100°C. You should therefore check the contents of the plist file of your /Extra/IntelCPUmonitor kext as the default Tjmax value is 0. You'll get incorrect (lower than real) T° readings with an incorrect Tjmax value in the kext. I have nothing specific to performance in terms of kexts in my /E/E folder, it's just the EDP-installed kexts, including TSCsync. So, if you have a myHack/EDP installation, you have the same as I do. I just have better T7500 CPUs (bigger cache, higher freq.). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dutchcow Posted January 31, 2013 Author Share Posted January 31, 2013 I changed the TJ values to a 100 they were both at 0 as you said, at boot time I did see some messages fly by I think. The temp on both is slightly higher be still well below the 40 point, not that I mind as long as the palm rests stay cool. Too bad there isn't much else you or I can do to troubleshoot my D630 I do have a plain myHack+EDP install, I use the same usb stick for the install, just a different Extra for each laptop. It would really suck if for some really strange reason my 3D/OpenGL stuff isn't fixable, kinda bought this machine to be a hackingtosh... Edit: I checked how OSX reports my card and noticed its a GeForce now, it used to display the right card, but that could be just cosmetics as they are essentially the same card right? Chipset Model: NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS VRAM (Total): 128 MB Vendor: NVIDIA (0x10de) Device ID: 0x042b Revision ID: 0x00a1 ROM Revision: 60.86.68.00.16 Wonder if you have the same ROM and revision as me on one of your D630s. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Administrators Hervé Posted January 31, 2013 Administrators Share Posted January 31, 2013 Read my answer in other topic re: reported 8400m GS card -> replace DSDT with version from boot pack will restore report of NVS 135m. I have exact same version/ROM/revision of nVidia NVS 135m as you: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dutchcow Posted January 31, 2013 Author Share Posted January 31, 2013 Thank for the info. There's really nothing else I would know to do, I'll wait and hope someone here knows something else to try. Else I'd just put this one up for sale and go for a well supported E series. On a side note, would it be possible for EDP to include some fix for the hard disk ticking noise created by OSX's silly way of enforcing the max power savings causing the heads to park every 10-20 seconds making this ticking noise. I use hdapm for it myself, but I don't know if they allow redistribution or if you guys even want such thing in the EDP. It could go in the fixes menu? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Administrators Hervé Posted January 31, 2013 Administrators Share Posted January 31, 2013 On a side note, would it be possible for EDP to include some fix for the hard disk ticking noise created by OSX's silly way of enforcing the max power savings causing the heads to park every 10-20 seconds making this ticking noise. I use hdapm for it myself, but I don't know if they allow redistribution or if you guys even want such thing in the EDP. It could go in the fixes menu? ??? I mustn't have the same system... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts