dell e6430s performance problems - 2 Machines - only one fast

[cellstorm]

hello,

 

I have quite a bit of a problem,

 

I have set up an e6430s , corei5 2.69ghz and 8GiB of Ram, with (now called) "Dell Latitude / Inspiron / Precision - Clover Guide" with elCapitan, upgraded to 10.11.6, I chose MBP 9.2 in SMBIOS.

 

All went well, and I have gotten decent performance out of it, wen opening Nikon Raw Files with Adobe Camera Raw in Photoshop.  Even dockingstation working.

 

No I have bought another one, with exact same specs.

I installed right bios, cloned the partition from my working e6430s with carbon copy cloner,  copied the EFI partition over, and it Booted Instantly. - great, I thought. BUT when I did try to open a RAW file with Photoshop, it did not perform the same as on the other machine, it needed at least 5 seconds more!

 

I thought  I was doing sth wrong when copying the partition, so I tried to boot up with the harddisk of the first e6430s in the second e6430s - but this made no difference! - is was significantly slower at this task of opening raw photos - so slow that it would be unuseable to edit lots of photos this way. I tried to switch the RAM chips as well ... And to generate a new SSDT.aml for the processor..

 

So I thought mybe I had to setup the machine fresh - but no avail. Lots of work to play through installation and configuration, but it did not perform. I am a bit fustrated now...

 

I am now trying a Sierra install with the updated Guide. 

 

Has anybody had any comparable experience? 

 

Could someone give me a hint what this could be?

 

 

thanks in advance,

 

flo

 

[Hervé]

Are you sure they're both identical in every respect and that CPUs do not differ from one model to the other?

[Bronxteck]

I would start by comparing the bios settings from the "good" machine to the other. make sure there both on the same level playing field since OS wise everything else was the same.

  also try swapping batteries and power supplies. an inadequate battery or power supply can also sometimes cause the machine to get stuck in a low power state and not throttle properly 

[cellstorm]

right, the Good machine now died in a car accident. Thanks god no living being was hurt.

 

The CPU of the repacement machine is different, its an I7. So I have to run the ssdtPRGen.sh again and place the ssdt.aml (renamed to SSDT.aml, is that important?) into efi/CLOVER/ACPI/patched Is there something else I have to do? because I did this, and used the efi folder of the dead machine (ssd survived the crash..), but still having the problem...

 

I think I will start form scrach now with sierra ; any good advice to another, newer latitiude or similar (faster i/o (preferably 4pci-e lanes nvm-e ssd) with swappable drives, docking station port, pr03x preferably..) to try out if this all fails? I guess I would try the 6440...
 

also try swapping batteries and power supplies. an inadequate battery or power supply can also sometimes cause the machine to get stuck in a low power state and not throttle properly

I have three different power supplies so far. one 60w, one 90w and two 120w (from the docking station).

Eventually I should ditch them and just use 90 watts...

 

Last time It did show the power at startup when I used dockingstation, I was unshure what to do, so I just turned it off.

In case I did choose the wrong option within this power warning dialog at startup, what would be the apropriate steps to reset this?Is it enough to reset whole bios (plus addinig hackintosh settings) after switching to standard 90w power supply to gain the full system power back?

Also I read that the battery settings are set to smart at default, and switching them to standard should alter something, anyone has experience with that?

[cellstorm]

I have now switched to Sierra (using Jake-Lo's guide), have everything fully working with full speed.

 

Except one minor thing: Audio works, but when I plug in headphones, it still plays through the speakers.

 

I have now also a 6430 (without s, with NVS5200), and will get a 6440 with Hervé's specs soon.

 

With the 6430, I also got everything running (HiRes.aml, optimus enabled, set for hd4000 only) except waking up from sleep. When I try to wake, the machine reboots, and strangely it has then turned off "enable optimus" in bios. I was told that this happens with 2x8GiB RAM installed, with only 1x8GiB installed sleep works properly.

[Hervé]

Install EAPDFix kext to get audio through the headphones. You may still experience glitches on occasion when you plug/replug the earphones, in which case pout the laptop to sleep and wake it. That'll bring everything back to normal.

 

Can't comment on the stated sleep issue with 16GB of RAM but I guess you know what to do to verify what you were told. I'd be surprised if it made a difference though...

[cellstorm]

Ok thanks.

 

Could I use the one from your 6230 enoch guide or must I go through the whole procedure of the  EAPD/Jack sense Fix of EMlyDinEsH ?

 

What I also have experienced at install was a problem when I added files from the 6430 Bootpack to /L/E, after repairing permissons and rebuliding cache, and the reboot, the files I pasted in /L/E were gone..any idea why?

I then put them in S/L/E and there it worked. Now that I think of it, I replaced the existing kexts without backup and these will not survive an update I guess.

 

About the sleep issue, I also tried with 1x8GiB installed, sleep fails. Trying 2x4GIB next. Should I try patched AppleRTC kext (from Software Matters ->Mac OS X/MacOS subsection) or does this not help in this matter?

[Hervé]

You can of course retrieve the kext from any existing pack or scrounge the Net for it.

 

Can't comment on your copy/paste issue but this would have to be a user error. No, add-on kexts placed on /S/L/E will not be removed/deleted at the next update. But add-on kexts are lost with the rest in that folder. That's why it's been recommended for years to keep them separate and in folders such as /E/E or, more recently, /L/E.

 

Regarding sleep, it's probably incorrect settings. Did you disable hibernation for instance?

 

If you want to patch AppleRTC, you can simply activate the Clover option. It may be worth you spend some time running the Clover Configurator app and reading Clover's wiki so that you learn about Clover and its numerous options.

[cellstorm]

Ok.

It is sometimes a bit hard to follow the flow of the procedures here, because everything seems to change quite fast. If you read a topic which is one year old it could be that the procedure has already changed. I can only state my starting point (Jake-Lo's guide and  E6430_A12.zip   which is from 28 June date stamp)

 

For AppleRTC, for example, there is an entry in Software Matters ->Mac OS X/MacOS subsection. There you can download a kext for sierra, but you say I should just activate the clover option (which of course was already active in E6430_A12.zip clover config)... So I assume the <key>AppleRTC</key>
<true/> does the same as Find: 75 2E 0F B6  Replace by: EB 2E 0F B6  or and installing the Kext. All a bit difficult to follow

 

As with EAPD/Jack sense Fix, there is also a quite lengthy guide on that page, with booting linux, dumping and finding out values, so I assumed I cannot just take the kext from somewhere but that it must be at least already customized to the IDT 92HD93 hardware in Latitude e6xxx, hence I was asking for the one in your guide, also because you stated elswhere that this bootpack is 90+% Relevant for 6430 hardware as well.

 

Regarding sleep. I guess I will have to post my config then.. I double checked everything, and as I can successfully sleep and wake up with the very same config and cloned disk on the 6430s machines, I do not see where I could have put sth. wrong.  I Just used vanilla E6430_A12.zip and added dw1550 patches. Bios has defaults. uefi, sata ahci, parallel and serial port disabled, smart on...oh well, I could definitely have made an error, its very complex matter for shure...

[Jake Lo]

Disable Wake on LAN, WWAN, WLAN in the BIOS.