TreyRhodes

Arrrrgh! This USB weirdness is driving me crazy. Stuff works then stops. Or takes several minutes to start working. In any case, nothing goes over USB 2.0 speeds. My Apogee Duet 2 sound card is especially problematic. Sometimes the sound is very choppy and has tons of digital artifacts out of the blue. Arrrgh! Just had to vent. Anyone have any good ideas for me to try?

I found and installed another video adapter that is even better, IMO. The HP part is nice enough (especially if you need the space in the case--it is very slim.) However, if you are not using your second (crippled) PCIe slot in your 990, 9010, 9010, 70-whatever, etc. SFF model, then there is a better solution: the ASUS GT630-SL-2GD3-L. The HP OEM card is Kepler but strangely configured. Not sure why. Though both are designed on the 28nm die scale, the HP (and other OEM cards) use only half the available CUDA cores and dissipate twice the power (50W vs. 25W.) The ASUS part is essentially a low-profile reference design; its specs can be found on NVidia's site under GT 30 Kepler. My idle GPU temps have dropped 15C! I am thinking that this video card is a godsend and much more interesting than the AMD offerings, performance-wise. I am glad I have it. And, as it happens, there are very few Kepler GT 630 cards on the market for some reason, despite what I would consider a great need for HTPC owners. Oh...and, besides the way better capabilities of the part versus other GT 630s, I should mention that this particular example has no fan! Nice. https://www.asus.com/Graphics-Cards/GT630SL2GD3L/

Bronxteck (R-N-D Manager): I ran that card in my 990. For me, CUDA acceleration in Photoshop and video transcoding made the jump to GeForce card quite worth it.

Thanks for the reply. I think. Not much hope, there... But, since you are a 9010 (ab)user, I might take a minute tell you that I have been running a cheap and cheerful GPU in my SFF Dells (990 and 9010.) I happened upon an HP NVidia GT 630 and it sits well in this box. The power requirements are perfect for the (rightmost, BLUE, 50W) PCIe slot. The trick is to buy the HP OEM part. See this URI: http://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c03625491 Search eBay or the like. It is also called by the trade name "Cheetah" -- though "Fast Housecat" might have been a more apt moniker. Seek P/N 687580-001 or 682293-001 if interested in throwing some more money at your 9010. The graphics performance upgrade is respectable vs. the Ivy Bridge. And having CUDA cores is also very nice. FYI, YMMV, etc.

Restored my previous system image using Time Machine (instead of from CloneZilla) for a few technical reasons. Wow! What a colossal pain in the neck! Turns out the Yosemite installer has no provision for re-imaging from Time Machine. Wha? I guess the idea nowadays is to use the UEFI recovery partition. That's all well and good except that of course I did not use Clover. $@*&%#$!!! I had to locate a DMG copy of Moutain Lion from the WWW, fiddle with the DMG to make it appear to be an app, create a new bootloader for it, restore a Time Machine image from the booted ML installer, and fix a Boot0 error. I thought I might rely on Time Machine, since it is a hands-off affair. But... not a chance. Back to Linux and CloneZilla. Anyway, I wonder what might have happened. My original problems still exist. Should I live with flaky USB? Advice from the sage is most welcome.

Well, I used the supplied kext. Kernel panic. Looked like some kind of power management issue. Or perhaps something about CPU power state. Or something related to the known ACPI complications of the installation on this Optiplex hardware. I sort of said a bad word and ignored the error. I can boot with -f flag.

Fantastic, thanks! I will try that right away. Gotta make sure I am backed up first...

Oh, by the way, I should mention that I was able to update OS X without failure. This may be the completely wrong place to do that and, if so, my apologies. I am new here. My method had worked previously on my ML Hackintosh so I tried it again. I simply cloned the working system SSD (all partitions and boot sectors, etc.) using CloneZilla to a new laptop-sized HDD I bought once by accident. Then I updated my 10.10.4 installation to 10.10.5 using the combo update. Worked like a charm. Did not need to use my cloned image to restore. Very nice.

FIist of all, let me state that installing Yosemite on my new (old) Optiplex 9010 was a real chore. Until I read the instructions on this site. Not going back to UniWhatever and MultiWhatever and all that. Never again. Never. I think those methods are like using a sledgehammer when all you need is a slight tap. The included files seemed to work wonders. Thanks again to whoever wrote that guide! The thing is, I am experiencing some USB behavior that is difficult to understand. Not all devices seem to be recognized. And sometimes they are recognized on one port but not another. And sometimes unplugging a device (say a thumb drive) results in the whole thing sort of stopping, where nothing is recognized--not even my keyboard and mouse, which is needless to say quite an issue. I have a StarTech four-port USB 3.0 PCIe card that I used in my old Optiplex 990 build. So I figured I might pop that in to see what happens. It boots all right. Then the System Report shows it is there as a super speed device. But plugging anything into it causes the whole USB functionality to stop after a time (like 30 seconds.) Bummer. And very weird. I figured that I might have too many USB ports going or something; however, disabling some (or all) of the USB 2.0 ports via the BIOS seems to have no effect. Furthermore, I am not thrilled with the USB speeds I am getting when it works. They are not even really in the ballpark of USB 3.0 according to my speed tester. I might get 35 MB/s-ish on a flash drive rated for USB 3 (with only that device plugged in, no USB 2 on the hub, of course to potentially throttle things.) Any ideas, fellows? I am puzzled.