Clean Install Of Ventura on Gygabyte B450 Aorus Pro Wifi with Ryzen 5 2600?

[vanquish]

I currently run Big Sur 11.5.2 and most things are working fine. Never managed to get iMessage to work but that is a small niggle.

I would like to get Ventura up and running but I have attempted to upgrade before and it did not go well! Luckily I had a back up cloned version of my drive to revert to.

So rather than go down the upgrade route again I would like to try a clean install on a fresh drive. And I am wondering if anyone else has successfully done this with the same or similar spec to what I am running at the moment.

My system spec is as follows:

Motherboard: Gigabyte B450 I Aorus Pro WiFi Mini-ITX

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 2600

Graphics: PowerColor RX 6600 8GB.

Memory: 16GB 2133MHz DDR4

Lexar NM610 Pro NVMe

WiFi/Bluetooth: Broadcom

I replaced the original wifi with the Broadcom version so Air Drop etc works fine. Definitely don't want to lose that function.

Any guidance would be much appreciated.

 

[Edhawk]

Your HD 7870 isn't supported in MacOS Ventura. It is only supported up to and including macOS Monterey.
Apple dropped the HD7000, HD8000, R7 and R9 series of AMD GPU's when releasing Ventura.

So you need a Polaris, Vega or Navi series card to run MacOS Ventura on an AMD system.

AMD GPUs | GPU Buyers Guide

Depending on which Broadcom WiFi/BT card you are using will dictate whether the card works in Ventura or not. The BCM94360CD/2CS/CS2 cards all work in Ventura, so if you have one of these or an M.2 derivative of the BCM94360 card then it should be OK.

M.2 | Wireless Buyers Guide

Everything else looks OK to run Ventura.

If I recall correctly you need to be using OpenCore 0.8.2 or newer, with the latest AMD Kernel Patches to run Ventura. Probably best to use the latest version of OpenCore which currently stands at v 0.8.8.

Releases · acidanthera/OpenCorePkg

OpenCore bootloader. Contribute to acidanthera/OpenCorePkg development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

Just follow the latest Dortania Ryzen guide and you should be OK.

Ryzen and Threadripper(17h and 19h) | OpenCore Install Guide

 

[vanquish]

Thanks for the heads-up on the graphics card. It is getting on a bit!

The Broadcom is the BCM94360.

Ok, so its a hunt for a new graphics card first then

 

[Edhawk]

WiFi and BT should work fine in Monterey and Ventura with the BCM94360 card. I use the same WiFi/BT card in a couple of Intel Hack's running Ventura.

Graphics Card:
A second hand RX470/480 from eBay might not be too expensive. I bought two RX470 8GB cards recently for £65 & £70 respectively. They work perfectly well in macOS Catalina, High Sur, Monterey and Ventura. Link to RX 480 card on eBay below, as an example.

AMD RADEON RX 480 8GB GDDR5 GRAPHICS CARD | eBay

Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for AMD RADEON RX 480 8GB GDDR5 GRAPHICS CARD at the best online prices at eBay! Free delivery for many products.

www.ebay.co.uk

You can now see Navi RX6000 series cards on sale on eBay. Some Buy-it-Now items start at £220 on eBay UK. But that might be a bit much for a second hand card when the card new might sell for just £80 more. Just beware of the sellers with multiple cards for sale, as they are likely to have been used for Mining, have messed up bios settings, and have been run constantly for months if not years.

The second hand market for Vega or RX5000 series cards is poor, with most cards being close to the same price as a new RX 6600 card.

New, you are only going to see Navi RX 6000 series cards. The RX6600 might not be deemed too expensive as they are available for approx £260 on Amazon UK. But it restricts which version of macOS you can run to Monterey or Ventura. As its initial support only started in Monterey 12.1.

The RX6800 and RX6900 are supported in Big Sur, but are going to be expensive, even with the new AMD RX7000 series just released. Do not be tempted by the RX7000 series, as Apple have not added support for this series of AMD cards in any way.

The RX6400, RX6500 and RX6700 including XT versions are not supported in any version of macOS, so stay away from those cards.

 

[vanquish]

Thanks so much for all the info. I may be able to stretch the budget a bit. Depends on what work comes in over the next week or so. I also have a Mac Pro 5,1 that I need to get a card for so might look to buy two.

 

[vanquish]

Been a while since I looked at doing this upgrade but wanted to wait until I had a better graphics card. I picked up a Sapphire RX580 8GB dual bios version for £80 which is not too bad.

I also have a spare 500GB Lexar NM610 Pro NVMe drive which I would like to install to. Are there any issues installing to an NVMe drive?

 

[Edhawk]

No, NVME drives are the best option for running macOS on a Hack.

Your Lexar NM610 500GB NVMe drive uses the Silicon Motion SM2263XT controller. More details are available on this review over at Tom's Hardware.

Lexar NM610 M.2 NVMe SSD Review: Responsive and Efficient DRAMless Storage

Lexar’s NM610 dishes out multi-GBps performance on the low

www.tomshardware.com

See the link below for the Dortania anti-Hackintosh Buyers guide Storage section for NVMe and SSD's to avoid.

# Anti-Hackintosh - Storage

 

[vanquish]

Thought I should update this thread.

With a LOT of help from Edhawk I am now running Ventura.

It was not all smooth sailing. I decided to do an update from BigSur rather than a fresh install. I did clone my drive first of course.

After downloading the update and rebooting, it all seemed to be going well and then it went into an endless boot loop. I remembered the same thing happening with BigSur and I eventually got that working by removing my NVMe and placing it in an external caddy. I then booted from that and it worked. I have no idea why but it did. I was then able to put the NVMe back in my machine and boot as normal. The same thing happened with Ventura.

I did need to reboot a few times before eventually seeing the Ventura desktop. I am not sure if macOS goes through some sort of file repair process on boot, perhaps it fixed whatever was causing the problem? I don't know enough about how macOS works under the hood to figure that one out. But the bottom line is, it works!