The dirt-cheap ASUS laptop I wrote about a while back served it’s purpose well over the last few months. This time around I was looking for a laptop that fit a few specific requirements:
- is Linux compatible
- chance of working with macOS (hackintoshable)
- handles casual Windows gaming
- upgradable RAM, ideally accessible internals
- 1080p screen minimum
The Dell brand came to mind here. Linux compatibility tends to be good on Dell (some of their XPS line even *comes* with Ubuntu), they tend to gave a decent chance of hackintoshing well (and no WiFi whitelist shinnanigans), and when it comes to upgrading, Dell has repair/disassembly/service manuals for every model right on their website.
I ended up settling on the Inspiron 5570 with an Intel i5 8250u, 1080p screen, 8GB RAM, and a 256GB SSD.
Why not the equivalent AMD Ryzen Dell Inspiron 5575?
I mentioned casual games above, and the Ryzen 2500U is admittedly a great option. The integrated graphics have nearly twice the performance of Intel’s integrated HD which makes it twice the machine for Windows gaming. And it tends to be a little cheaper (with a spinning-rust hard drive – if manually upgrading to an SSD it’s about the same). I’ve seen complaints regarding constant fan noise and lower battery life which may point to higher idle power on Ryzen, but in terms of bang-for-your-buck it’s a solid option.
Unfortunately where AMD hasn’t established a great track record (yet) is with Linux support – specifically on the GPU end. Don’t get me wrong, they’ve made great strides with AMDGPU and have been doing a lot of work in recent times to add features/support to Linux. But GPU instability on Ryzen was a problem for at least the first half of this year and it seems they’re often playing “catch up” rather than getting ahead of the curve.
I absolutely hope the AMD situation on Linux continues to improve (I know people are working hard on it), but for now, Intel’s slow-but-stable iGPU just made a little more sense for me. Intel’s habit of early kernel upstreams (even at the expense of leaking upcoming product details) and long history of heavy involvement with Linux open source development in general just gives them a big edge.
The one other aspect that came into play was that Intel CPUs can often be hackintoshed. This isn’t AMD’s fault by any means – I’m sure they’d love to sell Apple CPUs. It just hasn’t ever been in the cards.
A few observations between initial use and disassembly:
- The Canadian bi-lingual keyboard is physically a US-keyboard (a plus). That means no wonky enter key, and a regular-sized shift key.
- The 1080p screen is… well.. basic. It’s crisp enough, but color has a bit of that “washed out” look to it. Nobody would ever describe it as “vibrant”. HWInfo shows it as being a 6-bit BOE06A9 NT15N41 manufactured in early 2015 which would make it over 3 years old. Perhaps Dell got a deal on some old stock or has excess stock from a large purchase years ago. That said, it works and is very usable. Note that 1080p packed into a 15.6″ display results in much of the interface looking quite tiny, so if you struggle to read small text you may want to either go with a lower resolution machine or step up to a 17.3″ laptop.
- Touchpad is textured and has that “sticky” feel to it. Some people might prefer this, but I found that it makes it very tough to move the cursor by 1 pixel at a time for those moments I need careful precision. I have to slightly roll my finger if I want to move the cursor over by a pixel.
- The SSD included uses the M.2 connector slot. So you *can* add a physical 2.5″ drive (and I did).
- Onboard ethernet is 10/100 (RealTek RTL8101/2/3). Not gigabit… Okay, so most people connect to wifi anyway and plugging in is rare. The combination of plugging in and using more than 100Mbps of throughput is probably even more rare. But still… unless there was some substantive power savings to be gained by using this chip (or something else I’m missing), this just seems like pinching pennies. I mean… you’d almost have to work to *find* non-gigabit stuff these days.
- Disassembly was much harder than it should be. I’ll go into details next.
(above: Canadian Keyboard – physically a US-keyboard, but with additional characters labelled on the keys – click for larger image)
Disassembly fun woes
I popped open the repair manual on Dell’s site just in case their disassembly was exotic/tricky in some way. The short version to access the “guts” of the machine is this:
- Remove the screws from the bottom.
- Optical drive slides out.
- Couple screws that were previously covered by the optical drive can now be removed.
- Pry the base cover off (starting from a specific corner).
(note that you shouldn’t follow my short instructions – follow the repair manual as it has good detail and helpful images)
The reality of disassembly was that Dell hadn’t put in a screw all the way, which prevented the optical drive from coming out. After that fight, removing the bottom panel required a lot of prying, and extra care/coaxing to ensure the HDMI and USB ports weren’t ripped off the motherboard.
Disassembly was much harder than it should have been, and carried more risk of damage than it needed to. Dell really needs to clean things up in this area.
On to something a little more positive… Once the cover is off, you have:
- Great access to the Wi-Fi adapter (Intel AC 3165)
- Great access to the M.2 SATA hard drive (Samsung PM871b)
- Great access to the RAM (1x Micron 8GGB DDR4-2400 17-17-17-39) and additional empty ram slot
- Great access to the 2.5″ empty SSD slot, with the housing, connector, and 4 screws already included and taped down
- Great access to the CPU cooler + fan
- Great access to the battery
So unlike many laptops out there, Dell makes it easy to access all the main components. No need to pull off circuit boards or the motherboard to access something hidden on the other side. Heck, I think everything *except* the keyboard can be accessed/removed with the motherboard still in. A huge plus.
(above: RAM, overview (blurry – sorry), m.2 SATA, Wifi Card – click for larger images)
You could argue that a lot of Acer machines do a better job of making it easy to access the common bits (small panel to get at storage + SSD in the cheap Aspire 5’s at least), but Dell lets you get at everything and even gives an online manual with the details. If only that bottom panel came off more easily…
Linux (Ubuntu 18.04)
Not much to say here except that… it works swimmingly…? Ubuntu does work out of the box with most laptops these days anyway (especially if relying on Intel’s integrated graphics), but there is some hardware out there that has hiccups.
I’ve spent a good bit of time in Ubuntu on the Inspiron 5570, and no unexpected issues or problems. The fact that Dell has true Linux support in some of their XPS laptops (and thus obviously acknowledges that Linux usage is a thing) gives me continued hope for the future too.
Update: I did hit an oddity… the screen backlight was always full brightness on restart. The fix is to pop into the BIOS and change the brightness settings (both for power and battery) – just change them to *something* else. Then when you restart, Ubuntu starts to remember this setting correctly. A little digging showed that this may be a glitch in the Dell BIOS where it doesn’t really have a correct value stored in the BIOS somewhere on a new machine and it won’t write a correct value until you actually change the brightness in the BIOS. Once a correct value exists, Ubuntu starts remembering screen backlight intensities properly on reboot.
Hackintoshing (macOS 10.14 Mojave)
I only did some preliminary work here and since (a) hackintoshing is a niche area, (b) Mojave beta only recently got Coffee Lake (and by extension kaby-lake-r) support, and (c) Mojave support via standard hackintosh tools/kexts is in it’s infancy and any steps given will undoubtedly change, I’m just going to gloss over this area with some points for others experimenting:
- Minimum Mojave beta 4. Old versions will KP when you try to enable native (non-fake-id) CPU/GPU as they only support up to the original Kaby Lake series (7xxx processor) support.
- I used MacBookPro14,1 ProductName. Possible the 15.x ones may be a better match due to Coffee Lake models perhaps being closer to Kaby Lake refresh.
- The Inspiron 5570 has a DVMT Pre-alloc of 32M. Thus you need to enable a workaround or manually set the BIOS to 64M via the dangerous BIOS setup_var stuff (I went the dangerous route).
- Using common config.plist laptop stuff (ie Rehabman’s 620 plist.config) which already enable “FixHeaders” etc, the Dell SMBIOS fix has to be enabled.
- FakeSMC.kext and VoodooPS2Controller.kext for basic functionality.
- Lilu kext, WhateverGreen.kext to get graphics working (must use latest versions… if using older Lilu+IntelGraphicsFixup must use -lilubetaall)
- Latest acidanthera/AppleALC.kext + config.plist Audio Inject “13” for working onboard audio
- RealtekRTL8100.kext for onboard ethernet.
- ACPIBatteryManager.kext for battery status/indicator.
- SSDT-PNLF.aml + AppleBacklightInjector.kext for basic backlight control in System Preferences (hotkeys require more work).
Things untested or not working:
- WiFi card swap (required for WiFi), untested.
- HDMI output wasn’t working. May require manual work.
- MicroSD card slot not tested (RealTek RTS5129 if you’re interested in messing around and/or trying)
- Touchpad is recognized as a mouse (System Preferences does not see a touchpad). Appears to be I2C so likely requires manual work.
- GPU Power Management (checked via AppleIntelInfo.kext) does not appear to be working (only min/max states).
- CPU Power Management does seem to work (many states), but min frequency seen was 1.3Ghz (600-800Mhz can be found in Linux/Windows).
Short version: Very functional/usable but obviously needs some time/effort. May give it a try again once Mojave is out of beta. Then again, there’s a strong chance Apple’s going to ARM desktop/laptops within a few years and whether they go full ARM or dual product line Intel/ARM (which may keep hackintoshing viable if they don’t move too much to the T2-equivalent chip) is hard to say. If they go full-on ARM there may not be many years left for macOS on Intel, similar to what happened when PowerPC was dropped for Intel over a decade ago.
Casual Gaming (WoW)
The UHD 620 included in the Kaby Lake Refresh here should perform similarly to the HD530 and HD630 found in previous desktop chips (including mine) and in some really brief testing it seems fairly close. Bumping down the settings to “3” in the BFA Pre-patch I was looking at approx 30fps in a class hall (update: above 60fps in a Garrison). I didn’t do anything heavy, but based on performance of my HD530 I’d expect a pretty smooth experience most of the time at these lower settings with the exception of massive stuff (ie 40v40 AV turtle when everyone shows up).
So expect most of the games that run on recent non-Iris Intel HD graphics to run here, including the games mentioned in my previous ASUS Pentium N4200 writeup.
Temperatures, fans, and throttling!
At idle you can’t hear the fan. According to the sensors the RPM is 0, which would mean the laptop is passively cooled at this point (update: I ran the laptop without the bottom case and verified the fan is indeed off)
At idle, temps tend to sit between 40-50C.
Run a CPU-intensive task and the turbo kicks up to 3.4Ghz. After a few seconds the fan starts spinning up. The CPU gets into the 90-100C range and thermally throttles. A few seconds later the fans are at max speed (which is quite loud) and the thermal throttling ends. Another few second pass and the laptop begins TDP throttling.
At this point, 2.8-2.9Ghz is about the max that could be held under high load.
Take away the load and the fans drop in speed, becoming less loud. Once enough time has passed at idle, it cools down enough for the fans to become silent again.
I did try undervolting (Intel’s XTU did work). Note that this is a little risky because XTU saves your settings to the BIOS and if by chance the machine doesn’t boot anymore you could be in for trouble.
At -0.110v the machine would bluescreen moments after a stress test was started. Dell’s watchdog did catch it and revert the settings to stock, but that’s not something to rely upon.
At -0.100v the machine worked and survived some heavy stress testing. This had a slight positive impact when it came to delay-before-throttling, and also allowed a steady 3.1-3.2Ghz clock speed during the TDP-throttling.
I settled at -0.080v. You can see benchmark results at my “undervolting Kaby Lake R” writeup. After all the effort that went into it, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend chasing an undervolt for that improvement unless doing a lot of intense heavily multi-threaded tasks. Note that if you ever eat a bluescreen in Windows (or sleep/suspend in Linux from the sounds of it), there’s a good chance Dell’s watchdog service will remove your undervolt anyway.
As a final note, I did pop off the CPU cooler, cleaned the TIM and put on some fresh old Arctic Silver I had laying around. Idle temperatures dropped a few degrees, but the thin material over the CPU means that load temperatures bounce around enough (in the 90C+ range) to make a solid comparison there a little hard.
The only notable mention when replacing the TIM is that the 2 dies on the CPU have slightly different heights (or did on mine) which results in the cooler not mating perfectly flush – so if you reproduce this, re-attach then re-detach the cooler from the CPU after putting on your thermal paste to ensure you have 2 die-shaped rectangles on the cooler… if there’s a clean spot left on the cooler where there should be a paste-colored rectangle, you need a little more paste on that spot to ensure you don’t get hotspots.
BIOS modding / IFR (warning: dangerous)
I decided to change the DVMT Pre-Allocated for hackintosh testing, and figured I may as well save the undervolt I had settled on in a more permanent fashion. This requires delving into the IFR.
(above: writing variables directly to the EFI. Not for the feint of heart)
It’s also highly dangerous, so I don’t recommend it. Few reasons:
- Dell hid these settings, and do not expect/intend for you to modify these. Even if everything goes correctly they could change something in a BIOS update that has the side effect of your old setting now doing something different and killing your system.
- A typo may brick your system.
- The wrong setting may brick your system.
- You really need to get the IFR from your own machine – the models all have different IFRs (for example the XPS one is different, I verified this).
- Using a setting from an incorrect IFR will probably brick your system.
- If your system won’t boot, you can’t undo the change. You *could* try disconnecting the battery and pulling the small cell battery, then hope the BIOS resets. You also *could* try one of the Dell BIOS recovery methods via a file on USB or hard drive. But if neither work, your machine is now dead.
That said, for those curious about it, I’ll paste some details in case you want to obtain your own IFR from your BIOS and compare to mine (and the notes I made for mine). Again, delve into this at your own risk.
Getting your own IFR from your BIOS (this guide was for an XPS, but while values are different the process to obtain the IFR is the same):
http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/tutorial-xps-15-9550-9550-bios-advanced-options.810307/
My own IFR, just for curiosity and comparative purposes – delete this after reading through it so you don’t accidentally mix up mine with your own IFR, write the wrong variables, and destroy your system. Note that I myself almost made this mistake when I was comparing IFR locations/values between 2 IFRs:
Matts_Dell_Inspiron_5570_IFR_values_-_DO_NOT_USE.txt
My own notes from my own IFR are below. Again, just for informational purposes – there could even be typos. Don’t use it. Use the one you create from your own machine:
Inspiron 5570 Bios 1.1.6 - i5-8250u, 1080p, 256GB SSD, 8GB RAM
DVMT Pre-Allocated, set to 32MB (default): setup_var 0x795 0x1
DVMT Pre-Allocated, set to 64MB: setup_var 0x795 0x2
If you look through the IFR, you will notice other options here (multiples of 4 from 4-60MB) via differently formatted values. I would only use 32MB or 64MB here, as the other values are different enough that it might do something else, and setting *any* multiple of 4 is uncommon on most PCs that allow setting via BIOS anyway.
DVMT Total Gfx Mem, set to 256M (default): setup_var 0x796 0x2
DVMT Total Gfx Mem, set to 128M: setup_var 0x796 0x1
DVMT Total Gfx Mem, set to MAX: setup_var 0x796 0x3
CFG Lock, Enabled (default): setup_var 0x4ED 0x1
CFG Lock, Disabled: setup_var 0x4ED 0x0
DID NOT TEST XTU INTERFACE, SINCE INTEL XTU WORKED ALREADY
XTU Interface, disabled: setup_var 0x65D 0x0
XTU Interface, enabled: setup_var 0x65D 0x1
OVERCLOCKING FEATURE MUST BE ENABLED FOR UNDERVOLTNG TO WORK
OverClocking Feature, Disable (default): 0x65C 0x0
OverClocking Feature, Enable: 0x65C 0x1
MUST SET THE NEGATIVE OFFSET FLAG IN EVERYTHING BELOW - DEFAULT IS POSITIVE WHICH WILL OVERVOLT
Core Voltage Offset Negative: 0x664 0x1
Core Voltage Offset: 0x662 0x19 (should result in 25 aka 0.025v)
Core Voltage Offset: 0x662 0x50 (should result in 80 aka 0.080v)
Core Voltage Offset: 0x662 0x0 (default 0.000v)
PROCESSOR GRAPHICS VOLTAGE OFFSET
GT Voltage Offset Negative: 0x86D 0x1
GT Voltage Offset: 0x86B 0x28 (should result in 40 aka 0.040v)
GT Voltage Offset: 0x86B 0x14 (should result in 20 aka 0.020v)
GT Voltage Offset: 0x86B 0x0 (default 0.000v)
PROCESSOR GRAPHICS VOLTAGE OFFSET FOR HD MEDIA? HAD NO EFFECT
CAN NOT FIND REGION FOR EQUIVALENT XTU GRAPHICS MEDIA OFFSET
GT Voltage Offset Negative: 0x876 0x1
GT Voltage Offset: 0x874 0x14 (should result in 20 aka 0.020v)
GTU Voltage Offset: 0x874 0x0 (default 0.000v)
Uncore Voltage Offset Negative: 0x865 0x1 (was 0)
Uncore Voltage Offset: 0x863 0x14 (should result in 20 aka 0.020v) (was 0)
Note: Standard Long Term Power Limit Override, limits, and time windows did not work (0x4C5, 0x4C1, 0x4C6, 0x4C7, 0x4C8).
Possible a different setting area (SLPC?) or another setting had to be enabled?.
However most other addresses had 0x0, or non-0x0 variables that did not seem to make sense if converted to decimal.
Really, unless you completely understand the process, the values, and how to read/interpret your own IFR you shouldn’t even consider tinkering with this stuff. But because some people do and/or will tinker with this stuff anyway, hopefully having my data as a reference will help point you in the direction you’re hoping to go.
Keep in mind that if something goes wrong (and it may, even if you do everything correctly), you’ll have a dead machine. If you can’t afford that, you probably shouldn’t be tinkering with this stuff.
Overall Thoughts
I’m quite happy with the machine overall.
Sure, the display is basic, and disassembly was a royal pain. Sticky trackpad and 10/100 ethernet are things I’ll get over. USB-C is one of those “would have been nice to have in case I care about it some day” aspects, but for most of the current Inspirons it only shows up in models with a dedicated GPU so given the choice between not-having-it or having-it-but-paying-more I’ll take the former.
Once the panel is off, maintenance/access is great. In this age of glueing and soldering everything together so that broken/old devices go to landfills (hello Apple), Dell definitely deserves credit for letting you swap out the innards.
It runs Linux (Ubuntu) very well. Heck, I had macOS running on it so we’ll put that in the plus column too.
At idle it’s also the quietest laptop I’ve owned. I was able to do some light web browsing and have a YouTube video going while Chrome downloaded installed all without the fans making a sound. The fans are annoying when they do spin up, but fortunately that’s rare under light usage.
For now, that concludes my review (or observations/experiences anyway). As I did with the ASUS, I’ll make updates if I come across anything applicable as time goes on.
If you’ve got an Inspiron 5570 (or the AMD variant 5575), feel free to share your own experiences below!
MISSING
This is a backup of my most "up to date" one with everything working that I've tested so far except:
- I was unable to get keyboard backlight control working. Keyboard backlight from System Preferences works, just not the hotkeys (volume hotkeys work).
- The trackpad is detected as a mouse. The trackpad works, but it uses the mouse settings (no trackpad listed in system preferences. 2-finger scrolling works, but the multi-touch gestures (pinch, 3/4-finger, etc) do not. If a mouse is plugged in, it "shares" the settings with the trackpad.
- I haven't touched/tested the SD card or DVD drive.
A few notes regarding the config.plist:- The SerialNumber and SmUUID fields have been removed, as you need to generate your own (usually done via the Clover Configurator app). Sidenote: please follow the official guides for this and check to make sure your generated SN does *not* match a valid machine as that could potentially cause problems for both you and the person with the real machine down the road.
- Because I used BIOS efi_vars for the DVMT etc (basically all the BIOS stuff I mention in the writeup), I did not intentionally handle this in the config.plist. It might be worth comparing against RehabMans at https://github.com/RehabMan/OS-X-Clover-Laptop-Config/blob/master/config_HD615_620_630_640_650.plist . His is a better starting point.
- I have -lilubetaall, -v, and a bunch of other cruft in the command line. Not all of it is required.
- I hide the recovery parition.
- I have a mess of extra stuff in mine that was used when trying to get various things working (like trackpad, keyboard brightness hotkeys). So my config.plist is a little "dirty" and may include stuff that causes issues. It would be cleaner to start with your own (or RehabMan's) and add things you need from mine.
A few notes regarding the CLOVER/ACPI/PATCHED folder:- SSDT-ALC256.aml is in here for audio.
- SSDT-PNLF.aml is in here too for backlight.
- There are a lot of other .DSL files that are in here too which were just used while testing - you should probably delete the .DSL files (or simply don't copy them to yours).
A few notes regarding the kexts:- The AppleX86..Injector.kext in the "root"... you probably do not want to use this. It was for some testing to bring down the minimum frequency to 600Mhz and it is only placed here so that I had a backup copy. If you decide to use it anyway, it goes into /Library/Extensions/ (followed by permissions and rebuilding kext cache). It will likely break in future MacOS updates when Apple changes various power settings for the MBP 14,1 . Note that this is my only kext that went in /L/E/ - everything else below is within CLOVER which isn't necessarily ideal but made this more portable.
- IntelGraphicsDVMTFixup.kext was not absolutely needed. However, plugging in external HDMI flashed the screen many times without it, and having this kext makes plugging/unplugging the HDMI much smoother.
- FakePCIID.kext, FakePCIID_Broadcom...kext, BrcmFirmwa...kext, BrcmFixup.kext, BrcmPatchRAM2.kext - All 5 of these were ONLY added when I swapped in the Broadcom (Dell DW1560). I did not check to see if I could get away with only some of them - I just dumped in all 5 and gave it a try. If you do not swap in this wifi chip, you do not need any of those 5. Also if you swap in the Dell DW1560 chip, Linux does need a proprietary driver (Ubuntu lets you select/enable propriety in an easy way via a software settings and updates tab - others vary). Windows 10 will find the driver in Windows Update.
- Most of the rest of the kexts are pretty self-explanatory in name.
Note finally that this is on a recent Mojave Beta. I have not tried in High Sierra though I suspect High Sierra will not work with the graphics unless you get the special build of 10.13.6 that supports their Coffee Lake MBPs.Ok that was a bit long. If you have any questions you can toss them here, but no guarantees that I'll remember how/why I did something, as I very much took the "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" approach for a lot of it.
Anyway hopefully something in there helps. Good luck!
I'm also using a recent mojave beta ( I believe its beta 4).
Thank you very much, I'll compare your clover config.plist with mine and let you know how it goes, this is only my second hackintosh build after many many years (since back when apple first moved to intel and the first hackintoshes actually popped up) so it was probably not a great idea to jump straight into mojave beta and use a samsung evo 960 ssd as my main drive, but everything is moving forward quite nicely.
On a side note, your undervoling and manual bios variable patching is quite interesting, I'll delve into that at some point, but at the moment, and given my lack of experience I'd rather don't risk a brick.
I'm also changing my display for an IPS (in my case, since I have touch and a 40 pin connector I think the one from INSPIRON 15 5579 would work well) but I'm not ready to spend another 90 dollars in this build at the moment).
Anyway, Keep it up with the great posts, other 5570 owners definitely appreciate it.
As for using Beta 4, trying one of the newer Mojave Betas might be worthwhile just in case. "dosdude1" has a tool on his site at: http://dosdude1.com/mojave/ which makes pulling a new version a little easier (just use the downloading part from menu-bar, don't use his built-in patcher when it asks). Also note that I use the latest versions of CLOVER from sourceforge.
Incidentally, I put in a Samsung EVO 960 also (512GB version) for the macOS drive which is working well here too. Aside from the touchscreen you mentioned our machines seem to be very identical in setup. One other thing I haven't experimented with (which you may want to investigate if you hit certain issues I did not) is adding the display EDID to the config.plist. Downside is that if you do ever swap your screen you'll need to undo/redo this.
I wanted to let you know I went ahead and implemented most of the advanced bios (minus the undervonting part) via setup_vars and now I have full graphics acceleration on the latest Mojave beta, I also have Brightness control via system preferences using my EDID in clover (I haven't been able to make the hotkeys work yet though).
However I have a HUGE problem, for some reason my CPU Idle frequency is 3.7GHZ!, speedster is enabled in BIOS and I've followed every guide out there to enable appleIntelCpuPowermanagement and AppleLPC unsuccessfully. I see that your base freq is 1.3 GHz (as it should be for a real Mac) but I can't make that work. Any chance you can give me a hand, this is driving me nuts.
The only other thing to do would be ensure you're using a relatively new Clover EFI (no older than when I wrote up the post). If you *were* using an older Clover EFI you will likely want to back up the entire folder before installing since Clover EFI had a tendancy to overwrite a bunch of stuff (it does on my USB sticks anyway).
If that doesn't do it, best guesses are:
- One of the settings in my config.plist may differ from yours - take a look at the SSDT-related options in both config.plists to verify.
- One of the changes you made to try getting it working may have had the opposite effect. It may be worth undoing your changes
Note that I also had power management working when I fooled with the ssdtPRGen.sh tool (and fooled with other stuff I never ended up using), so I suppose if the above is fruitless you could give that a shot. But I never had power management *not* working and am kind of surprised to hear yours is having problems.--
If nothing above works, your system is probably close enough to mine that you should almost be able to basically plop in my settings and have it still work. To diagnose this, maybe create another (separate) USB using the latest Clover EFI, erase all the default EFI subfolders on the USB (the ones that also exist in my zip), replace all the files on the USB with the ones from my zip file, add the MacBookPro14,1 definition, and then boot from the USB installer but use clover to start macOS from your hard drive. This way it should load all of of the stuff I use.
As long as you didn't do anything to /Library/Extensions or /S/L/E, starting from USB should really be identical to starting on my machine. If power management works when starting from the USB, then you *know* it's a difference between our settings and that you just have to trial/error getting your stuff (config.plist, kexts) closer to mine. If power management *doesn't* work then you know our systems are somehow different (or that something is goofy with your /S/L/E or /L/E).
--
Edit: If you have been modifying things in /S/L/E or /L/E, keep in mind that when you undo the changes you also have to fix permissions and rebuild the kext cache. I mention this because when I was troubleshooting issues I would often forget to do one or the other and it would cause problems - I kept seeing old behaviour. I eventually created a clunky little bash script to do it so I couldn't forget a step. The script looked something like this:Obviously this just handles /L/E - you can modify it for /S/L/E if you've been doing stuff in there, although I think there are some little GUI helper programs out there that might be easier and might be a better option. Also sometimes this script hit an error because something was in use so it had to be run 2x.
The only other thing is that AppleX86..Injector.kex is not working, my cpu now idles at 1.3GHz, I've tried your injector and running freqvectors.sh unsuccessfully, I'm using 14,2 as well.
I would probably advise against spending a lot of time getting it working though because the power consumption difference between 600Mhz and 1.3Ghz is next to nothing (assuming the machine is actually idle). Apple undoubtedly had a reason for going with 1.3Ghz as the base instead of a lower value like Win/Linux use. Best guess is the power consumption difference was small enough to be hard to measure and using a higher default potentially reduces any lag/latency when it does have to step up the frequency under load.
The other downside is if Apple makes other changes to the power platform, the injector might break something causing a non-boot or really bad behaviour.
Keep in mind between the undervolt, thermal repasting, DR/DC RAM with tight timings, and relatively cool environment I'm likely to get somewhat higher results though. Whether that is what is causing your results to be 84% (single) and 63% (multi) of mine, or whether it's something else I don't know.
I have the same Dell 5570 laptop.
Could you guys run macOS on 1920x1080 ?
Cause fonts are too small to read.
I use scale to 1600x900.
I use 1920x1080. But text is about as small as I can handle, and I can understand how others may find it too small. Scaling is certainly a reasonable way to get around it. Hopefully that's working well for you.
To tackle the other bits: I'm usually plugged in. Last time I wasn't I seem to recall hitting more than 5 hours. However, I keep this laptop idle as much as possible. If a website causes the CPU fan to spin up (some websites eat constant CPU power), I close it. I've also done some undervolting which probably helps a touch here. Upgraded RAM has kept the hard drive accesses down: even now I"m using 14 GB out of the 32 GB of RAM I have. Really I've gone to just about every length I can to keep power consumption down. The few times I've been on battery it's lasted a long time.
As to sound I haven't tried headphones: maybe someone else has and can chime in. If you can't get that one solved, a set of USB headphones might be worth considering.
I use scale 1600x900.
I have the same Laptop as you but battery lasts 3-3.30 hours in Windows and 2.3-3 on Hackintosh.
Headphones are not recognised and audio is lost after sleep.
Is there any way to correct these?
Can I ask something else ?
Your laptop comes with backlight keyboard and touch screen ?
Because mine doesn't and cannot boot with your attached dsdt.
Could you make a DSDT for my system ? I can upload any files you need.
Thanks again.
Y.G. Using your patch for running at lower frequency. It works but I don't think it is affective for battery.
I tried SMBIOS 15,2 (which I find more suitable for dell 5570) and cpu runs idle at 1,2 with lower voltage and temps. Maybe you should try.
Pretty sure it was one of the last things I tried when attempting to get I2C trackpad stuff going. And I was not successful with the I2C stuff.
SSDT-ALC256.aml and SSDT-PNLF.aml on the other hand should both be doing something useful. Note that my SSDT-ALC256.aml requires corresponding settings that I used in the config.plist. If you're tackling audio from scratch and doing it a different way, then you would probably want to *not* use my SSDT-ALC256.aml and if you copy/pasted a lot from my config.plist, find my audio related entries in there and *remove* them and/or change them to the defaults that would normally come in one of the RehabMan config.plists.
https://mega.nz/#!urg2RIyQ!L5qtgIM34QzWPQaBUTm_OWRewlUfAtrS1D5to36M9tU
In the meantime, you might have tried these already, but if not:
- If it's a bad NVRAM setting, open up the machine (follow Dell's manual), disconnect the main battery, and take out the cell battery. Hit the power button to drain any residual energy. Wait 10 minutes then put the cell battery back in and reconnect the main battery. Reassemble and try starting the machine. I've had to do this before. If when starting up again nothing happens within 2 minutes (except for crazy loud fans), power it off and try turning it on once more.
- If the BIOS itself is damaged (bad flash), and you haven't formatted the original hard drive or anything, a recovery BIOS might still be present on the hard drive. You can try following the instructions at https://www.dell.com/support/article/ca/en/cabsdt1/sln300716/bios-recovery-options-on-a-dell-pc-or-tablet?lang=en .
- If the BIOS itself is damaged (bad flash), and you have formatted the original hard drive, it *could* be worth trying the above with the latest BIOS downloaded from the Dell website. Alternately you could try putting the downloaded BIOS on a USB stick and hold F10 (possibly some other key combination) when powering the computer - see if a "flash bios" option comes up.
- If by "last March" you mean 7 months ago (rather than 1y7m ago - I know everyone uses "last" differently), the machine is probably still under warranty. That might be the easiest route to go.
Anyway that's all I've got for now. Good luck!In any case, first I would test the USB drive in another computer to make sure Ubuntu wrote properly and boots - if it doesn't you may want to try rewriting the Ubuntu installer ( Fedora Media Writer is a good Windows/Mac tool for this: just choose the Ubuntu ISO instead of letting it download the Fedora ISO).
Assuming the USB drive has been verified to boot elsewhere, things I'd try:
Thanks
Without knowing why Dell might have capped the speed, it's hard to know whether it's an endeavour worth pursuing. If it was simply for improved battery life that's one thing. If the traces/components are designed for less power, that's quite another. The best option might be to nag Dell a bit to see if they'll open it up as a BIOS option (assuming battery life is the reason, they may be open to it). Then again, there's always the chance someone will find the settings in the BIOS/IFR, give things a try, be successful, and share the details.