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Building a Hackintosh Pro

dancounsell.com

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Re: Building a Hackintosh Pro

#2

Post by jrnichols »

I'm in the same boat this author is. It's disappointing to see the desktop market lagging so far behind. For all of the 68k/PPC years, we could at least say "different architecture" and Intel hadn't caught up. Now we're all Intel, and it's Apple that isn't keeping up. It's frustrating, and I'm not necessarily a "Pro user" anymore at all. I have a current generation Mac Mini, and it's over 2 years old now. What I can buy from the Apple Store right now for the same price is what I got 2 years ago.

I wish I know what Apple was thinking. One would have thought that the "iPhone halo effect" was something that they would have wanted to give momentum to. Instead people are looking at Windows units again.

Re: Building a Hackintosh Pro

#4

Post by adamnemecek »

> I've switched off auto-updates in Sierra. While system updates should work just fine, I prefer to hold off until the community over at tonymacx86 have confirmed there are no issues.

Does anyone know why some of the updates can brick the machine? Also how often does this happen? Or like what percentage of updates break things.

Re: Building a Hackintosh Pro

#5

Post by jwr »

I used to use a Hackintosh. It was a time-consuming thing, I feared OS updates, and I could never be sure about the reliability (you can get really weird problems sometimes. I then switched over to a Mac Pro (cheese grater) and was very happy with it. Unfortunately, since the trash can Mac Pro I'm left out in the cold, so I'm considering running a Hackintosh again...

Unfortunately, the information is still very fragmented and it takes a lot of time and effort to get one running. Actually building the thing is the easiest part, it's the booting, installation and OS patches/fixes that eat up time.

Re: Building a Hackintosh Pro

#7

Post by djsumdog »

adamnemecek wrote: post #4

> I've switched off auto-updates in Sierra. While system updates should work just fine, I prefer to hold off until the community over at tonymacx86 have confirmed there are no issues. Does anyone know why some of the updates can brick the machine? Also how often does this happen? Or like what percentage of updates break things.

I ran a Hackintosh for years, but I used the stock/retail ISO along with a couple of custom kexts and the nvidia enabler (the drivers will run other nvidia/ati cards, they're just not officially supported and the stock kernel models have a white-list of the models that were sold with macs).

I remember leaving the stock updates on and rarely ran into issues. I think I had video screw up once or twice, which just involved getting some of the latest kexts off the forums.

Re: Building a Hackintosh Pro

#9

Post by doctorpangloss »

As a Hackintosh user, I'd recommend an NCASE M1 v5 or the Shuttle SZ170R8 for a significantly better chassis.

With the NCASE, you can get a LGA 2011-v3 mini-ITX board and get as fast of a computer as you want. Though truthfully, I don't think there's much of a point.

Likewise, an old NVIDIA card for a Hackintosh? Also not much of a point. The web drivers are so bad. Who knows when Apple will ship another NVIDIA chip in a Mac?

If you need "CUDA stuff," use Linux or Windows. Software like Octane is so buggy and suffers from worse performance on Mac anyway. Final Cut and After Effects both support OpenCL acceleration. Besides, the RX 480 is $189.

If you're doing "VR stuff," well pity on you if you're developing for an Oculus on a Mac. The Vive doesn't, and probably never will, support Mac. Whatever VR solution Apple releases will obviously run great on the video cards they support, so that again strongly points to purchasing an AMD card at this time over your alternatives.

With regards to this specific build, a high DPI display will greatly improve the enjoyment of this computer. The Dell P2715Q is the best deal. Mac OS has such good HiDPI support compared to Windows (and especially Linux). Enjoy the features you pay for!

Truthfully, I'm hard pressed to see the point of a Hackintosh, and I own one.

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