Hackintosh

It’s been a few days since my last blog post about a virtualized hackintosh, I’ve got some time to tinker and form opinions and gather facts about it. It’s not bad at all but it comes with a compromise, let me try to follow up on what I’ve written before. Why Virtualize At All? Why not? But a more convincing argument is because I have a gaming PC with a 16 core/32 thread CPU lying around. It’s rather fiddly to dual boot between macOS and Windows because both my GPUs (Radeon RX 570 and RTX 3080 Ti) are connected to my monitors and on Windows this is not ideal. The best possible experience is to use an HDMI or DP switch to connect the GPUs to my monitors, I don’t have such a device and I’m pretty sure I don’t want to explore the quirks that comes with using it. ...

I have installed hackintoshes since the very beginning on a Core2Duo laptop. Back then the term was OSX86 and the only way to get the OS is through torrent downloads. Since then I’ve built hackintoshes especially when Intel Macbook Pros are so pro. I can’t believe all these years I never tried to do the virtualization route. The past few years, my hackintoshes were always a dedicated PC separate from my gaming PC because Nvidia GPUs have no hope in hackintoshes, now it changes. ...

My last post about my hackintosh is when I was still on Ryzen 3700X/X570 pair. It was overkill for my day to day work, instead I built a new PC just for the hackintosh and used the higher end pair for gaming. It was a great decision, introduced me to the microATX form factor. For a work computer (trading and programming), a microATX board fits my use case. It’s small but it’s big enough to host all my peripherals. I started with this spec. ...

I have never in my life built an AMD CPU based box, never. BUT, AMD’s rise is well on its way to dethrone Intel off of the performance perch. Over the years, I usually upgrade my machine every 3 years whether it’s a laptop or a desktop. I’ve had my Intel i7 8700K for 2 years now, I’ve made a lot of work with it, it’s great. The blow for me with an Intel box was that Intel decided to abandon the LGA1151 socket for its newest CPU’s. Not to mention Intel’s BIOS limit preventing 6th-7th gen CPU’s not being able to run on 8th-9th gen chipsets vice versa. While AMD was improving and iterating at a phenomenal pace. Other than its impressive 7nm process which is a leap ahead of Intel, Ryzen have more cores/threads than Intel, period. ...

I’m on a hackintosh, it gets tricky when trying to burn a Windows 10 ISO to a USB drive. Google comes up with a variety of different ways, none worked until I come across a Super User post here. It’s great but the actual burning process is slower than it should. The post tells you to output dd to a buffered /dev/diskX device. This means there will be processing overhead from the OS to write to that device. So for everyone out there trying to do this, here’s a faster way of doing it. This will work on any Mac regardless of it being a Hackintosh or not. ...

Since my last Hackintosh post, I overdid myself with a new one. This time I’m switching sides to AMD fro the GPU with a simple reason because Nvidia cards are not Mojave ready. I’ve tried but without hardware acceleration, you can’t do anything right. Before anything else, this is the final spec: Intel Core i7 8700k Cooler Master MasterLiquid Pro 120 CPU water cooler MSI Z370 Gaming M5 HyperX 16GBx2 DDR4 3200 MHz Samsung Evo 960 Pro 250 GB (boot drive) Samsung Evo 960 Pro 500 GB (store) Asus ROG Strix RX580 8GB OC Thermal Take MasterBox MB500 Casing The first thing I’m glad of is the Mojave installation. Because I’m using an RX580, Mojave supports it out of the box. No more annoying low resolution when installing, feels like a real Mac. ...

A few months ago I wrote about my 2018 Hackintosh which I’ve just upgraded again. This time by adding an NVMe drive into the motherboard. A blog post here made me very excited to try it out for myself. I chose a Samsung SSD 960 EVO 250GB because of its unprecedented benchmark scores. Samsung claims it’s up to 3x speedier than regular SSD’s although benchmarks shows the number to be 2x. ...

I built a Hackintosh a few weeks ago because I want an upgradeable Mac. And so I upgraded. Also since now I’m back in Jakarta, I took an SSD from my now defunct HTPC + Storage rig. The storage part which is a 3TB USB Harddrive decided to break. So now my Hackintosh is upgraded with these parts: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 * Biostar B250-GT3 - MicroATX - 4 DIMM slots FTW! And it's a newer chipset with 2 PCIe slots for more GPU power. Also has 4 SATA ports :) * Kingston 8GB DDR4 2400 MHz memory stick which brings my memory to 12GB * Kingston 120GB SSD taken from my HTPC rig * Zotac GTX 1050 2GB GDDR5 - Slim and it doesn't require any added powering * Fenvi Wireless AC PCIe with Bluetooth - Plug n Play! * New Infinity casing * Logitech Extreme 3D Pro joystick * Generic Mac keys Bluetooth Keyboard * Logitech M337 Bluetooth mouse * Behringer Xenyx Q502USB Soundcard It’s worth noting that the new motherboard has a M.2 slot that’ll enable me to use NVMe SSD’s. Not going to do it sometime soon because support for Hackintoshes is still patching kexts manually. Although the 1000 MB/s read is totally a sexy appeal. ...

After some motivation from a colleague about this game I’m after, I decided to build myself a PC. That idea got me thinking, why not build with parts that are Hackintosh compatible. Further more, since this is a PC, I can build lean in the beginning and upgrade along the way. Used parts are the best way to go I thought. It’s unfortunate that I couldn’t find used parts for the GPU and SSD. I had to buy them new. So before anything else, here are the specs: ...

A few weeks ago my brother in law asked me to help him build a Hackintosh rig. I obliged with the utmost curiosity. It’s been a while since I last built one so this will be interesting. The first thing I did was heading to InsanelyMac’s forums. There were a lot of guides but one that interests me is the Mavericks guides. I downloaded a copy of it before for my Macbook. ...