SA Hackintoshers?

[Mo Facta]

So after upgrading to Ryzen, I decided to challenge myself yesterday in this rainy weather to see if I could hack it!

Well, I did!

AMD Ryzen 7 1700 (overclocked to 4Ghz)
Asus X470 Prime Pro
Asus ROG Strix RX 480 Gaming 8GB
16GB Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4-2666

Still need to do more IO tests and some About this Mac customisations but it looks like almost everything is working including triple display from the RX 480, which worked natively with full acceleration. Probably have to work on power management as well, as it's having trouble rebooting properly. But happy days!

If anyone is wondering, I used this method:

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[rinners]

Let us know how it handles updates. Do you have wifi and/or bluetooth card in your machine?

 

[Mo Facta]

Let us know how it handles updates. Do you have wifi and/or bluetooth card in your machine?

Currently this patched kernel only supports 10.13.0 / 10.13.1 / 10.13.2 / 10.13.3 as far as I know, so I might only update it to 10.13.3. Given that this is a Ryzen hack it's not as straight forward as an Intel build but I am glad to say that it is possible and the hackintosh community has made some great strides with AMD.

I don't use WIFI or Bluetooth on this machine as I have a LAN cable pulled from my router. But most of the challenge is just getting the OS to run and the on-board IO to work. Once that's done you can buy any supported WIFI or Bluetooth add-in card or USB dongle and it should work OOB. Some unsupported cards have kexts you can install but it's always best to use supported ones.

I do have a TP-Link WIFI USB adapter that works with drivers from Ralink but I probably won't use it cuz of the LAN.

Cheers

 

[Tackleberry]

I've had 3 Hackintosh builds. End of the day it's a total waste of time. After every MacOS update almost everything needs to fixed or tinkered with.

I have 2x Mac Pro's and an iMac, and they all quite a bit slower than my previous Hackintosh builds, but they work no matter what.
If for some reason you need a mac, buy a Mac.

 

[Mo Facta]

I've had 3 Hackintosh builds. End of the day it's a total waste of time. After every MacOS update almost everything needs to fixed or tinkered with.

I have 2x Mac Pro's and an iMac, and they all quite a bit slower than my previous Hackintosh builds, but they work no matter what.
If for some reason you need a mac, buy a Mac.

That's the point, though. Macs are excessively overpriced and that's why people build hacks. There's always a price to pay and that price is dealing with the hassle of upgrades. Personally I'm a Windows guy, though, and I don't use macOS on a daily basis. I mostly build hackintoshes for fun and for media professionals like audio engineers, video editors and graphics guys. Most of the time they are after system stability and will not upgrade for a long time as their software will require they stay on a certain OS revision to ensure that stability. They are also attracted to the massive performance increase at a fraction of the price. Who wouldn't be?

Saying that, my one friend/client needed to upgrade from 10.13.3 to 10.13.6 and we did it in about half an hour. Everything worked perfectly.

The hackintosh bootloader and development has come a long way and it's actually easier than ever to build and update one. But yeah, there's no such thing as a free lunch so if you're going to cheap out because you can't afford a real Mac, you're going to have to accept there may be hiccups along the way.

Sincerely, writing this to you from Windows 10,
Mo

 

[souljazk]

Keep regular Time Machine backups. Thank me later.

 

[vinodh]

macOS Catalina GM Seed was released this week so I updated my system from beta 8 and it updated like a real mac. There's one or two niggling issues like the SMBIOS being incorrect/not liking all the ports on the GPU but it runs stable and is really fast considering it's still in beta.


No support yet for the 5700 XT (I checked) but there's placeholder info which means that support should be out most probably in the next point release.

Overall, the state of the hackintosh is looking better than ever. AMD cpus is supported with the vanilla installer (no need for custom kernels), intel CPU support is of course perfect and AMD GPUs have good support besides the 5700 and 5700 XT. Nvidia cards have been left behind but we knew that long ago. My system is running Catalina without needing any strange mods or hacks. Just Clover with the recommended minimum kexts. Awesomeness.

 

[vinodh]

A friend of mine wanted to replace his 2016 15" MacBook with an iMac. Unfortunately, the latest 27" iMacs with an 8 core CPU are priced around the R50K mark.

I eventually convinced him of the hackintosh option and helped him select a system from this shady website called Progenix.co.za. The system was ordered on 11 March 2021, delivered on 12 March 2021. I assembled and installed macOS Catalina on it that same day and the next day it was already used for work. It's been in use for a few days now doing the job it was built for without any issues.

The installation was done using OpenCore and the system runs like a real iMac with Facetime, iMessage, the Mac App Store etc all working 100%. Thanks @Oj0 for the excellent prices and the amazing delivery time.