Hackintosh

[marurun]

Anyone here tried making a Hackintosh lately? I haven't owned an OS X machine in years and years, and I certainly don't need one for anything, but it would be nice to have that OS available. I know in the next 6-8 months I'm going to be building a new PC to replace my 4 year old trooper. I'm considering going Hackintosh because I'll still be able to use Windows for all my gaming needs, and it shouldn't raise the price too dramatically.

Looking for a little first-hand experience advice.

[fastbilly1]

Ive built a couple, and installed it on unsupported hardware a couple more times. If you know your way around in terminal, and are not afraid to screw things up to the extent you will have to reinstall, you will have no real issues. Having proper hardware is the only real hurdle.

[jeffro11]

I'm running one right now. Bone stock Asus Intel based board with an I5 CPU. 8gb of ram and a 9800GT. That setup is SO easy to get working it basically works out of the box.

What kind of hardware do you have?

[marurun]

Oh, I'd be making my new PC double as a Hackintosh. The old one would get retired. I'm talking about building a new Hackintosh.

[jeffro11]

Stay with a common chipset. The Tony Mac forums will help greatly. As a good rule of thumb, most if not all Intel brand motherboards will work. Asus a runner up and more available. Some of the newer gigabyte boards are really awesome too. As for a video card... Id suggest going with Nvidia. The 5xx series work out of the box on Mountain Lion and up. Ram... It's not very picky about.

[Niode]

You need to make sure you choose hardware that mirrors genuine Apple products. This allows you to source drivers relatively easily. It does narrow down your choice of viable GPUs though. While possible to use non-apple equivalent hardware, you are at the mercy of whatever kexts are available to you, and whether or not they're still being developed/supported by the alarmingly few hackers that are interested in this sort of thing. It's easy to find a 'pre-baked' build on the OSx86 forums and run with whichever one fits your needs.

I will recommend you run Windows and OS X on their respective disks and if possible have a further separate drive with the bootloader on it. It's surprisingly easy to hose your entire installation if you are not careful. Running windows on a separate HDD will save you many a headache, trust me, I've been there.