Hackintosh Pro

[Depone]

Right. I said i'd write a bit on here about how my hackintosh build went... And well I'm writing this from it!
Ok, so I made the decision last month to ditch the iMac (fairly decent spec) and build my own production powerhouse.

I got he iMac through a student discount when i was at university, so at the time It was a great deal (£700 or so)
I made sure i backed it upto 2 external Drives for piece of mind, and I wiped it and Sold it for £550. It was 3 years old, so I think I made a pretty good decision there.

So for those who don't know, a Hackintosh is a Mac built from specifically selected PC parts...

I decided to take the plunge and build a hackintosh, due to me being a bit miffed at not being able to 'future prooof' my computer.
Now, I have used apple computers from as young as 12. Im now 25, so I'm pretty glued fast to the operating system, and Logic.

All i can say is holy F**K this thing flies. It cost me just over £600 and has the same geekbench score of an 8core Mac Pro. Im absolutely amazed.

I'm not here to tell you my hardware, and I'm not going to, so please don't ask. reason being that everyones hackintosh is diferent and even with the same hardware, you may run into diferent problems.
I was incredibly lucky and everything installed and worked mostly out of the box without much tweaking.

This post is meant to be a bit of an encouragement to people thinking about making one. Do it! So far its stable as concrete, and have only had minor teething problems with some installation of the boot loader due to a poor hard drive selection (Dont buy Seagate Barracuda's, it doesn't like them)

I gatheres all my resources and a shopping list from visiting here - http://www.tonymacx86.com/
These guys have made it incredibly east to install OSX on a PC. Just do your reading (I read for aprox 3 months 30 mins a day) and now know that Apple isnt black magic, its just PC parts packaged into its own uniform aluminum.

Thats pretty much it. I will answer questions here, please don't PM me as other people might want to know the answer to your questions too!

[nowaysj]

You are pretty much just messing with me, right?

[Sharmaji]

well played Depone!

[Depone]

You are pretty much just messing with me, right?

Ahh this post is all for you!

[nowaysj]

Was reading in another thread about some of the difficulties with logic, like send your tracks to auxes or some such thing to try and balance processor usage... what they hell man, this is 2012 (so far) apple/logic/core whatever can't do multithreaded plugins? Was reading this guy had 16gigs of ram etc and was having memory/cpu problems. I don't need anymore problems. I've got my own problems. I'm looking for solutions... maybe logic is not the ultimate solution, ie fix some things for me, create other problems. Maybe I'd rather stay in the frying pan rather than jump into the fire.

[Depone]

Was reading in another thread about some of the difficulties with logic, like send your tracks to auxes or some such thing to try and balance processor usage... what they hell man, this is 2012 (so far) apple/logic/core whatever can't do multithreaded plugins? Was reading this guy had 16gigs of ram etc and was having memory/cpu problems. I don't need anymore problems. I've got my own problems. I'm looking for solutions... maybe logic is not the ultimate solution, ie fix some things for me, create other problems. Maybe I'd rather stay in the frying pan rather than jump into the fire.

Here is apples official documents on multiple cores and threads
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3161

I was running huge projects on just 2 cores no longer than 2 months ago. I would say that in all, despite it's load management, is still very efficient and fast. Not trying to be defensive but honest.

[pete_bubonic]

I recently took my macbook (duocore 2.8 4th gen white) apart, took the superdrive out, moved the magnetic hdd into a special caddy to fit in it's slot, and installed a 160gig ssd inn the original hdd space. This thing flies, it's bizarre, it basically now the same spec as the last gen macbook air, with 320 gigs, all the ports for about half the money (680 when I bought from mac wholesaler, the parts cost 180, installed myself). I noticed things were getting slow (or at least seemed a lot slower when comparing to my mates new macbook pro), but this has extended the life of the lappy for another year or two. I'm very happy.

Not quite hackintosh levels, but future proofing another way

[nowaysj]

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3161

Appreciate that Depone.

This may have put me off Logic for now. Maybe 10 will fix this? I think Apple may be too focused on dodging the tax obligations on their giant 95 billion dollar offshore cashhoard to fix these problems? Back to the pc sweatshop for me.

[dubesteppe]

what cpu did you put in it? also, why not share your hardware details? from your explanation i assume you dont want a bunch of people bugging you for help. just think, if tony hadn't shared any of his information you wouldn't be reading this on a kickass hackintosh

[legend4ry]

Yeah but can it right click! (joking... obviously!).

I am tempted once I upgrade to build a Hackintosh as long as it can handle being dual booted with W7 or Linux (not decided what to go with yet!).

[deadly_habit]

Yeah but can it right click! (joking... obviously!).

I am tempted once I upgrade to build a Hackintosh as long as it can handle being dual booted with W7 or Linux (not decided what to go with yet!).

my build triple booted fine, then i realized i'd never use osx and reclaimed the hard drive space

[nowaysj]

climbed that mountain just to see if you could

[Depone]

yeah booting other operating systems works just fine. I'd recommend using separate hard drives for each though.

[Depone]

what cpu did you put in it? also, why not share your hardware details? from your explanation i assume you dont want a bunch of people bugging you for help. just think, if tony hadn't shared any of his information you wouldn't be reading this on a kickass hackintosh

Because I directed people to the resources to select their own hardware.
I also did this because to make It happen, you have to do a lot of reading on compatibility. Just reading someone elses specs on a list wont achieve this.

My CPU is a Core i7 2600k

[Pedro Sánchez]

I built mine by simply going on the applestore, getting the specs for the then top macpro, then buying the pc equivalent of the parts, that way, nearly all OSX support was there, buying a copy of Snow Leopard Retail and burning a copy of Tonyx86. I even copped an aluminium case and 23inch monitor with the change.

[coemgen]

Nice thread man, going to be build a Hackintosh within the month or so, will post back when I get it done, cheers for the link!

[xbubbax]

been running a dell vostro 1500 intel core 2 duo with 4 gb ram gefore8600gtx.
OSX 10.5.8 bitch is SOLID!!
runs traktor 2 and ableton 8 no prob. I used IPC installer for 10.5

i dont use it too much anymore because I went out and bought a macbook pro

pics
http://www.mediafire.com/?k4380b4cqpe9r5k
http://www.mediafire.com/i/?k4380b4cqpe9r5k

[nutrician]

well done depone. nice to hear it worked out for you.

[nowaysj]

Think I'm about to start a build. It will be a win 7 powerhouse, 16 gigs, etc... but I'm thinking about making the parts compatible with the mac so that I can, if I so choose, join the dark side to run logic

[Depone]

Yep, no more on-board graphics, Got an Nvidea card and everything's giving me top speed scores. Couldn't be happier.

But...
Its not without its faults. every now and then (1 in 20 or so) it will crash on shutdown but overall very stable.

I just cant believe how easy it's been