I have a new Hackintosh build!
My friends, it is time to upgrade! As with every creator seeking to get the most out of their toolkit, there comes a time when you outgrow your current computer build. For me, that time hit six months ago. I squeezed every little bit of performance I could out of my daily driver Hackintosh build from 2017.
If you haven’t seen our video on Hackintosh back in March of 2017, go watch, if only for our sketch.
Reasons to upgrade
My old system was stuck on MacOS Sierra. Yeah, not even High Sierra. Also, my old processor was a i7-6600K (4 core / 8 threads) and we started getting more Premiere and After Effects work. We’re even getting FinalCut projects.
The final nail in the coffin was the latest update to the Adobe suite rendered all my apps incompatible since I was still on MacOS Sierra.
Frank and I decided it was finally time to upgrade the Hackintosh.
Before you start asking about why not save some money and switch to Windows, once again I direct you to watch the previous Hackintosh video, it answers that. But the short story is I love working in MacOS. Period. And with a Hackintosh, I can pay PC prices and end up with both a Mac and Windows machine.
This is not a tutorial. I will leave links to some fantastic creators who do that sort of thing for the Hackintosh community. I’ll also leave links to the Hackintosh forum where I got my build guide for this very machine. If you are considering building a Hackintosh, then stick around. I’ll give you a rough overview of what has to happen to build one. I’ll also let you in on a few pitfalls that weren’t mentioned in any guide anywhere and how I solved them.
Building a Hackintosh, revisited
The first thing you need to get right when building a Hackintosh system is the hardware. While you can get certain bits of hardware to work, I went with the stuff that was already tested by the large Hackintosh community. This wasn’t my first Hackintosh build, so I knew to keep things simple.
Processor:Intel Core i9-9900K 3.6 GHz 8-Core Processor
Why not go with a blazing fast AMD Ryzen processor? Well, it all comes down to the high level of compatibility I wanted to maintain. Real Mac’s don’t run on AMD, well at least not yet. Also, as far as I know, getting things like FaceTime, Siri and iMessage to work on an AMD processor is still extremely difficult on an AMD Hackintosh build. So I chose the fastest, most affordable Intel processor I could.
Since I screwed up before by getting a 4-core processor, I wanted to at least double that in this build. So the i9-9900k will serve as a great choice for the Mac side and a great gaming processor for my WIndows side.
Motherboard: Gigabyte Z390 DESIGNARE
It’s almost as if Gigabyte designed this motherboard for Hackintoshers. It has a steep price but it’s the most compatible with MacOS that I could find in my research, right down to the on-board Thunderbolt 3. This is the most bling board I think I have ever purchased and will be a killer for MacOS as well as Windows. I was a bit surprised that it didn’t have a power switch on the board for the price. But I guess they used the “bells and whistles” budget in other places.
RAM: HyperX Predator Black 3600MHz DDR4 32GB Total
What’s a fast machine without fast RAM? The motherboard supports 3600Mhz DDR4 RAM sticks, so I threw 2x16 into it for a total of 32GB for handling the heavy stuff. I plan to up that to 64GB very soon.
Storage: Samsung 860 EVO PRO SSD 512GB / WD_Black SN750 500GB NVMe Internal Gaming SSD - Gen3
I went with a 512GB SSD for the MacOS boot drive and to keep all my applications. Since I rely heavily on our 14TB NAS for file storage, I didn’t find it necessary at this time to install a larger boot drive. I will probably upgrade this to a 1TB M.2 drive at a later date, but it serves me well right now.
Also, I have a 256GB Crucial SSD installed and formatted with ExFAT32 to act as a stand alone Cache Drive for both Mac and Windows. This way I can point all my Adobe Apps and whatever else to it for a speedy dedicated cache location, taking the burden off of my boot drives.
Power: EVGA 1000 GQ, 80+ GOLD 1000W Power Supply
I originally intended to use my existing 850W power supply. But for reasons that I will mention later, I found that I needed to move up to a new, beefier PSU.
Graphics: AMD Radeon VII 16GB
Now here is the newest addition to the family. Look ma! It’s not an NVidia card!
Cat’s and Dogs, living together!
As you may or may not know, Apple and NVidia are no longer friends. So Apple doesn’t want NVidia tech in their hardware and NVidia no longer supports MacOS Mojave and above. Compatibility is still a priority with this build, which is why I had to go to the fastest card available from team red.
The Radeon VII is comparable to about a GTX 2070, and is natively supported in MacOS Mojave. Now, some folks smarter than me have been able to get NVidia cards to work somewhat in Mojave, but when I drop this AMD card in, it just works. It’s fully supported in MacOS v10.14.5 and above. Also, Final Cut sports some major optimisations for AMD cards. I don’t use Final Cut as my daily driver, but we do sometimes get clients who supply us with projects that we have to be able to read.
Software Install Overview
To get your Hackintosh up and running you will follow a certain procedure:
Choose the right hardware and build your PC
Download the latest version of MacOS (in my case it was Mojave v10.14.16)
Create a boot USB
Check out one of the video links in the description below or visit Tonymac86.com for an instruction guide. You can make a bootable install drive on either a real Mac (which I own a couple) or a PC using a program called TransMac.
Install Clover to your USB boot disk.
Check the links provided for proper installation as you will need to choose certain options for Clover to work.
Also download Clover Configurator so you can change things in the EFI boot partition.
Configure your motherboard BIOS. Super important!!
Boot from your USB and install MacOS
You probably have to use Disk Utility to format the disk you want to install MacOS to.
At this point you are mostly there but you have to install Clover to your boot drive and copy your EFI partition data to the disk so you don’t have to boot from the USB disk all the time.
Install CloverConfigurator and add any kernel extensions, or kexts, needed for your hardware. Think of kext files as hardware drivers for the Mac system to know how to use the hardware on your motherboard.
PROFIT
I now have a working Mac system with a dual boot to Windows 10 whenever I want to game.
I’m not a benchmark fiend, but I wanted to see how much of an improved system I have so I rendered a project in my old Hackintosh and my new one. The old system too 19 minutes to render the project. The new system rendered the same project in 9 minutes. I’ll take a 10 minute savings.
The system runs great. Stability is solid.
If you are going to attempt this yourself, here are some things to be aware of.
My plan was to save as much money I could so I decided to re-use my case and power supply. The case worked just fine. But the system would re-boot itself under heavy graphics load. And it didn’t matter if it was running Mac or Windows, I would get random re-boots, no error logs or anything. I thought I had a bad video card. It turned out that my old 850W power supply just couldn’t cut it. It was about 7 or 8 years old and just couldn’t keep up with those times when the system asked for a bunch of power all at once. And that AMD Radeon VII eats power for breakfast with a power draw rated at 295W maximum. My old GTX 1080 card topped out at only 180W. So I purchased a brand new 1000W power supply and the system runs like a champ. If you’re gonna recycle components, make sure they all fit the bill.
Like I mentioned before, I created a dual boot system with Windows 10 selectable from the Clover boot screen. What I did on the PC side is actually install a 500GB NVME drive, not necessarily for the speed, but more because when working with a dual booting system like this, it’s better to have Windows installed in the M.2 slot so that it updates/modifies its own EFI partition whenever it does a system update. That way, I don’t lose my Clover Boot EFI partition, which is what makes the Mac side run.
Checking the guides on the Tonymac86 website, it’s fully possible to install MacOS on the M2P slot and Windows to the M2M slot, and everything will work great. I may do that in the future.
You might also consider starting from a “mature” version of MacOS. When I built this machine, MacOS Catalina was just hitting the street. But I opted to start from a late version of Mojave. This way, I could avoid some early OS issues that always pop up when a new version comes out. Mojave was already at version 10.14.6 when I installed it. And I will probably move up to Catalina once the bug fixes and issues are all ironed out.
Looking at Apple’s store, a comparable system to this one would cost about $6,000. And that’s their low end Mac Pro. This one in total only cost about $2,200. For about the third of the price, I have a Mac that is faster and a Windows 10 machine thrown in.
But I don’t get support. Or Apple Care. And one update can brick my system. So I have to do full backups before updating and read a bunch of forums to stay on top of it all.
But this is what I do. I’m a PC builder and I think I can handle it. If building PCs is not for you, then buying a proper Mac may be a better solution.
So that’s it. I’m using the Adobe suite, DaVinci Resolve, FinalCut Pro, all on my new Hackintosh. It’s a fun ride.
Thanks for watching. Let me know in the comment section if you are considering building a Hackintosh, or if you think I’m absolutely bonkers for even trying. Love to hear what you think.
Typical end stuff here.