The Hackintosh Thread

[Roykor]

Yup! Still running perfectly fine... and it's been under a VERY heavy load too. In the last couple or so months I've converted about 100 movies @ 1080p, so it's been running at full speed for about 12 hours a day sometimes 36 straight hours. One of the Kingston RAM sticks did fail though, but that could happen to a Mac too, especially since we often buy 3rd party RAM anyway.

My only gripe is that I'm still running 10.10.4 and updating the OS will likely botch the install, so I'd be better reinstalling OS X from scratch. I've no intention of going to El Capitan as I wont be able to use TotalFinder or XtraFinder, so Yosemite has been great for me. Honestly, I've had two Mac Pros and a Powermac before my Hackintosh... I'm really glad I went out and made it. It didn't cost a fortune and runs circles around every Mac on the market except for the Mac Pro... which nobody should pay that much for, the price is a slap to the face of the consumer.

Thanks for your awnser. The part of not updating worries me a little bit. That makes me ( i think ) moving over to the W10 side than staying on OSX, Most of my work is in Adobe and i have the Cloud version so it doenst really matter on which OS i work. The only think I would loose is my tool iShowU to capture my screen. A program only for mac I bought some time ago. I am sure there are plenty of Window variants.

Also a build-in kinda time machine in Windows 10 too so also that part is from my worry list if i move over. Any intresting facts you can tell me to lurk me into a Hackingtosh build?

 

[jblagden]

Well, I'm running the hack in my signature block everyday for general purpose computing and recording my band's (me, myself & I) practice sessions with GarageBand. I have USB 2/3 on the rear panel with the USB 3.1 Type-A & C ports running at USB 3 speeds (need Apple to get on the ball and release a new Mac Pro), and I have a Firewire 400/800 PCIe card. I also have an iMac WiFi/BT4 card in a PCIe adapter which works great; although I don't use the hand off much, it does work with this card. If you get the GTX 1080, don't be an early adopter; I think that we'll have to wait for OS X 10.12 (or whatever its going to be called) before we'll see a more robust Nvidia web driver as several folks here have speculated.

There is a guide for iMessage. iTunes music works fine. However, HDCP/DRM is broken, and you can't run protected movies from the iTunes store; somehow that got broken with the Intel 6-series systems several years ago. I use apps from the MAS all the time - iLife, iWorks, Capo, TinyWord, Airmail (so much better than Apple's mail app), and many more. Finally, depending upon what you're trying to do with your Mac/hack, there are people that get frustrated for one reason or another and go back to Apple computers, but not many that I'm aware of.

I know that's what you'd spend for a max'd out gaming system. But, you can still run windoze on it. LOL!

You might be able to get a kext for USB 3.1. I'm pretty sure you can convert Linux drivers into kexts.

 

[pastrychef]

Yes, the Clover boot loader works great. When OS X 10.11.5 was released yesterday, I decided to click on the update button just to see what would happen. To my amazement, the update went through and the system rebooted with no problems at all!

I'm glad I found a machine to mess around with. I am quite sure that my next Mac will be a hackintosh. This experience has given me a lot of confidence.

 

[owbp]

@pastrychef , polyzargone (@IM) did great job patching DSDT and making USB_Injector.kext for that Optiplex series. Thanks to him (and other guys from the topic) whole El Capitan experience has been great for Optiplex users. It has been more stable than my MP1,1 - not by a great margin, and 1,1 is much stronger machine than 755/760/780 etc, but i had few crashes on MP due to Radeon kexts and Framebuffers (on wake with USB) and none on my rusty 755.

Good thing is that with that DSDT and FakeSMC you can go way back to Mountain Lion without any fuss (didn't try Lion and earlier).

I am quite sure that my next Mac will be a hackintosh.

I started saving money for hackintosh build when this MP1,1 appeared for dirt cheap (and few other things that i didn't have strength not to buy...).

 

[Asgorath]

FWIW I switched to a Hackintosh back in 2013, and really haven't looked back. It's staggering how much faster a high-end Haswell CPU + Maxwell GPU system is compared with my old 2010 Mac Pro.

 

[bladerunner2000]

Thanks for your awnser. The part of not updating worries me a little bit. That makes me ( i think ) moving over to the W10 side than staying on OSX, Most of my work is in Adobe and i have the Cloud version so it doenst really matter on which OS i work. The only think I would loose is my tool iShowU to capture my screen. A program only for mac I bought some time ago. I am sure there are plenty of Window variants.

Also a build-in kinda time machine in Windows 10 too so also that part is from my worry list if i move over. Any intresting facts you can tell me to lurk me into a Hackingtosh build?

Honestly it just works for me, I know some people have issues with imessage or something or other, but if you pay attention to the guides on tonymac and follow a build thats more or less guaranteed, you wont have any problems at all. I didn't... I just wish I had made a Hackintosh earlier... now I need to sell my Mac Pro. I don't think I'll ever buy another Mac desktop again.

 

[scott.n]

I switched a few months ago after having bought and upgraded a couple of 2009 Mac Pros and not gotten the performance that I wanted. There's really no comparison. The Mac Pro has a lot of brute power, and if your software scales to 8+ cores it might be the better option, but the hackintosh just feels more responsive and faster at most tasks. So far it hasn't been any less stable than my Mac Pro.

Honestly it just works for me, I know some people have issues with imessage or something or other, but if you pay attention to the guides on tonymac and follow a build thats more or less guaranteed, you wont have any problems at all. I didn't... I just wish I had made a Hackintosh earlier... now I need to sell my Mac Pro. I don't think I'll ever buy another Mac desktop again.

Completely agree. I was very indecisive - bought parts in fall 2014 to build one, then chickened out and returned them. I bought parts again in fall 2015 and almost did the same thing, but eventually decided to go ahead and build. Glad I took the chance. They are a lot of fun.

 

[bladerunner2000]

I switched a few months ago after having bought and upgraded a couple of 2009 Mac Pros and not gotten the performance that I wanted. There's really no comparison. The Mac Pro has a lot of brute power, and if your software scales to 8+ cores it might be the better option, but the hackintosh just feels more responsive and faster at most tasks. So far it hasn't been any less stable than my Mac Pro.



Completely agree. I was very indecisive - bought parts in fall 2014 to build one, then chickened out and returned them. I bought parts again in fall 2015 and almost did the same thing, but eventually decided to go ahead and build. Glad I took the chance. They are a lot of fun.

I just love the fact that I can slap in one of those new Pascal GPUs for an awesome price while Mac Pro users are stuck on 5 year old technology... those AMD Firepro's are based on the 7xxx series cards and suck HARD, lol. Can you believe people paid so many thousands of dollars for such a lousy system? Hahahaha!

Can't wait to upgrade to the Nvidia 1070 and play some Battlefield 1!

 

[navaira]

I have exactly one problem with the Big Hac – sleep/wake. After 4-9 days a memory leak appears, first symptom is always Chrome crashing, then the computer reboots. Other than that everything works perfectly including system updates from App Store.

 

[SoyCapitanSoyCapitan]

I just love the fact that I can slap in one of those new Pascal GPUs for an awesome price while Mac Pro users are stuck on 5 year old technology... those AMD Firepro's are based on the 7xxx series cards and suck HARD, lol. Can you believe people paid so many thousands of dollars for such a lousy system? Hahahaha!

As long as Boot Camp is your best friend, those web drivers aren't optimised for newer architectures if you want to game


http://barefeats.com/gtx980ti.html

 

[Fl0r!an]

As long as Boot Camp is your best friend, those web drivers aren't optimised for newer architectures if you want to game


http://barefeats.com/gtx980ti.html

You are aware that the 980ti is sitting in a MacPro tower with 2009ish CPUs? That's nowhere near a modern Skylake system when it comes to singlecore performance (which is what matters in games).
OS X drivers traditionally have a quite high CPU overhead, which will make high-end cards perform worse in OS X when they're sitting in a CPU-limited system, but that's nothing specific to Maxwell, that applies to Kepler as well (have a look for GTX 680 threads).

Just an example what a 980ti can do in OS X when it's sitting in a more capable system:

You won't see considerably more than that in Windows.

 

[SoyCapitanSoyCapitan]

You are aware that the 980ti is sitting in a MacPro tower with 2009ish CPUs? That's nowhere near a modern Skylake system when it comes to singlecore performance (which is what matters in games).
OS X drivers traditionally have a quite high CPU overhead, which will make high-end cards perform worse in OS X when they're sitting in a CPU-limited system, but that's nothing specific to Maxwell, that applies to Kepler as well (have a look for GTX 680 threads).

Just an example what a 980ti can do in OS X when it's sitting in a more capable system:

That is partly true, except some of those benchmarked apps including Tomb Raider are highly GPU bound (on Windows there is almost no difference if you upgrade CPU from a X5690 to a 6700K). Try those Hackintosh tests on a 680 and 980 side by side for more detail. The 9 series should be doing much better.

I can show you the web driver and the OSX Nvidia driver performing nearly identically in Unigene tests, so it's not a good test for showing GPU driver improvements in OSX.

The fact is, the web drivers don't support the color compression algorithms introduced with Maxwell. This is what holds the 9 series from reaching their full OpenGL potential under OSX (not to mention that Apple's OpenGL is old and sluggish anyway). It allowed Nvidia to give the 980 a smaller 256 bit bus instead of going bandwidth crazy like AMD does.

And then in Pascal there are several new features that need specific driver support.

 

[bladerunner2000]

As long as Boot Camp is your best friend, those web drivers aren't optimised for newer architectures if you want to game


http://barefeats.com/gtx980ti.html

Boot Camp? What's that and why do I need it?

 

[SoyCapitanSoyCapitan]

Boot Camp? What's that and why do I need it?

For Microsoft Word 95 compatibility ;p

Sorry I forgot you're a Hackintosher

 

[Asgorath]

That is partly true, except some of those benchmarked apps including Tomb Raider are highly GPU bound (on Windows there is almost no difference if you upgrade CPU from a X5690 to a 6700K). Try those Hackintosh tests on a 680 and 980 side by side for more detail. The 9 series should be doing much better.

The fact is, the web drivers don't support the color compression algorithms introduced with Maxwell. This is what holds the 9 series from reaching their full OpenGL potential under OSX (not to mention that Apple's OpenGL is old and sluggish anyway). It allowed Nvidia to give the 980 a smaller 256 bit bus instead of going bandwidth crazy like AMD does.

And then in Pascal there are several new features that need specific driver support.

The fact you keep saying this won't make it true. Where is your evidence that the web drivers don't enable color compression? Just because Tomb Raider is GPU bound under Windows doesn't mean it's the same on OS X. The Apple OpenGL framework adds a large amount of CPU overhead compared with the D3D drivers under Windows. And, as I mentioned in another thread, what is NVIDIA supposed to do about new hardware features like Simultaneous Multi-Projection when they have no control over the application-visible interface (which is defined by the Apple-controlled GL/CL/Metal frameworks). NVIDIA can't expose OpenGL extensions like they can on other platforms, because Apple provides no mechanism for this (i.e. they want to keep full control over what features are exposed on their platform).

There's a really simple explanation for those BareFeats results that you keep linking:

- The new NVIDIA web driver was tuned to remove most of the CPU overhead on their side. There have been lots of complaints over the years that the NVIDIA driver was slower, and this seems to have been resolved.

- Most apps improved to the point where they are now CPU limited. This means a 680 and a 980 Ti will produce around the same score, because the GPU isn't a limiting factor.

It's really a shame that BareFeats didn't run these cards in a modern Haswell Hackintosh (or Skylake now I guess) as it would've allowed for a much higher CPU limit threshold and thus allowed the cards to stretch their legs.

 

[pastrychef]

I'm still having lots of fun with my first hackintosh. It has been running solid since I get it all up and running. However, I finally came across my first hiccup. It's an anomaly that affected file transfers to my NAS. Here are the symptoms:

1. Internet browsing and downloading works fine.
2. LAN connection to another computer via VNC works fine.
3. Try to copy anything to the NAS and it will break the ethernet connection.
4. Only way to bring it back up is to put computer to sleep and wake it.

I did a bit of reading on an other thread and it seemed that this issue is related to the driver I was using and others ended up using USB to ethernet adapters as a work around. Fortunately, I have an old Apple one but it's only 10/100Base-T. But at least it works.

Just for kicks, I decided to see how much slower it is when compared to my 5,1. I converted a video using handbrake. 5,1 took about 42 minutes and the hack took about 3.5 hours. Pretty close to what I expected. It was a nice little stress test for stability.

It idles at around 42-44W and, under full load, it uses about 91-93W.

 

[TheStork]

I'm still having lots of fun with my first hackintosh. It has been running solid since I get it all up and running. However, I finally came across my first hiccup. It's an anomaly that affected file transfers to my NAS. Here are the symptoms:

1. Internet browsing and downloading works fine.
2. LAN connection to another computer via VNC works fine.
3. Try to copy anything to the NAS and it will break the ethernet connection.
4. Only way to bring it back up is to put computer to sleep and wake it.

I did a bit of reading on an other thread and it seemed that this issue is related to the driver I was using and others ended up using USB to ethernet adapters as a work around. Fortunately, I have an old Apple one but it's only 10/100Base-T. But at least it works.

Just for kicks, I decided to see how much slower it is when compared to my 5,1. I converted a video using handbrake. 5,1 took about 42 minutes and the hack took about 3.5 hours. Pretty close to what I expected. It was a nice little stress test for stability.

It idles at around 42-44W and, under full load, it uses about 91-93W.

View attachment 632029

We've found that some of the latest versions of the hackintosh Ethernet drivers are "broken." What is your Ethernet chipset & what driver have you been using?

 

[pastrychef]

I believe this machine has the Intel 82580 controller.

I tried the AppleIntelE1000e.kext and it works until machine goes to sleep then it won't establish a connection again until I reboot. Then, I switched to the Intel 82566MM.kext and it works as I explained earlier except for writing to my NAS.

For now, I'm using an old Apple USB to 10/100Base-T Ethernet adapter.

 

[Asgorath]

IntelMausiEthernet.kext from InsanelyMac is generally considered to be better than AppleIntelE1000e.kext, for what it's worth.

 

[pastrychef]

Thanks for the info! I'll check it out!

 

[Siborn91]

Hey guys, I posted a thread in the wrong spot and I am just going to post it here.
Hope you guys can help me out.

Hi guys,

I've just finished a Hackintosh build with El Capitan. Everything went relatively smooth, but I'm having an issue with the audio.
I'm using a Dell 34" Ultrawide U3415w which has inbuilt speakers, and connected via display port to an MSI GTX 980 Ti gaming 6G video card.
I'm able to get audio from the headphone jack as well as the line-outs on the rear of the MB. However I'm unable to get sound from the inbuilt speakers of the monitor. Not sure if it has anything to do with the nVidia drivers for OS X (346.03.10), or if the MB is just not detecting the monitor speakers.

Any ideas?

Thanks
--- Post Merged, Yesterday at 2:21 PM ---
Update:

So trawling various forums, and it seems that El Capitan has SIP, which disables unsigned kexts from loading into boot. Could this be my problem?

I've enabled the flags bootflags rootless=0 and kext-dev-mode=1.
I've also entered the following code into config.plist in clover configurator.

<key>RtVariables</key>
<dict>
<key>CsrActiveConfig</key>
<string>0x67</string>
<key>BooterConfig</key>
<string>0x28</string>
</dict>

The reason I've done this is because I've read that the above things disable SIP.

After doing this, I've tried both kexts HDMIAudio-1.0 and HDMIAudio-1.1.

Nothing works.

Running out of options here. Can anyone suggest anything?

 

[Fl0r!an]

SIP is disabled by default on Hackintoshs to prevent any problems with unsigned kexts. You should already have the mentioned RtVariables in your config.plist.
Both "rootless=0" and "kext-dev-mode=1" are useless in El Capitan, you can safely remove them.

I'd try using a Clover-based method to enable HDMI audio, e.g. this script.

 

[Gav2k]

Tempted ...http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/nuc/change-the-game-with-nuc.html

Chances of this being hackintoshable?!

 

[NOTNlCE]

Tempted ...http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/nuc/change-the-game-with-nuc.html

Chances of this being hackintoshable?!

I would say, "high." I have a Haswell NUC in one of my mod projects, but from what I've read, the newer ones have embedded Intel wireless, which is 150% unsupported in OS X.

 

[dfritchie]

This week I received my case kit and front panel kit from Laser Hive for my G5 case. Next month I can order the MB and Skylake processor. Due to cost it will be the i5-6600 on a Gigabyte GA-170M-D3H mATX MB. Planning to start with 16 GB of DDR4-2133 ram. Will eventually install a EVGA GeForce GTX 960 4GB video card as well. Should be fun putting this beast together, been years since I last built my own computer!

This link has my parts list.