Not sure about the UP
4-TH board, but I've used the GA-Z77X-UP
5 TH board on several builds and it makes for one of the most flawless Hackintoshes ever. Lightning fast- with a 3770K the geekbench score is 15800, which is 8 core MacPro range.
Thunderbolt ports on a Hack can be misleading- on the UP5 builds I've done, nothing shows up under thunderbolt hardware unless a TB device is actually hooked up. Unless you tested it, it may have been working.
USB 3 usually requires 3rd party drivers- Eton, CalDigit or LaCie depending on the board/controller. I've had no problems with USB 3 so long as the right driver was installed.
At any rate, I've heard the Asus board you have makes for a great Hack too. I've just stuck with Gigabyte because they consistantly make boards that work great.
As to the topic: I think that QUO company is cruising for a major legal beat-down.
That board pictured is nothing but a custom Gigabyte board; it's an update to the GA-Z77MX-D3H TH.
The board markings are dead giveaways:
Image
Image
To me it even looks like they 'shopped out the Gigabyte logo from where it would obviously be, and possibly the QUO logo as well.
And the whole line of Gigabyte motherboards has been moving from the blue PCB to the grey for some time now.
I'm of the same thinking that Hackintoshes are great for individual builders and keeping it under the radar, so to speak. But every time some company comes along and thinks they can somehow cleverly bottle and sell the work of OSx86, I personally think it's taking it a step too far.
Read the Wikipedia article on the Psystar case. That company got slapped six ways from sunday for the stunts they tried to pull. They were of course blatant about selling actual assembled/installed Hackintoshes, but if you read the details of that case, they later tried to switch gears and just sell the hardware and a custom EFI that allowed installation of OSX. The court ruled they would be shut down for that as well.
I get that this company is just trying to be less blatant/more clever about doing essentially the same thing as Pystar's last efforts before they were shut down, with a bit of a 'wink and nod' approach saying "Hey, it's just off the shelf stuff, there's nothing particularly special about this that lets it run OSX... it just happens to. But meanwhile, we'd like to raise a bunch of money with the very thing we're going to later deny... as the main selling point."
To me, it sounds shaky at best. First off, the real kicker is: they're right on the first point of defense. There's nothing really special about it. They're capitalizing on the fact that many Gigabyte motherboards make good Hackintoshes, and that the OSx86 crowd has already done the heavy lifting.
Custom BIOSes to allow OSX to run easier are nothing new either. Heck, now there's even a one-click utility that will generate a custom BIOS for OSX compatibility in a matter of seconds.
So the only people ready to throw their money at this like it's something special- are simply people that don't know how old news it is (you can already do the same thing yourself, right now, with dozens of motherboards).
At the worst, if they did succeed, it will probably prompt Apple to bitchslap them hard legally, and then take further steps at locking down their OS even more.
Personally, I dunno.. I kind of find it douche-baggish of them to use kickstarter for this. If they're already any kind of legit company, what do they need with kickstarter money? If they're really a fly-by-night that can't fund their own R&D, then why does anyone need them trying to profiteer off what the OSx86 crowd has done?
