May 26, 2012 - kenshinjeff

making a hackintosh early in 2012

Long story short:
If you have no patience or time, don’t waste your time, because it takes time and reading to assemble a hackintosh. If you think it’s fun to tinker around with software/hardware until they work, please continue reading.

The easiest way is to get someone to prepare a bootable USB (>=8G) with 10.7.4 and you buy the same hardware as those listed in the golden builds/confirmed user builds. There is complete installation guide from tonymacx86 and there are people located in the forums who may be able to help if you ask nicely.

1. Use unibeast to install mac osx on a PC.
2. Use hardware listed on golden builds or confirmed user builds.
3. Configure BIOS.
4. After installation, use multibeast to setup your system.

From my short readings, any board should be able to install, just not all the components on board will be supported out of the box, hence you should look for hardware that other people have tested above.

BIOS settings:
1 – Load Optimized Defaults
2 – Set Bios to AHCI mode (for my board, found under “Integrated Peripherals”, second option)
3 – Set HPET to 64 bit (for my board, found under “Power Management Setup”)
4 – Set bios xmp to profile1 (advanced memory bios page)

Recommended chipsets taken from the forum:
– Realtek ALC audio codecs (885 / 887 / 888 / 889 / 892 / 898)
– RTL81xx Ethernet  (8111 / 8111B / 8111C / 8111CP / 8111D / 8111D(L) / 8111DP / 8111E / 8168 / 8168B / 8168C)

Some pitfalls in case you say I didn’t warn you beforehand:
– Any device that has not been tested may not fully work. Use at your own risk.
– USB 3.0 is flaky
– Suspend/Sleep may or not work

Long story begin >

I had the good fortune of having a friend who has made his own hackintosh, and it was time to throw away my girlfriend’s wife’s old mac book pro. Being an insistent miser who does not believe in personal computer warranty I figured that a hackintosh is the way to go.

I went on a pretty long quest to get the parts and everything, so it took me over 2 weeks to get everything in place. Also, my brother was in USA around that time, so I managed to get a bunch of SSDs at a reasonable price. Breakdown is all the way at the end.

Tried to create unibeast myself many times, failed just as many times. I blame it on the old mac os x version that was available to me. Ended up getting my friend to build the usb for me.

Once the motherboard settings were fine, I booted unibeast successfully into setup. In setup, I could not find any harddisks available. I actually rearranged all my sata connectors to get it to work. But apparently, being an idiot I was, it turns out that my ssd wasn’t partitioned……

After installation was successful, I left the USB stick plugged in and rebooted. This time, the installed harddisk icon will appear, select that to boot.

Using multibeast, setup your system while remembering to install chameleon (this will configure your boot drive so you don’t have to leave your flash drive in, this will also enable you to dual boot, but that’s not covered here)

My multibeast settings are as follows:
– UserDSDT install [You have to have the DSDT.aml for your motherboard on the desktop, case sensitive]
– System Utilities (Repair Permissions)
– AUDIO (ALC8XXHDA, AppleHDA Rollback)
– DISK (3rdParty SATA, TRIM Enabler)
– MISCELLANEOUS (FakeSMC, Motherboard Plugins, AMD RADEON Plugin, USB 3.0)
– NETWORK (Lnx2Mac’s RealtekRTL81xx Ethernet)
– BOOTLOADERS (Chimera)

As of 2012 May:
A) Fully decked out 21.5″ @ $3,927.61
– i7 2.8GHz Quad Core
– 16GB DDR3 1333MHz
– 256GB SSD
– Apple mouse + trackpad + wireless keyboard

B) Fully decked out 27″ imac @ $4,766.70
– i7 3.7GHz Quad Core
– 16GB DDR3 1333MHz
– 256GB SSD
– Apple mouse + trackpad + wireless keyboard

C) Self made, no support hackintosh with a choice of monitor @ ~$2,600
– Amount of time spent: 2 weeks sourcing for parts + reading, 6 hours to assemble the computer (Slow I know, LOL)
– One might argue that Apple support is unparallelled, I can totally agree with that, but no way in hell am I going to pay a premium to buy hardware that will be obsolete in 12 months. (Unless the strategy is to sell for a low price when the new model is out, and buy the new model with minimal topup)

Q. What happens if your hardware breaks down?
RMA, or throw or give away your old hardware and buy new supported hardware from SLS. Unless you’re a really really slow reader, I doubt you will need more than 12 hours to do this.

I could rephrase the question above like this, and the answer would still be the same!

Q. What happens when new and faster hardware comes about?
RMA, or throw or give away your old hardware and buy new supported hardware from SLS. Unless you’re a really really slow reader, I doubt you will need more than 12 hours to do this.

Jokes aside, it really is a pain in the ass to setup. I attribute this to the OS itself. I cannot stand using it. I cannot navigate through it properly. The whole Apple mindset is trying to different and “creative”. *cough* And this is coming from someone who has no problem using other operating systems, who takes apart things to figure out how they work, a person who can find pleasure in programming useless things.

COMPLETE DEVICE LIST

OPERATING SYSTEM
OS X LION USB THUMB DRIVE @ $80*
*You can buy this cheaper from the mac app store and burn it to a usb stick yourself, or the Apple store.

MOTHERBOARD + CPU @ $623
GIGABYTE GA-Z68XP-UD3
INTEL CORE I7-2600K (3.4GHz)

RAM @ $340
G.SKILL RIPJAWSZ F3-12800CL10Q-32GBZL 32GB (4X 8GB) DDR3 1600MHZ

GRAPHICS @ $300
SAPPHIRE HD 6870 1GB GDDR5 DIRT3 EDITION*
*I should have bought this instead but there was no stock at that time.
SAPPHIRE HD 6870 1GB GDDR5 PCIE

CPU COOLER @ $41
COOLER MASTER HYPER TX3 EVO*
*There’s no special reason why I bought this, I think it’s reasonably cheap and I didn’t really want to use the stock cpu cooler.

CASING @ $146
FRACTAL DESIGN – DEFINE R3 USB3.0 BLACK PEARL*
*This casing is a steal at this price, but personally I feel that the build could have been better. It does, however, have alot of noise dampening material all around it, so it’s really quiet. Another reason why I bought this casing was because when one day when my wife decides to retire this casing, I can use it for myself. It has slots for 7 x 120mm fans, 8 x 3.5″ drives, and ONLY 2 x 5.25″ drives!

PSU @ $125
SEASONIC M12II 620W MODULAR

SSD @ $124.99 (APPROX $170 SGD)*
CRUCIAL 128 GB M4 2.5″ SSD SATA 6GB/S CT128M4SSD2
*Typically for home usage, the lifespan of an SSD is roughly about 4-5 years. From my understanding, more you use it, the faster it “dies”. According to the specsheet, if you write 20GB per day you can use it for 5 years. So I figured that I might as well buy double of what I required, and it should theoretically double to 10 years on typical usage.

HDD
WD 3.5″ SATA BLACK 1TB @ $198

DVD ROM*
BLACK LG 22X OEM DVDRW @ $25
*Usually my builds don’t come with a CDROM because no one uses those things to boot up anymore.

MONITOR*
24″ PHILIPS FULL HD AMVA DISPLAY WITH POWERSENSOR 241P4QPY @ $335
*I really wanted to get larger monitor like 27″ but alas, the big price constraint.

PERIPHERALS
APPLE WIRELESS KEYBOARD + MAGIC TRACKPAD @ $145
8G SANDISK USB THUMBDRIVE @ $13
BELKIN MINI BLUETOOTH USB ADAPTOR @ $30+?

annoyances / HOW-TOS hackintosh / Z68 /

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