Hackintosh Users

jeid

jeid

Terribad
Mar 9, 2009
1,966
4
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41
Scotland
Hello, I've had my 27" iMac for 5 years now and I'm thinking about an upgrade. I'm not really sure I can justify spending £1600 on a new iMac so I'm really thinking hard about building a Hackintosh.

Compatibility seems to be a lot easier than it once was. My two concerns are getting a good firewire card and noise.

I've not owned a PC for about 8 or 9 years, so I'm not to sure about how much noise the newer fans make these days. Will it be a concern as I sometimes do tracking at home. My iMac is almost silent.

Planning on building it myself, which shouldn't be a problem and I've priced one up to come in at about £8-900. Could probably sell this one for about £4-500.

Any negatives I should be aware of?
 
For firewire any card with a TI chipset is usually good. Although, most interfaces are USB these days.

Noise is really up to you. If you buy a quality PSU, CPU cooler and a graphics card without fans (assuming you're not doing anything graphically intensive) then noise shouldn't really be an issue. You can take it a step further and get a noise reducing case if you want.
 
I have considered the Mac Mini, but there's zero expandability on it now with the memory being soldered in.

My interface is firewire just now and I'll not likely be upgrading that anytime soon. Will keep the TI chipset in mind though. Will need to read up on quiet fans/cases. Cheers for the tip.
 
jeid said:
I have considered the Mac Mini, but there's zero expandability on it now with the memory being soldered in.

My interface is firewire just now and I'll not likely be upgrading that anytime soon. Will keep the TI chipset in mind though. Will need to read up on quiet fans/cases. Cheers for the tip.
Click to expand...

Just expanding on what I said before...the nicer PSUs will generally only kick on their fan when the load is high and remain silent other times. The cheaper ones will run the fan all the time. Some cases are designed for silence and I do feel it makes a difference. The Fractal Design cases are nice.

For CPU coolers the larger fans are better because they move the same amount of air at lower speeds and create less noise. I have a Hyper Evo (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835103099) fan that is pretty quiet most of the time because of the large fan and heatsink.

For video cards, if you're only doing audio, I recommend trying to find a fanless one. It won't be good enough for gaming but it will keep things quiet.

The last thing would be hard drives. SSDs make no real noise but mechanical drives can make quite a bit- the solution is usually little rubber standoffs that help isolate the vibration from the case.

If you just google "silent pc" or similar terms you can find a lot of information.

I've used a hackintosh with Logic for years with no real issues. Check out http://www.tonymacx86.com/ for good hackintosh info. There's guys on the forums there running hacks for music production.
 
I've had a bitch and a half getting it updated to Yosemite but that's more my build than anything. On my 10.8.5 build, Messages doesn't validate for whatever reason. These are the only two issues I've had with my Hackintosh, and they're directly related to setup/build (aka I fucked up).
 
choose wisely the firewire card or your hackintosh otherwise it will reboot instead of shutting down!!
I have the one advised on tonymac osx by a dick head claiming it was totally compatible.... in the end many like me had problems.
To avoid reboot I have to unplug my firewire harddrive, this way when it shuts down it does as it should
this is the one I have
[ame]http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000WCT5HK?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o04_s00[/ame]
 
I installed OSX Yosemite on a spare drive last weekend. I've gotta say, although it may be easier to install now than it used to be, it's still not easy. I am a software developer for a living, and I've installed multiple versions of Linux on the same hardware a few months ago, and getting OSX working was definitely more frustrating...

but now it works, and it works well. Really enjoying it, actually, which kinda makes me regret ignoring OSX for the last few years.

I'm using an RME AIO PCI-E card, FWIW. Works great.
 
jeid said:
Good info on here guys, thanks very much. For those of you that have made them, did you follow a guide for parts?

I've found this, which seems to be good. http://www.tonymacx86.com/building-customac-buyers-guide-june-2015.html

Do you find your machines to be stable?
Click to expand...


My build is completely stable, no issues whatsoever. I'm using a Gigabyte motherboard and I also used an older no-name motherboard without issues. I no longer use Firewire but when I did I had a cheap card with a TI chip and it did just fine. (the first card I had did not have a TI chip and it caused issues)

It's not a bad idea to search around the tonymac forum for whatever gear you're planning on buying to see if anyone is having issues. Regardless, your first build is a learning experience and you'll certainly make some mistakes along the way but if you've read the install guides and aren't intimidated it's really not that bad. It's gotten a little more tricky because you have to first install Mountain Lion and then get the latest build of OSX from the app store but once you do it once it's not a big deal.
 
I followed the CustoMac guide. I would argue that the install process is not at all that bad, esp with TonyMac's bootloaders. Josh, I'd be willing to bet your problems were build related and not software related.
 
Cool, I'm gonna go ahead with it. Watched a lot of videos and read a lot of the FAQ type threads on the forums and it seems easy enough, assuming I don't mess anything up.

Definitely trying to get best bang for buck. The Mac Pro spec machine is in my budget and will give me a good upgrade on what I have, plus, I won't have to eat beans for 6months to pay it. Cheers again guys.
 
Josh Burgess said:
Anyone know if there will be a new Macbook Pro coming out any time soon? Maybe in fall?
Click to expand...

Nope, just updated 2 months ago:

http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#Retina_MacBook_Pro

I'm on a mid-2014 15" MBP Retina (release just before the newest one) and it absolutely slays. Benchmarks just below my i7-4770k HackPro, and is honestly so sleek a machine I know that I'll be going full laptop when it's time to get rid of the HackPro for something else.
 
jeid said:
Good info on here guys, thanks very much. For those of you that have made them, did you follow a guide for parts?

I've found this, which seems to be good. http://www.tonymacx86.com/building-customac-buyers-guide-june-2015.html

Do you find your machines to be stable?
Click to expand...

Yes rock solid and it was super easy compared to years ago... At the time the suggested operating system was Maverick, but I needed mountain lion because I had to keep both pt10 and pt11 on the same machine. I installed mavericks and everything worked out of the box, then I tried Mountain lion and the graphic card had problems... I had 1024x768 as resolution... and like all things mac... I just ran two scripts that didn't make sense to me even if I'm a computer programmer lol and had the hackintosh running smoothly ever since
Every once in a while it doesn't show the menu bar (very very very very very rarely)... I just click the desktop and boom it comes back again, nothing really annoying.
The trick is the post install process, install just the drivers you need.... otherwise you'll fuck things up...
Huge advice: once you have everything running good clone the disk with disk utility to another drive... this way you can restore the image easily
 
I'm running Mavericks just now because of PT10, but I think I'll take the risk and ditch it when I get my new computer. I have pretty much fully migrated to PT11 now anyway.

A disk clone will definitely be happening.
 
I am working on a MacbookPro 2015 and a Hackintosh.

Did it on hardware I already own and it's running absolut stable. Overclocked i7 @4,7Ghz is a beast. Running it on yosemite...it is also my first hack.
 
JeffTD said:
Nope, just updated 2 months ago:

http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#Retina_MacBook_Pro

I'm on a mid-2014 15" MBP Retina (release just before the newest one) and it absolutely slays. Benchmarks just below my i7-4770k HackPro, and is honestly so sleek a machine I know that I'll be going full laptop when it's time to get rid of the HackPro for something else.
Click to expand...

Hmm. Do they always release in spring? I think I'd like to wait for Sky Lake since that's coming relatively soon.

My desktop is using the slightly older 3770k. Still pretty fast though.
 
I built mine when Lion was still new OS, so I might not be the best man to give advices, but I can say that my build has been fairly stable. First I had some issues, but it was due to bad choices on hardware (WD Green caviar hd and no proper firewire card for starters). Now it still has some kernel panics, but they're so rare I haven't bothered to take a closer look yet. Anyways.. I had some major audio drop outs with the motherboard's firewire connection, but they all vanished after I installed the cheapest TI-chip firewire card I found. Aand after I installed an SSD in there, Logic stopped saying my hard drive was too slow for 16 tracks at a time.

Just follow the tonymac instructions and search the web to see if people have had problems with the parts you're going to buy and you should be golden. If I can build one, anyone can..
 
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