Building of a Hackintosh Diary

[thehadgi]

Was going to post this in the other hackintosh thread I started, but I thought it'd be good to start a new thread in case anyone else thinking about a hackintosh wanted a good look at a possible build/paths/tips/shortcomings. Got some good info from ezelkow, mostapha, and others for places to look, so thanks to you guys.

So, after much deliberation, and impatience in waiting for more funds to waste on a stupid apple logo, I decided to go ahead and purchase all the parts necessary for a machine I could hack OS X onto. Looked into a couple sites, mainly tonymacx86 (http://tonymacx86.blogspot.com/2011/11/building-sandy-bridge-customac-buyers.html) and nofilmschool (http://nofilmschool.com/build-a-hackintosh/), and sorted out the parts I was going to get and what to keep in mind. The idea was for me to build a machine that was more than capable of handling video rendering and effect processing along with music production, because although a lesser computer would have been able to handle Ableton and plugs fine enough, I am getting really into video production alongside music so I wanted a machine that would last me some years with good power.

Already own 2 monitors, keyboard, mouse, printer, bluetooth dongle, 2 TB external hard drive, so I didn't need to account for those.

Total cost came to around $1300-ish for the setup below, through Amazon (order 1-2 parts used, like power supply and case):

Intel Core i7 2600K Processor 3.4 Ghz 4 Core LGA 1155 (http://www.amazon.com/Intel-Core-2600K-Processor-1155/dp/B004EBUXSA/ref=lh_ni_t) - $289.99
Gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD3 LGA 1155 Intel Z68 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0054OWTQU/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i00) - $134.99
OCZ 120GB Vertex 3 SATA 6Gb/s 2.5-Inch Performance Solid State Drive (SSD) (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004Q81CKY/ref=oh_details_o02_s00_i01) - $109.99
Western Digital Caviar Black 1 TB SATA III 7200 RPM 64 MB Cache (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0036Q7MV0/ref=oh_details_o02_s00_i05) - $119.17
Corsair Vengeance Blue 16 GB DDR3 SDRAM Dual Channel Memory Kit (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004RFBIUU/ref=oh_details_o02_s00_i03) - $96.99
SAPPHIRE AMD Radeon HD 6870 1GB GDDR5 (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005C8RTTU/ref=oh_details_o02_s00_i04) - $169.99
LG WH12LS30 12X SATA BLU-RAY BURNER (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004LPLE50/ref=oh_details_o01_s00_i00) - $81.95
Corsair Carbide Series 400R Mid Tower Gaming Computer Case (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0055Q7BR4/ref=oh_details_o02_s01_i00) - $89.99
Antec CP-850 850 Watt CPX SLI CrossFire 80 (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001RTPLWK/ref=oh_details_o02_s02_i00) - $88.06
Mini PCI-E to PCI-E Wireless Card w/ 3 Antennas (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005Q751BA/ref=oh_details_o03_s00_i00) - $4.81
Apple Airport Extreme Card BCM94322MC (http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_trksid=p4340.m570.l1313&_nkw=Apple+Airport+Extreme+Card+BCM94322MC+&_sacat=0) - $43.99 (for airport extreme)

For software:
OS X Lion (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/os-x-lion/id444303913?mt=12) - $30

Oh yeah I got some computer tools and grounding straps and whatnot too! Heard that's good practice.



Now lord knows I still have no idea how to put this all together. But the sites I got the info from all have tutorials and such, so I think I'll manage to get it all connected together without a problem. Then it's on to programming it all to work right. So hopefully next week when the parts arrive, I shall be ok. If not, I may require the help of computer guru's on here lol

Stay tuned!

[Dj DRPX]

Nice man, Can't wait to see this get put together.

[Phil Noize]

Well done for taking the plunge into doing this. It will be interesting to see your progress.

Good luck!!

[thehadgi]

Forgot to order the processor... :facepalm:

[manythings]

Sweet! I'm actually thinking of doing this soon too. I currently run on two laptops (1 mac, 1 pc) which was good for when I was in school but now that I have graduated and am staying put for a bit I'm planning on getting rid of my pc laptop and building a dual boot desktop for mac and pc.

Hope yours works out!

[sephi]

Looking forward to seeing how this turns out. I had a Hackintosh ASUS laptop a few years ago. Everything but the NIC worked out of the box, and all I had to do was add a kext to fix that minor issue. Twas much fun. Just be sure to not share the OSX drive with any other OSes, or you're gonna have a bad time.

[Synaxis]

Forgot to order the processor... :facepalm:

Oh, wow, that must have sucked when you realized.

Looking forward to seeing the final build. Keep us updated!

[Scott Michael]

Good luck with the build, sounds like you've done your research and are ready to take on the task. Expect something to go wrong and then figure out how to troubleshoot it. Once you get it running properly it will be worth it. I've had a hack runing stable for months now without any problems. I'm still running Snow Leopard though. Contemplated up****** to Lion but my old motherboard would be a pain in the ass to get running. Post some pics when your done!

[thehadgi]

Thanks will do! I should have all the parts in Thursday so I'll update then

[g-sep]

Not Hackintosh centric, but something to keep you motivated.
http://www.million-dollar-pc.com/

[thehadgi]

http://img.tapatalk.com/b8390323-d9f3-27f7.jpgParts are in! Prob should move the water and other stuff out of the way hehe

[Rek_Aviles]

Not Hackintosh centric, but something to keep you motivated.
http://www.million-dollar-pc.com/

http://www.million-dollar-pc.com/gallery-2009/special/pius-edelweiss/edelweiss-00.jpg
Sick.

[g-sep]

http://www.million-dollar-pc.com/gallery-2009/special/pius-edelweiss/edelweiss-00.jpg
Sick.

I'm thinking of getting their sleeve kit with some matching colors for my rig. Then she'll sit on top of the desk and be looked at all the time :fap:

[thehadgi]

Build not going to well... Cut my wrist and bled a couple drops on the GPU fan, power supply is too big for the case, broke a plastic hard drive lever thingy (don't think that's a big deal)

Need to slow down and be patient :argh:

[thehadgi]

Phew! Got a good power supply that fits, everything is connected to the motherboard (hopefully).

Now to figure out this sata business...

[Rek_Aviles]

:lol: sounds like you need to take a time out and regroup.

[thehadgi]

:lol: sounds like you need to take a time out and regroup.

Lol i think so... won't power on :eek: my stupid computer genius roommate is high and playing WoW so he is of no use :argh:

[thehadgi]

Alright! Got everything hooked up right finally. Had a difficult time booting up from the lion-installed usb drive, took a while to search and find a workaround. It seems that the ati/amd (at least) radeon cards have a weird time, and cause freezing when trying to load. If anyone reads this, try checking this thread (http://www.tonymacx86.com/viewtopic.php?f=169&t=38388) on how to move kexts to the root, and then try booting from the chimera main screen with "PCIRootUID=0"

Worked, bluetooth and all, now I'm installing lion and will update again soon!

http://img.tapatalk.com/b8390323-2e5f-50a7.jpg

[g-sep]

Word, congrats man. Large feat you undertook by building one of those.

Now unplug everything and reroute those wires to make it cleaner! It'll help with airflow too.

[thehadgi]

Word, congrats man. Large feat you undertook by building one of those.

Now unplug everything and reroute those wires to make it cleaner! It'll help with airflow too.

Ha thanks, yeah after I succesfully hack OS X on this I'll take a look at how people that know things about computers would organize cables lol

Also heading into hour 20 of my hand still bleeding from some stupid minor cut on the top of my hand. Medical expertise would probably suggest going to the ER to see if stitches are warranted, but Bear Grylls would man up and pee on it so I might try that if it doesn't stop soon... that is all for the current update :D

[akswun]

good job! at first I was like this guy is spending almost 1800 to build a hackintosh...I was thinking a laptop hackintosh.

Anyway... pressure on that cut! like till it hurts.... it'll stop bleeding.

[thehadgi]

Cuts good!

Finally got audio (onboard) working. Just leaves Ethernet/wireless, which will wait till tmrw hen the parts get here

Update work-wise: I seriously underestimated the time and frustration setting everything up would be. I even tried to get parts from recommended builds, but it's still trial error. Probably installed lion close to 15 times, and have rebooted the comp well over 100 times in two days!

Just a warning to those without computer tech knowledge or patience looking at a hackintosh :lol: def in for a ride, not going to be all setup in and hour or two

[Divercity]

Nice build man. It's almost exactly the same as mine!


It will run sweet ;)

[thehadgi]

Viola!

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/9079827/Photos/newcomp.jpg (https://dl.dropbox.com/u/9079827/Photos/newcomp.jpg)


Wooo all drivers set up! Man what a pain in the butt. But hey, powerful ass computer for 1350-ish, and maybe the biggest plus out of this was learning about computers!

Ableton says I authorized too many times, so I have to await activation :argh:

[g-sep]

Congrats man! I know when I finished my build on my Windows box I was proud as hell.

[thehadgi]

Congrats man! I know when I finished my build on my Windows box I was proud as hell.

yeah it's weird.. i feel like i earned it or something. pretty cool feeling.

and technically i lost a fair amount of blood over this too, so i have a pretty personal investment in it too i suppose :lol:

[thehadgi]

In case anyone wants a similar build, this is my geekbench score: 11943

http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/884000

No overclocking or anything, just straight up. I really don't know how good that number is, but thar it is

[Scott Michael]

In case anyone wants a similar build, this is my geekbench score: 11943

http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/884000

No overclocking or anything, just straight up. I really don't know how good that number is, but thar it is

That's not a bad geekbench score. My watercooled desktop PC I built a year ago now scored about 14,300 points. It is a 2600k overclocked to 4.7 ghz. I ran into many problems though trying to get Intel Speed stepping to work and finally gave up running at dual boot machine. There was no point in doing it considering my geekbench score in windows was much higher than my OSX score.

Enjoy a few pics of my build, I'm extremely proud of what I accomplished.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v395/Spin_Cykle/tj07/DSCF1469.jpg

[Phil Noize]

^^Nice!!

Some great work going on in this thread!

Props to thehadgi & to Scott Michael.

[manythings]

In case anyone wants a similar build, this is my geekbench score: 11943

http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/884000

No overclocking or anything, just straight up. I really don't know how good that number is, but thar it is

congrats! glad to hear you finally got it all set up.

[Rek_Aviles]

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v395/Spin_Cykle/tj07/DSCF1469.jpg

:fap:

[akswun]

I hear Mountain Lion calling for your hackintosh!

[DJNR]

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v395/Spin_Cykle/tj07/DSCF1469.jpg

Good god man, that looks good! I haven't broken into water cooling yet, but I will someday hopefully. Once I get my new fans maybe I'll post a picture of my rig here :P

[thehadgi]

Wow scott nice build dude :eek: mine looks like a slab jungle of ugly next to yours lol

[Scott Michael]

Thanks for the kind words fellas. :) The link below is a build guide detailing my build.

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1642519

Here is a part list:


Parts List

Silverstone TJ07 Internals Powder coated
Intel Core i7 2600k
Asus P8z68 V-pro
Corssair Vengance 8GB (1600)
Evga GTX 580
Silverstone ST-85F PSU
Crucial M4 (64GB) Boot (128GB) Program
ASUS Blu Ray Burner
Silverstone HDD 5.25' bay

Water cooling Parts

EK Supreme HF CPU Block
EK Full Cover 580 GTX
EK Backplate
EK Multioption Res 150
Swiftech 120.4 Rad.
Swiftech MPC 655 pump (variable)
5x Gentle Typhoon AP-15's

[g-sep]

Lookin good Scott. Gonna have to get in touch with you about wc'ing my 2600k.

[Scott Michael]

Lookin good Scott. Gonna have to get in touch with you about wc'ing my 2600k.

5.0 ghz was my fastest 24/7 stable clock speed and I ran it for a couple months straight without issue. I think dialed it back to 4.7ghz because the vcore required to hit 5 ghz was pretty high. 4.7 ghz for my chip was the best bang for the buck with voltage vrs. clock frequency.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v395/Spin_Cykle/i750ghz.jpg

[DJNR]

5.0 ghz was my fastest 24/7 stable clock speed and I ran it for a couple months straight without issue. I think dialed it back to 4.7ghz because the vcore required to hit 5 ghz was pretty high. 4.7 ghz for my chip was the best bang for the buck with voltage vrs. clock frequency.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v395/Spin_Cykle/i750ghz.jpg

I've read people running 5.0 just fine on the 2600K. I also have one myself. For graphics im running 2x570GTX

Also just a warning, I had the same motherboard and that fried on me. I decided to get a Gigabyte instead.

[Alex Murphy]

looks and sounds tasty... Jeez, the amount of fans and cooling you got in there.


I hear Mountain Lion calling for your hackintosh!


+1 on that

[thehadgi]

I hear Mountain Lion calling for your hackintosh!

Yeah I'm gonna give the coders at tonymacx86 a couple months to make sure all the drivers and everything will work before I switch... After the amount of fresh installs I had to do from messing up drivers I'll let the people that know what they're doing test it out :lol:

[ezelkow1]

Besides that osx updates are notorious for killing various audio software and plugins. So besides the tonymac guys Id also gives the devs of any plugins/hosts your using time to figure it out as well.

At this point I sort of gave up on the hackintosh, ran it for a few months, not really gaining anything software/stability/interface wise and sometimes just being pissed at osx when trying to do stuff. So the drive got wiped and sent back to backup duty

[Archon]

http://www.million-dollar-pc.com/systems-2008/special/g69t/dark-blade.htm

i personally saw this PC in real life at Quakecon 2 years ago.

[thehadgi]

http://www.million-dollar-pc.com/systems-2008/special/g69t/dark-blade.htm

i personally saw this PC in real life at Quakecon 2 years ago.

:eek:

[Scott Michael]

Updates on the machine Alan? How's it running?

[thehadgi]

Running perfectly. Haven't had a single issue with it! :D

[redbook]

Hey hadgi I'm just curious as to what music software you primarily use? I have been debating on building a hackintosh purely for speed issues. Just before summer I bought a 2GHz i7 quad-core mac mini and put 16 gigs of ram into it, with 2 big internal hard drives inside.

This thing has saved my life for live music performances I need to because it's just so damn small and reliable. I used to use a receptor live (for people who know don't know, it's like a music pc in a rack but it's big and expensive for what it is) So I decided to use my mac mini for the same purpose instead and never looked back. Now the mac mini is fast, but not fast enough for my music set up. When you have ableton set to 128 sample buffer size to ensure that vocals and midi come in with low latency, it really can eat at the cpu.

I decided that I would design a 2 mac system (doesn't matter if one is a hackintosh, as long as it works). The mac mini would be my stage keyboards' "dedicated computer" (picture a big action weighted midi keyboard, on a big stand, with an lcd on an arm connected to it, hooked up to my mac mini) that would have a low sample rate, so that it could handle vocals, powerful vsts, and effects live WHILE connected to a more powerful mother mac that handles production styled plugins and other things that would slow down my mac mini by itself too much. The software I rely on is Protools, Albeton Live, Reason, Native Instruments Suite, Spectrasonics, Fabfilter Suite, and others but those are my main dogs.

Sorry for all the info but I saw your post today and I'm really curious to see what you're experience has been with it? I would love the speed of a hackintosh

[Unknown DJ]

Hey hadgi I'm just curious as to what music software you primarily use? I have been debating on building a hackintosh purely for speed issues. Just before summer I bought a 2GHz i7 quad-core mac mini and put 16 gigs of ram into it, with 2 big internal hard drives inside.

This thing has saved my life for live music performances I need to because it's just so damn small and reliable. I used to use a receptor live (for people who know don't know, it's like a music pc in a rack but it's big and expensive for what it is) So I decided to use my mac mini for the same purpose instead and never looked back. Now the mac mini is fast, but not fast enough for my music set up. When you have ableton set to 128 sample buffer size to ensure that vocals and midi come in with low latency, it really can eat at the cpu.

I decided that I would design a 2 mac system (doesn't matter if one is a hackintosh, as long as it works). The mac mini would be my stage keyboards' "dedicated computer" (picture a big action weighted midi keyboard, on a big stand, with an lcd on an arm connected to it, hooked up to my mac mini) that would have a low sample rate, so that it could handle vocals, powerful vsts, and effects live WHILE connected to a more powerful mother mac that handles production styled plugins and other things that would slow down my mac mini by itself too much. The software I rely on is Protools, Albeton Live, Reason, Native Instruments Suite, Spectrasonics, Fabfilter Suite, and others but those are my main dogs.

Sorry for all the info but I saw your post today and I'm really curious to see what you're experience has been with it? I would love the speed of a hackintosh

Looks like all your software can be run on a Windows PC so why not use that?

[redbook]

I'm just not a windows guy at all, and I have a bunch of music software I bought that is mac compatible only because I didn't pay for the windows versions. I have nothing against windows pc's or people using them, so don't take me the wrong way. I just have the worst experience with them always, unless I'm using them as a game machine.

[thehadgi]

Ableton. Along with some Kontakt plugins. Ive had up to like 10 instances of session strings pro and a host of tracks and synths and have still not run into an issue. Tbh, i havent even touched my buffer size, and dont even know what that does lol. Runs like a dream though!

Actually, I also do intensive video and after effects work (well, amateurly hehe). Which is probably more CPU intensive than music, and it flies also.

As for getting a windows machine... Sure, that's an option. However, as much as I despise apple as a company, I just can't tear myself away from OS X. Windows is more than capable if I decided to go that route, but all my software is already mac, and i dont feel like figurig out how to get windows version and downloading etc etc. So there it is. The operating system really should be the last thing to hold you back, since they both do the same thing; I just chose to keep OS X but pay less for more performance.

As I mentioned before though, it is very seriously easy to underestimate the amount of work necessary to make OS X able to run on a hackintosh. I even followed the hardware recommendations and installation instructions to a T, and it still took days of googling and hunting down forum posts to get drivers to work right (most issues resulted from my graphics card, so I'd suggest researching what seems to be the most hassle-free card from the forum posts). On the upside though, you will learn an incredible amount of tech knowledge, granted you aren't in the tech field. That plus a sense of accomplishment is one of the big perks imo.

If I would've ordered a Mac Pro built to the specs my computer is at, I would've spent well over $3000. You'll see I spent way, waaay less than that, and have more ports than a Mac will ever come with.

In a nutshell, with the machine I have it will definitely satisfy my needs for 3-4 years. Unless for some reason plugs get super complex inexplicably? But yeah def one of the better investments I've made

[thehadgi]

Ugh updated OS X and my 2nd monitor is out :facepalm: here goes two hunting down the issue

[thehadgi]

Turns out the update did something weird to my gpu driver thingies

Bought a active display port adapter for one monitor and now they both work, one dvi and one dp

Keeping track of these thing in this thread too just in case I need to reformat my drive and remember the little things it took to make them work lol

[M!TCH]

TL;DR

What OS version you running, Alan?

[CC Ricers]

What kind of monitor display types do you have? IPS?