Upgrading to Ivy Bridge in existing Hackintosh. i7-3770K

[ahopeinhell12]

Hey there,
So over a year ago I put together a Hackintosh machine. It's been running great for the whole time I've had it, but it's time for a few upgrades. I was considering putting in an i7-3770K, which I've heard is compatible with Mountain Lion, but I was wondering if there were any precautions or extra steps (Bridge Helper, compatibility fixes?) to take to keep my current install, since the processor is an Ivy Bridge.
Thanks,
Tyler.

 

[Supermulti]

I'd backup all of my important files at first!

I think it would work if you upgrade to mountain with your old board and then swap boards.
This could work, because gigabyte boards seem to boot without any extra modification.

But I'd recommen a clean install, it's not that much work.

Besides that: Is it really worth your money to upgrade from sb to ib?
Maybe you should wait for haswell or get a 2600k (which wouldn't require any software changes)

 

[Jamesbond007]

Hey there,
So over a year ago I put together a Hackintosh machine. It's been running great for the whole time I've had it, but it's time for a few upgrades. I was considering putting in an i7-3770K, which I've heard is compatible with Mountain Lion, but I was wondering if there were any precautions or extra steps (Bridge Helper, compatibility fixes?) to take to keep my current install, since the processor is an Ivy Bridge.
Thanks,
Tyler.

I had moved from a Gigabyte EP45-UD3L / Q9550 to a Gigabyte GA-Z68A-D3H-B3 / 2500K before and both Snow Leopard and Lion worked without any modification. I then installed Mountain Lion in a third partition and I switched the CPU to a Xeon E3-1230 (Sandy Bridge) and all 3 OSXs worked without modification.

So since Mountain Lion supports Ivy Bridge, if you are already running Mountain Lion on your system, switching the CPU from i5 2550K to i7 3770K should work. But you must make sure your motherboard BIOS supports the 3770K before switching the CPU.

However, since you are using a Gigabyte Z68 motherboard, you should note that unless you have already upgraded your BIOS to the UEFI version from the Gigabyte website, you won't be able to overclock the 3770K beyond 3.9G.

If I were you, I probably won't be doing this upgrade. If I want an i7 I would look for a 2600K, 2700K or possibly a Xeon E3-1230 / E3-1235. But still it may not represent a good upgrade from your 2550K.