pastrychef
Moderator
- Joined
- May 29, 2013
- Messages
- 19,458
- Motherboard
- Mac Studio - Mac13,1
- CPU
- M1 Max
- Graphics
- 32 Core
- Mac
- Classic Mac
- Mobile Phone
I have mostly finished putting together my successful Hackintosh based on PastryChef’s build and offer a few notes and a photo:
• I used Asus ROG Strix Z370-G as he did.
• Intel Core i7-8700 Coffee Lake 6-Core 3.2 GHz (4.6 GHz Turbo) LGA 1151 (300 Series) 65W.
• 32 GB CRUCIAL RAM as 4x 8 2133MHz unbuffered and non-ECC DDR4 DIMM
• SeaSonic Platinum Series SS-400FL2 Active PFC F3 400W ATX12V Fanless 80 PLUS Platinum Certified (I will be upgrading this later to a 600 watt similar model to support video cards 500 w. power demands.)
• Case fan: Noctua NF-A12x25 120mm Fan
• CPU fan : Noctua NH-U9S, Premium CPU Cooler with NF-A9 92mm Fan (Brown)
• GPU: Sapphire Radeon NITRO+ RX 580 8GB Graphics Card running over HDMI
• Fractal Design Core 1000 Black MATX Mini Tower.
• 3 500GB Samsung EVO 850 Sata drives.
My intention was to replace my old, huge CoolerMaster ATX full size Hackintosh with a smaller, more up-to-date rig. At the same time I moved from El Capitan to Mojave 10.4.3. My install went normally (a few issues but that is normal for Hackintoshing.) It was ESSENTIAL to uSE PASTRYCHEF’S MOJAVE EFI FOLDER. I could not get a reliable boot with the EFI that uniBeast/multibeast had created. I replaced it using the EFI Pastrychef created. This was a lifesaver.
After I put in the Pastrychef EFI, everything just worked. I am running wired ethernet to my LAN so I don’t need a wifi card. Next, I will add a Samsung 970 EVO 500GB NVMe M.2 SSD as my boot drive and a Seasonic 600 watt power supply.
My cable management is not perfect, but I can't get crazy...
I run carbon Copy Cloner to periodically clone my entire boot SSD drive to a backup SSD. Carbon Copy Cloner includes the EFI segment and creates a bootable backup. This has been extremely useful in Hackintoshing, since if anything goes wrong I can just “revert” to a previous week in time, and recreate a working boot drive easily. If you are hackintoshing spending $40 on CCC can save you days of headache.
I will think about upgrading to a 4K monitor soon.
This is a VERY quiet machine, intended as a desktop workstation (photoshop, etc.) Right now the loudest noise is the Noctua NF-A12x25 120mm Fan. It’s hooked to chassis_fan_1 on the motherboard and is spinning at about 1300 rpm. I need to figure out how to slow it down to 800. I tried that in the BIOS but no go so far.
Total cost (various sources) is less than $700. When I put in similar specs for an Imac on the Apple Store it's $3699.
Try connecting your NF-A12x25 to the Optional CPU fan header on the motherboard to see if it helps. That's where I have mine connected and it's whisper quiet.