[Guide] HP 6300 Pro / HP 8300 Elite - A 100 percent Working and Easily Affordable CustoMac

[markintosh13]

Today's project: more ram.

Found two used Kingston HyperX DDR3 1800 8GB dimms today, figured they'd probably play well with the two sticks of Kingston HyperX 1600 already in my 8300.

Was expecting them to clock down and run at 1600, the unexpected good news is the 8300 instead seems to have clocked up the original 1600 to 1800, so now my hackintosh has 32GB of 1800mhz DDR3!

 

[Astro90]

I wonder what desktop will be the successor of the great HP 8300 Hackintosh in terms of value / Performance. Any newer HP/Dells that are just as easy to Hackintosh?

 

[trs96]

I wonder what desktop will be the successor of the great HP 8300 Hackintosh in terms of value / Performance. Any newer HP/Dells that are just as easy to Hackintosh?

There's now an Optiplex 9020 guide if you haven't seen it. The Haswell Quad core i5s have supported HD4600 graphics. Prices are pretty close to the HP 8300s. Find the guide in Golden Builds section.

 

[taskrov]

I messed up my HP 8300 with RX 560. I was on 10.15.0. I cloned my SSD with CCC and updated the EFI.
The conversion ended up in a black screen as others have observed. I can type my password and see the HD light flashing and I think the system logs in but the screen is black. I tried to boot in safe mode in Clover but I got a circle with a line through it. Grrrr! Any ideas what I can do now? I have MBP and one other hack running 10.15.0. Thanks.

 

[trs96]

I messed up my HP 8300 with RX 560. I was on 10.15.0. I cloned my SSD with CCC and updated the EFI.
The conversion ended up in a black screen as others have observed. I can type my password and see the HD light flashing and I think the system logs in but the screen is black. I tried to boot in safe mode in Clover but I got a circle with a line through it. Grrrr! Any ideas what I can do now? I have MBP and one other hack running 10.15.0. Thanks.

Do you have the latest Lilu and WEG kexts in the kexts/other folder of your USB for Catalina install ? If not add those and see if you can boot from the USB and get working graphics.

 

[taskrov]

Do you have the latest Lilu and WEG kexts in the kexts/other folder of your USB for Catalina install ? If not add those and see if you can boot from the USB and get working graphics.

Thank you. I restored 10.15.0 from CCC backup, put the latest Lilu and WEG (1.3.4) into EFI/Clover/kext/other and the update went normally. So something has changed since the zero release because before I did not need these kexts.

 

[markintosh13]

There's now an Optiplex 9020 guide if you haven't seen it. The Haswell Quad core i5s have supported HD4600 graphics. Prices are pretty close to the HP 8300s. Find the guide in Golden Builds section.

Did you find moving up to Haswell was at all noticeable?

I'm not seeing enough difference between an i7 3770 and a 4770 to splash out for new-to-me hardware, though in the future maybe a 4790 might work (at least I'd be able to recycle my DDR3 ram).

 

[trs96]

I'm not seeing enough difference between an i7 3770 and a 4770

Not a lot of CPU difference but with the 9020 MT and an RX 580 8GB card installed (PSU upgraded) you get the full x16 PCIe 3.0 slot and all the performance from that card so it's better in that respect..

A PCI Express 3.0 connection has a maximum theoretical transfer rate per lane of almost 1 GB/s (actually, 984.6 MB/s), twice the rate of the PCI Express 2.0 standard that offers 500 MB/s per lane. Thus, a PCI Express 2.0 x16 slot offers a maximum theoretical bandwidth of 8 GB/s, while a PCI Express 3.0 x16 slot reaches 16 GB/s.

This is also an advantage if you want an NVME drive in the x16 to get maximum performance out of it.

If someone must have a 1070 or 1080 they can install High Sierra and use Web drivers. Length of the card should be less than 10 inches.

 

[bunkerWHz]

If someone must have a 1070 or 1080 they can install High Sierra and use Web drivers. Length of the card should be less than 10 inches.

If you have any trouble with the length of the card you can use the PCI Express extender with no FPS downside. It costs like $10.

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[trs96]

If you have any trouble with the length of the card you can use the PCI Express extender with no FPS downside. It costs like $10.

I was referring to the Dell 9020 MT case which is really mATX size unlike the full size HP 8300 MT. The extender isn't of much use in the Dell. That is all covered in my Golden Build thread for the Dell 7020/9020. Dell put the two slot 3.5" HDD cage in the way and it blocks cards over 10" in length.

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