How about iMac20,1 ? That's what I used with z490 and Comet Lake and the iGPU worked beautifully... both in headless mode as well as the primary GPU. But to use it as the primary GPU, I had to increase DVMT preallocated memory to 96 MB otherwise the system would crash (for 64 MB or 32 MB). Sleep even worked. I only used the iGPU because MacOS 11.0 to 11.3 did not work with my 6800XT.
I haven't tried activating the Comet Lake iGPU framebuffer with z590.
And regarding your point about the Age of Hackintosh probably fading away, I second that. What Apple has done with M1 is amazing, and it serves as a disincentive to the desire or even need of building a Hack.
I saw the new M1 iMacs in the Apple store the other day, I saw the excitement on people's faces, I saw how sleek they look and how beautiful the 4.5K screens look, and thought to myself, am I really going to continue building hacks indefinitely, or am I just going to get a high-performant Apple Silicon mac and call it a day? I like the Hack scene because I'm a tinkerer at heart, i've been tinkering since the 90's. I also like the ability to run Windows/Linux/MacOS on the same box, but unless Intel delivers the performance with Alder Lake/Raptor Lake/Meteor Lake/Lunar Lake there will be little point in me continuing to build a hack anymore. Look at the problems we've had with thunderbolt hotplugging on z590... and the beta bioses from Gigabyte or Asus with their quirks. Whereas macs work well out of the box with no major problems or issues for the most part.
Hackintosh was fun while it lasted, it's been years since I've been doing this, but moving forward, I think I am going to retire in a few years, and I will just build a mini-ITX build to game on in windows, and hook up an ultra-performance Apple Silicon macbook pro (m2 or m3) to my thunderbolt dock and monitors, and just call it a day... I'm waiting to see what happens with Zen4 and Alder/Raptor Lake... but I'm definitely getting a new m2 macbook pro for sure if it drops later this year. No question about it.
I really value the freedom to tinker and pull together a PC as I like it.
Like u, running mac, win and linux all interesting and useful.
Intel seems to have disappeared into a rut.
Microsoft has always taken bank for granted and to me Windows is the Swiss Army Knife of stupid. Plus it never stops updating, to the point that almost the sole self-justifying purpose of a PC is to run Windows Update. And you will never be allowed to forget it. Even the controls designed to get it out of your way wants to keep involved with it. Lately MSFT has been making it ever more clear that your PC is on loan to you as part of an outreach program for Bill Gate's wallet.
Linux is still a vast herds of cats: anything is possible, and anything remains possible. But somehow by time its pulled together into a slick package it's old news. But the freedom is to be treasured. This comes at price of you are never allowed to forget about the kernel. When Linux makes doing anything convenient, I always feel like I'm being pandered to. At the same time — I am not making this up — in most modern Ubuntus you cannot move file to/from the Desktop and a folder window by dragging its icon! The icon will provide a drag animation in the UI but just will not go, with no clue about why. Looking up the explanation brings up endless technical and philosophical diatribes about poking high-entropy text sequences into hidden config files to betray the high-minded semantics of a "true-tablet GUI approach"; then Gnome vs Unity, init vs systemd, cats and dogs vs etc. God help you if you just want to install the latest Radeon driver. And you will be sent to pits of GPU hell if you remove the remnants of a failed installation of the latest Radeon driver!
Mac is my middle ground: corralling the Unix cats and encouraging Intel to evolve while surprising me with attractive and useful designs that at the higher end are very well-designed and long-lived. For me anyway.
I came to Hackintosh late because my macs have been trusty. It was the user-community supporting "unsupported" Macs that won me over. Then I saw how much of this unsupported support is rooted in hackintosh experience. In last couple years it's got to a place were the 2008 Mac Pro is hamstrung by ISA workarounds that wreck virtual machine performance and slow I/O is causing UI to become somewhat tedious. Nevertheless, this 13 year old system is still a very useful daily driver. Then a 590 + Comet Lake fell into my lap so I thought I should give it a go. I'd put together a Mojave Clover Uni-/Multi-Beast brix hack a couple years ago which i still use as a media station to drive a projector. But build felt like a bit more mystical juju than I care for. When I came across Dortania Guide, it felt like linux nerds had finally found Mac and made it their own, and this has won me over.
Why? For simple reason of the support for knowing how things work, combined with the freedom to make them work as we find suitable for ourselves and the community. (Good 'ol Richard Stallman with his pet GNU, eating putty from toes.) Apple lost a sense of this a long while ago, and replaced it with fashion. The hackintosh community brings it back together. So too bad it might be end of era. And for this end I ding Intel. They had all the marbles, but their pocket ripped.
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I'll try some connector iGPU patching and see what happens.
