While I have the the GA-Z77X-UP5 TH, and am very satisfied with it, I agree with Einsteiniac that your requirements describe an actual Mac or a quality Windows machine.
Setting up my machine was really easy thanks to the threads you called unhelpful. I spent weeks reading the threads and crafting my hardware list. Because of the threads, I knew which problems I was likely to encounter and how to fix almost all of them. I had also decided which problems with my setup I could live with -like no wake from Bluetooth.
The fact of the matter is, a Hackintosh is gonna have problems from time-to-time, but the members of those unhelpful threads pool their knowledge and generally come up with solutions quickly. That's not always the case though, you might encounter a problem that takes a long time to solve or doesn't have a solution at all, and you have to be willing to live with the problem.
If that process is unappealing and you find this community unhelpful, a Hack probably isn't a good fit for your needs. Believe me, I understand. I spent months reading the threads before I decided a Hack wasn't too risky to try. Along the way, I decided on several occasions that it sounded like too much bother. In fact if Apple had released a serious update to the Mac Pros this summer or fall, I would have bought one of those instead. While I waited for release info from Apple though, I read the threads here and eventually learned enough about the process and available hardware to make it work. It was a real toss-up for a long time though.
Hi Felix, thanks for your contribute. I guess you miserunderstand what I wrote before (due to my poor english surely, I'm sorry for that). I've never thought and/or told that here there are "
unhelpful threads by which everyone pools his knowledge" . Or at least it's never been my intention. Infact the sharing of this knowledge is
very valuable.
The point is that every bit and piece of this whole knowledge leads ultimately to an uncomplete puzzle in which every single build - including the golden ones - has its quircks, its pros and cons and there is no clear vision of what you can
surely get from a build and what you cannot. Many of them, with the exact same pieces of hardware, lead to completely different results, provided with different version of MultiBeast, kexts, bios versions and so forth. For a complete noob, such as I am, this can be a bit erratic and chaotic.
[OT] Infact even if what I'm about to say is OT in this thread, the only one thing that I feel like to suggest to moderators of this website, is to not only give advices about the right pieces of hardware to buy, but to develop and maintain some
preferred builds during the time and along the MB, bios, updates, and drivers are improved or simply changed. Maybe with a coordinator that collect all the experiences made by users on
that choosen build. [end of OT]
That said, what I'm looking for is not a shortcut to have my build up and running perfectly. My aim is less ambitious and much less spoilt (as some in this 3d have thought!): I often exchange great amount of data with external hard drives connected via USB2 and recently (a bless!) USB3 ports. Thunderbolt is just an option for the future at the moment. So I need to be sure that I'll be able to transfer file like before. That's it.
This does
not mean that I don't want to deal with the difficulties to build an osx86 machine... it's only that I'd like - after a learning curve - to count on a reliable result!
