New Mobo or New Mac?

Ugg321 · May 17, 2021

I *believe* I fried my motherboard this weekend. My hackintosh won't turn on and I can't get any power to it. I replaced the PSU, cleared the CMOS, tried shorting the power switch, etc... so I'm thinking I have a fried motherboard. When I built my hack in 2017, I followed the Buyer's Guide on this site. Here are my relevant specs:

i5 - 6600k
Gigabyte Z170MX - Gaming 5
GTX 970
32GB Ram
512GB SSD Storage

I'm at a crossroads as to how I should proceed. Basically, I see two options:

Option 1 - New processor / new motherboard.
I wanted to buy the same motherboard, but can't find it anywhere online at a reasonable price. I'm also having a hard time finding motherboards from the Tony Mac buying guide for my 6500 chip. I think my best option would be to get a new processor and a new motherboard. I don't want to invest a lot of money in this project, so I'm leaning toward i3-10100 and Gigabyte H470M DS3H. I figure this would be about $300. I'm **hoping** this would be a relatively straighrforward swap out of components, but please let me know if that is a bad assumption! I have consistently underestimated the pain of resolving hackintosh fixes haha

Option 2 - Buy Mac Mini
I'm wondering if it wouldn't be better to just put the money toward a new Mac Mini. I would probably opt for the 256 GB / 16 GB Ram option. My guess is that this would be a fairly equivalent performance to my current machine. Please let me know your thoughts on that assumption as well! I'm currently stuck on Catalina until I get a new graphics card, so with this option, I would be able to jump to Big Sur. The form factor is considerably nicer than my 18" x 12" x 12" case on the ground. The cost would be about $1000, which is steeper than fixing.

I think eventually my hackintosh experiment will come to an end, but it does seems like Apple will be supporting intel for a few more years at least. I would appreciate anyone's opinion as to whether I should fix my current build or bail on it. My current build does everything I need it to do and then some. I've never run into a performance issue. I mostly use it as a personal computer for some light gaming and photo editing Photoshop/Illustrator usage. My main concern is the pain of getting everything up and running again.

Thank you for all input!

pastrychef · May 17, 2021

If you are comfortable with 16GB RAM, my vote goes to a new Mac mini. They are reasonably priced and will run circles around your old build.

scottkendall · May 17, 2021

Ugg321 said:
I *believe* I fried my motherboard this weekend. My hackintosh won't turn on and I can't get any power to it. I replaced the PSU, cleared the CMOS, tried shorting the power switch, etc... so I'm thinking I have a fried motherboard. When I built my hack in 2017, I followed the Buyer's Guide on this site. Here are my relevant specs:

i5 - 6600k
Gigabyte Z170MX - Gaming 5
GTX 970
32GB Ram
512GB SSD Storage

I'm at a crossroads as to how I should proceed. Basically, I see two options:

Option 1 - New processor / new motherboard.
I wanted to buy the same motherboard, but can't find it anywhere online at a reasonable price. I'm also having a hard time finding motherboards from the Tony Mac buying guide for my 6500 chip. I think my best option would be to get a new processor and a new motherboard. I don't want to invest a lot of money in this project, so I'm leaning toward i3-10100 and Gigabyte H470M DS3H. I figure this would be about $300. I'm **hoping** this would be a relatively straighrforward swap out of components, but please let me know if that is a bad assumption! I have consistently underestimated the pain of resolving hackintosh fixes haha

Option 2 - Buy Mac Mini
I'm wondering if it wouldn't be better to just put the money toward a new Mac Mini. I would probably opt for the 256 GB / 16 GB Ram option. My guess is that this would be a fairly equivalent performance to my current machine. Please let me know your thoughts on that assumption as well! I'm currently stuck on Catalina until I get a new graphics card, so with this option, I would be able to jump to Big Sur. The form factor is considerably nicer than my 18" x 12" x 12" case on the ground. The cost would be about $1000, which is steeper than fixing.

I think eventually my hackintosh experiment will come to an end, but it does seems like Apple will be supporting intel for a few more years at least. I would appreciate anyone's opinion as to whether I should fix my current build or bail on it. My current build does everything I need it to do and then some. I've never run into a performance issue. I mostly use it as a personal computer for some light gaming and photo editing Photoshop/Illustrator usage. My main concern is the pain of getting everything up and running again.

Thank you for all input!

Your GPU is more powerful then the GPU on the M1 Mac mini so depending on what games you play it could be a downgrade. But for Photo editing it would be a upgrade. Here are some boards that should work:

Refurbished: GIGABYTE G1 Gaming GA-Z170X-Gaming 5 LGA 1151 Intel Z170 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.1 USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard - Newegg.com

Buy Refurbished: GIGABYTE G1 Gaming GA-Z170X-Gaming 5 LGA 1151 Intel Z170 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.1 USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard with fast shipping and top-rated customer service. Once you know, you Newegg!

www.newegg.com

Or

Refurbished: MSI Z170A PC MATE LGA 1151 ATX Motherboards - Intel - Newegg.com

Buy Refurbished: MSI Z170A PC MATE LGA 1151 Intel Z170 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.1 ATX Motherboards - Intel with fast shipping and top-rated customer service. Once you know, you Newegg!

www.newegg.com

Ugg321 · May 17, 2021

Thank you both for the responses, I appreciate the insight. The games I play are typically not very GPU intensive (EUIV, Civ VI, etc.), but it's good to understand that I may be limited in that direction moving forward if I go with the Mini.

I had originally been leaning toward buying a new mobo / processor, but pastrychef's comment is making me reconsider... especially coming from someone in this community! My original assumption was that the Mac Mini is equivalent or not quite as good as my current build, but it sounds like that is wrong (except for the graphics card.) Intuitively, it's a little easier to justify spending more $$$ if it's coming with some performance upgrades as well as simplifying my computing life.

However, I've also been scouring Ebay for motherboards and found a GIGABYTE GA-H170M-D3H for about $75. I'm a little hesitant about buying used motherboards on Ebay, but if my issue really is a dead mobo and I could fix it for less than $100, that might be the best option. That specific motherboard is listed as one of the TonyMacX86 recommended motherboards for my build, so I assume it would work without *desperately crosses fingers* too much trouble...

Jamesbond007 · May 17, 2021

Ugg321 said:
I *believe* I fried my motherboard this weekend. My hackintosh won't turn on and I can't get any power to it. I replaced the PSU, cleared the CMOS, tried shorting the power switch, etc... so I'm thinking I have a fried motherboard. When I built my hack in 2017, I followed the Buyer's Guide on this site. Here are my relevant specs:

i5 - 6600k
Gigabyte Z170MX - Gaming 5
GTX 970
32GB Ram
512GB SSD Storage

I'm at a crossroads as to how I should proceed. Basically, I see two options:

Option 1 - New processor / new motherboard.
I wanted to buy the same motherboard, but can't find it anywhere online at a reasonable price. I'm also having a hard time finding motherboards from the Tony Mac buying guide for my 6500 chip. I think my best option would be to get a new processor and a new motherboard. I don't want to invest a lot of money in this project, so I'm leaning toward i3-10100 and Gigabyte H470M DS3H. I figure this would be about $300. I'm **hoping** this would be a relatively straightforward swap out of components, but please let me know if that is a bad assumption! I have consistently underestimated the pain of resolving hackintosh fixes haha

Option 2 - Buy Mac Mini
I'm wondering if it wouldn't be better to just put the money toward a new Mac Mini. I would probably opt for the 256 GB / 16 GB Ram option. My guess is that this would be a fairly equivalent performance to my current machine. Please let me know your thoughts on that assumption as well! I'm currently stuck on Catalina until I get a new graphics card, so with this option, I would be able to jump to Big Sur. The form factor is considerably nicer than my 18" x 12" x 12" case on the ground. The cost would be about $1000, which is steeper than fixing.

I think eventually my hackintosh experiment will come to an end, but it does seems like Apple will be supporting intel for a few more years at least. I would appreciate anyone's opinion as to whether I should fix my current build or bail on it. My current build does everything I need it to do and then some. I've never run into a performance issue. I mostly use it as a personal computer for some light gaming and photo editing Photoshop/Illustrator usage. My main concern is the pain of getting everything up and running again.

Thank you for all input!

I don't think replacing your fried motherboard with a new motherboard and CPU based on Intel 10th generation hardware will be as straightforward as you hope, depending on the version of MacOS you were running before the problem arose. If it was High Sierra, which seemed likely as you were using a GTX 970, then it will be a significant overhaul. It is difficult to get High Sierra running on Intel 10th generation hardware (but not impossible), and you will have to switch to OpenCore or Clover 5124 and later as bootloader as plain old Clover no longer works.

I would agree with pastrychef that if you want to save your efforts to get everything up and running again, a Mac mini would be a good option to consider.

Ugg321 · May 17, 2021

Jamesbond007 - Thank you for that info - that's exactly the type of stuff that has tripped me up in the past when I took the "I'll figure it out!" approach, so I appreciate hearing it. "difficult but not impossible" is a difficulty tier above what I want to tackle at the moment! And you are correct that I'm still on High Sierra (I incorrectly stated above that I was on Catalina). I've been on High Sierra since NVIDIA stopped providing drivers. I briefly looked into upgrading graphics cards so that I could update OS, but prices are out of control at the moment.

The path I've settled on is buying a used series 100 motherboard (GIGABYTE GA-H170M-D3H), and seeing if I can get things going with that. It was about a $75 trial balloon, so we'll see how it goes. If it works, great - I'll keep squeezing as much life as I can out of my current setup. If it doesn't work, I'll opt for the mini. If I do end up buying a mini, I'm even considering going for 8GB, which sounds ludicrous, but the more I've been reading, the less I'm convinced that I can justify the $200 price increase for the additional RAM. We'll see.

Thank you for the help!

scottkendall · May 18, 2021

Ugg321 said:
The less I'm convinced that I can justify the $200 price increase for the additional RAM. We'll see.

For me all the justification I would need is that I can not add another 8 later! When it comes to the Hard drive I am fine with external Thunderbolt drive.

Ugg321 · May 18, 2021

scottkendall said:
For me all the justification I would need is that I can not add another 8 later! When it comes to the Hard drive I am fine with external Thunderbolt drive.

This is true and a totally fair point. But part of me wonders if I wouldn't be better off putting that $200 toward the next purchase three years down the line... when we have M4 processors

scottkendall · May 18, 2021

Ugg321 said:
This is true and a totally fair point. But part of me wonders if I wouldn't be better off putting that $200 toward the next purchase three years down the line... when we have M4 processors

In three years Apple will buy your system back and you can get the new one. I honestly do not think if I do not use this money now I can use it in three years I would have spent it 10 times over by then.

Ugg321 · May 23, 2021

Hey all,
Just a quick update to close this out... new mobo came this weekend, and I got everything up and running again. Thanks for all the help and advice!

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Refurbished: GIGABYTE G1 Gaming GA-Z170X-Gaming 5 LGA 1151 Intel Z170 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.1 USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard - Newegg.com

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