Build advice for Sierra and Creative Suite 6 specifically

[Lix]

Hi I’ve read the archive build threads having found out retrospectively that my Ryzen hackintosh wouldn’t run Sierra/High Sierra.

Based on my reading it looks like a Coffee Lake build will run 10.12/13

So have been looking at i5 9600 or i7 9700 on a z390 board
I have an ASUS 580RX 8GB and a GTX 1060

I found a seller selling
Msi Mag Z390 Tomahawk motherboard (doesn’t feature on buyer list?)
i7 9700K cpu
16gb Corsair DDR4 3200mhz Ram

Has anyone successfully installed 10.12 and CS6 on this configuration?

Or should I aim for a bit lower spec with Kaby lake or Sky lake build?
Both should be an improvement over my original build and cos a bit less.

Thanks in advance for any help and pointers

 

[etorix]

Initial support for Coffee Lake was in High Sierra.
So for safety with 10.12 you should indeed go back one step to Kaby Lake or earlier.

 

[trs96]

Based on my reading it looks like a Coffee Lake build will run 10.12/13

So have been looking at i5 9600 or i7 9700 on a z390 board
I have an ASUS 580RX 8GB and a GTX 1060

I know that @UtterDisbelief has done many installs of older OS versions on newer hardware. Perhaps he will chip in some ideas on this.

 

[trs96]

Kaby Lake support does start with 10.12.6 as you can see from the CustoMac Pro build.

Building a CustoMac Hackintosh Archive: Kaby Lake 200 Series Buyer's Guide

www.tonymacx86.com

The advantage of using CFL hardware is that you get 6 cores (i5 or i7) for not really much more than a 4 core Kaby Lake i7 costs. For Adobe CS6 more cores will certainly be worthwhile to go after.

@UtterDisbelief should be able to tell you if it's possible or not.

 

[UtterDisbelief]

Hi I’ve read the archive build threads having found out retrospectively that my Ryzen hackintosh wouldn’t run Sierra/High Sierra.

Based on my reading it looks like a Coffee Lake build will run 10.12/13

So have been looking at i5 9600 or i7 9700 on a z390 board
I have an ASUS 580RX 8GB and a GTX 1060

I found a seller selling
Msi Mag Z390 Tomahawk motherboard (doesn’t feature on buyer list?)
i7 9700K cpu
16gb Corsair DDR4 3200mhz Ram

Has anyone successfully installed 10.12 and CS6 on this configuration?

Or should I aim for a bit lower spec with Kaby lake or Sky lake build?
Both should be an improvement over my original build and cos a bit less.

Thanks in advance for any help and pointers

Initial support for Coffee Lake was in High Sierra.
So for safety with 10.12 you should indeed go back one step to Kaby Lake or earlier.

Kaby Lake support does start with 10.12.6 as you can see from the CustoMac Pro build.

Building a CustoMac Hackintosh Archive: Kaby Lake 200 Series Buyer's Guide

www.tonymacx86.com

The advantage of using CFL hardware is that you get 6 cores (i5 or i7) for not really much more than a 4 core Kaby Lake i7 costs. For Adobe CS6 more cores will certainly be worthwhile to go after.

@UtterDisbelief should be able to tell you if it's possible or not.

Hi all.

Yes, you can run even Sierra 10.12.6 on a Coffee Lake platform. To run it, and High Sierra though you need to "spoof" a Kaby Lake CPU. Once this has been done you just have to be careful about GPUs.

Given the choice though, I'd go High Sierra for sure.

Best done with OpenCore, although I have used Clover when I'm feeling masochistic.

Sorry though, I have NOT used any Adobe software on my hacks' so can't answer to that part of the question.

 

[trs96]

To run it, and High Sierra though you need to "spoof" a Kaby Lake CPU.

Does this affect CPU performance at all ? If it's a 6 core CFL CPU and you spoof a QC KL CPU you'd think it might.

 

[paulog]

I have High Sierra 10.13.6 and CS6 running successfully on my Z390 configuration on my profile.
I still use Clover on this configuration. Rolling from previous hacks. Works very well.

 

[UtterDisbelief]

I have High Sierra 10.13.6 and CS6 running successfully on my Z390 configuration on my profile.

Good to know.

 

[UtterDisbelief]

Does this affect CPU performance at all ? If it's a 6 core CFL CPU and you spoof a QC KL CPU you'd think it might.

I would say not. Though I never benchmark anything. In use the whole High Sierra experience was so much faster than Monterey or Big Sur - for which I removed the KL spoof. And as you probably remember I stick with iMac18,3 system-definition for reliability.

Having said that, I wouldn't argue with any of the tech-genius's around here though, as benchmarking is of no interest to me. Keeping track of temperatures is more important and I never had any issues.

 

[etorix]

Does this affect CPU performance at all ? If it's a 6 core CFL CPU and you spoof a QC KL CPU you'd think it might.

Spoofing just pretends it's an older generation to match SMBIOS and please macOS. Once that generation check is done, macOS will gladly find a 6-core "Kaby Lake" and use it. Just like, at another end of the price spectrum, macOS gladly finds a 32-core "Comet Lake" in a disguised i9-13900K. MacOS does NOT look up ark.intel.com for consistency…