- Joined
- Dec 6, 2011
- Messages
- 57
- Motherboard
- Thinkpad W530
- CPU
- Core i7-3840QM
- Graphics
- Intel HD4000
- Mac
- Mobile Phone
In a private message, a user named sneitzel, asked me how I got OS X 100% running on a Thinkpad W510. It turned out I could not answer in a private message, as I don't have enough posts here, so I will respond here, intending to address more general audience.
The shortest answer is no. It's not a good hackintoshing target. It may be cheap now, it has superb build quality, but it makes a rather poor Hackintosh. The daily driver on that machine is Fedora 23 which picks all hardware out of the box and is a perfect match for my use cases (as far as cross platform software development goes).
I had to revive OS X on my W510 unit, as I intend to do some low-level development on it, and I can reconfirm it's not that good.
For my particular use case, as a test machine, I don't care very much about these aspects, I use it as a stationary unit, though I worry a bit about AGPM —*the machine grows hot over time as it cannot drop GPU frequency.
By all means, if you want a super powerful Thinkpad running OS X, by all means get a W520. These machines sport the same build quality, you can max out RAM at 32 GiB, you can choose to run off an NVidia card or the integrated HD3000 which is 100% supported (just not Optimus, and you have to reboot+Setup), you can have a modded BIOS with unlocked memory speed, MSR 0xE2 (yay! No kernel panics, and CPU PM working natively!), advanced Setup tabs and no WLAN whitelist. It would work for you, and if you invest once in a dual SSD setup and make a RAID0 array (I'm running this setup on my real MacBook Pro), as well as max out RAM, you'll get a powerful work machine for quite a bit of foreseeable future.
The prices for used W520 on eBay are now getting to the "moderate" point, and many companies sell post-leasing units. Go get one while there's a lot of them and you can get spare parts.
The shortest answer is no. It's not a good hackintoshing target. It may be cheap now, it has superb build quality, but it makes a rather poor Hackintosh. The daily driver on that machine is Fedora 23 which picks all hardware out of the box and is a perfect match for my use cases (as far as cross platform software development goes).
I had to revive OS X on my W510 unit, as I intend to do some low-level development on it, and I can reconfirm it's not that good.
- You need a spare machine just to patch the DSDT initially. iasl shows you errors and warnings which you must fix —all of them — before you get your machine to even start. Then you patch it more to get battery status.
- You don't have native UEFI. This means you need to go through the hassles of converting partitions, or losing the ability to install recovery partition, or keep your Clover bootloader on external media (which I ultimately did).
- You get no USB3. Not only that, but the USB3 ports are dead, they won't work even as USB2.
- You get no graphics power management. Maybe it's possible, but the path is fairly complicated. Unless you have gobs of spare time, it's not worth the hassle IMO.
- I happen to own a X220 with an i5 processor. Twice as fewer cores (2 vs 4), twice as less memory (16 vs 32 GiB), and an i5 CPU vs i7 on W510. And you know what, their performance is almost identical —*except that I get less heat and noise from my X220.
For my particular use case, as a test machine, I don't care very much about these aspects, I use it as a stationary unit, though I worry a bit about AGPM —*the machine grows hot over time as it cannot drop GPU frequency.
By all means, if you want a super powerful Thinkpad running OS X, by all means get a W520. These machines sport the same build quality, you can max out RAM at 32 GiB, you can choose to run off an NVidia card or the integrated HD3000 which is 100% supported (just not Optimus, and you have to reboot+Setup), you can have a modded BIOS with unlocked memory speed, MSR 0xE2 (yay! No kernel panics, and CPU PM working natively!), advanced Setup tabs and no WLAN whitelist. It would work for you, and if you invest once in a dual SSD setup and make a RAID0 array (I'm running this setup on my real MacBook Pro), as well as max out RAM, you'll get a powerful work machine for quite a bit of foreseeable future.
The prices for used W520 on eBay are now getting to the "moderate" point, and many companies sell post-leasing units. Go get one while there's a lot of them and you can get spare parts.
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