Hello all, quick question for you. Two years ago a did my first Hackintosh with the 6300 Pro then last year I did my second with the 8300 Elite. I would like to do another this year and wondering what pre-made system more powerful than the 8300 Elite is as easy to Hackintosh as these two were? Thanks in advance.
system more powerful than the 8300 Elite
It depends on what you need more power for. Is it gaming, video editing, number crunching....
Do you need a faster boot drive ? Faster ram ?
If you mean more CPU power there are newer Haswell, Skylake and Kaby Lake systems by HP (Prodesk 600 or Elitedesk 800). They are usually differentiated by G1, G2 and G3 versions. They may not be as easy to hackintosh as the 8300s but are worth looking into.
Any of these can be bought with an i7 version CPU. G1 would have i7-4770/4790. G2 would be i7-6700 and the G3 i7-7700 (Kaby Lake). It doesn't make any sense to upgrade from an 8300 with i7-3770 to a G1 Haswell system. Wouldn't notice any significant performance improvement. A Kaby Lake G3 would be the best choice to get newer tech like faster DDR4 ram and M.2 slots. With an i7-7700 you also get HEVC decode and encode if that matters. Does matter to some that want to edit 4K video.
Note that Elitedesk 800 G3 systems with an i5 or i7 will not come down in price to the 250-300 dollar range for a couple more years when they go off lease. Right now, you'll be paying over $500 for a used or refurb one from Ebay. They start at over $700 on Newegg and Amazon.
In terms of more powerful graphics, the problem is always the proprietary 250W HP power supply which doesn't have an eight pin connector on it to power a graphics card. As you know, higher end graphics need more power to work. HP only wants you to use a card that gets all it's power from the x16 PCIe slot. That maxes out at about 75W.
What to do ? Search for some of the HP Prodesk 600 or Elitedesk 800 guides and see what you think about how good the guides are and how well that hardware works with Mojave.
Here's the EliteDesk 800 G3 which may cost as much right now as building new yourself.
http://www8.hp.com/il/en/products/desktops/product-detail.html?oid=15257631#!tab=specs
If you were to buy one you'd still need to figure out an SSDT for USB function and come up with a PSU replacement solution to power something like an RX580 8GB graphics card. So primarily you'd get a lot newer i7 CPU, ability to go up to 64GB of ram (DDR4) and a few M.2 slots to use. In terms of graphics you are still limited to the AMD RX 560 4GB unless you want to use a new replacement PSU and a 24 pin power adapter. I don't know if that even works or not.
In conclusion, it probably makes more sense to build a new Z370 system that has a detailed guide on how to install Mojave. Get a 600W gold rated PSU and then use whatever AMD graphics card you'd like. The AMD RX 570s or 580s are the best value right now. Newer AMD cards are on the way.
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