First I'd like to thank to
@trs96 for this amazing guide! I'm a Mac enthusiast for years and never seen such a professional community work, so , congratulations!!
I was really curious about building my first Hackintosh. I had an old iMac mid 2011 that was outdated and wanted to upgrade my desktop workstation.
After studying this guide my whole vacations, o ordered everything I needed and start building.
I bought a HP 8300 Elite SFF with i5 3570 3.40GHZ, a Nvidia GTX 1050 Low Profile, a Crucial MX300 275GB SSD for High Sierra install and a TCSUNBOW X3 60GB for Windows 10.
Id like to share my experience and give some feedback.
-High Sierra is working perfectly with APFS file system in my system.
-My low profile GTX 1050 seems to be working flawlessly (240W PSU, no problem!!)
-The only thing I did differently from the guide was that I already formatted my Crucial SSD to APFS before MacOSX install. (I presume the guide says to format MacOs extended Journaling cause it will be converted anyway for those who want to try APFS, but I was curious and also really wanted to try APFS)
-My booting time is very fast.
-Im an audio producer and protools 11 is working perfectly, actually much better than on my old iMac.
-I use a Complete Audio 6 USB audio Interface and it is working perfectly.
-iCloud is working, It made me reset my password and I had to update my other machines password, I was a bit afraid but in the end all worked!
-iMessages is working!! I didn't had to do anything!!
-I had a bad time configuring dual boot, but after couple of hours I understood what I was doing wrong and now its working.
-My machine came with a 500GB Hard Drive, I installed 2 SSDs and still use this third SSD to share files between Mac and Windows, I formatted it as exFat GUID.
-As my BIOS was at 2.90 I didn't want to update cause they say it always involve risks (as the guide says that older than 2.83 should work I preferred to stay with 2.90 instead of updating to 2.99.
-The first time windows changed the boot order of my BIOS, I don't know if its because of its version, but anyway, then I set the order I wanted again and since then all is perfect.
- Only 3 things related to the guide is not clear for me.
1- To improve my CPU speeds I didn't know how to build my own file as my cpu is i5 3570. (do I need to?)
2- The step of ignoring fakesmc configuration and doing that later, I didn't select fakesmc but when multibeast was installing I saw that it installed fakesmc as well , so I didn't go back to do anything. Just installed my Nvidia drivers and was all ok after reboot.
3- At the bottom where the guide says about windows installation, this method of excluding all windows partitions and then format gpt didn't work for me. I followed another guid here at tonymacx86 where I first partitioned the windows drive with Mac disk utility (Journaled) and then at windows installation I only excluded the other partitions but not the EFI on the windows drive. I installed windows on the non allocated space but the EFI partition was just up there. (Maybe the first method didn't work cause I missed something, Im not being critic, just sharing my experience.)
Id like to share the links where I bought the hardware, I don't know if its allowed by forum rules. It would be interesting for people in Europe, cause I mostly bought from Amazon UK, Amazon ES and Ebay Belgium.
I spent around 650 Euros including monitor, everything, and now I have an amazing machine, THANK YOU!!!!
