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[Guide] HP Elite 8300 & 6300 Pro (all form factors) using Clover UEFI hotpatch

HP 8300 Elite ~ Best Selling all around Entry Level Hackintosh

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I've checked the #1 best selling PC desktop list (new or used) on Amazon.com every month so far this year. The 8300 SFF model with a core i5 has always been at number one. The best refurbished price for one with 8GB of ram is $139 currently. Why is this ? Because small business owners need a fast and reliable Windows 10 Pro PC that doesn't cost a fortune. That is the primary kind of buyer. The second kind is people like you who want to run macOS and Windows without having to buy two separate computers to do so. These can run Catalina with no problems. Linux works as well.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01CV9G1BO/?tag=tonymacx86com-20

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To make this a really great budget hackintosh, you can add another 8GB ram kit: https://www.newegg.com/p/0RN-001H-001V3?Item=9SIADRHAG10987 for $33.

Also add the Visiontek RX 560 4GB, low profile graphics card. You can then use it for gaming, video and photo editing etc. Will come in at close to $380. Less than a gaming console and it will perform as good or better. You don't waste any money on RGB lights, glass side panels and everything else that makes no difference in game performance. If you're more of a casual, occasional gamer, you don't need to spend over $850 for a fully decked out RGB bling Core i7 gaming system just to play Fortnite, CSGO, Rocket League and Overwatch.

Is small enough to fit anywhere and is relatively quiet. Also easy to add a natively supported wifi/BT card to the PCIe x1 slot.

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You can run four 4K/60 Hz monitors off of this card. No PSU upgrade is needed. The cables are included and also the full height bracket if you want to put it in one of the MT HP models like the 6300 Pro or Elite 8300 MT. See pic above. The RX 560 should have support in macOS for at least 3-4 years past 2020 so it's a good investment. Build quality is solid and it's not too noisy like some fans in RX 560s.

The other great thing is that you can always upgrade to the 4 core 8 thread i7-3770 later on. Find them used for around 60-65 USD. Even less in a couple of years from now.
 
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itwas said:
mpv is my default media player
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It has nothing to do with the content of the thread, but the display in mpv is a great performance.
 
Rx570 or rx580 for hp 8300 cmt with catalina? The prices is similar for 8gb versions.
 
aristeidk said:
Yes 550 watt
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If the 570 and 580 cost the same I would go for the 580. Not a huge difference in performance. Might as well opt for the 580 if price difference is minimal.
 
trs96 said:
If the 570 and 580 cost the same I would go for the 580. Not a huge difference in performance. Might as well opt for the 580 if price difference is minimal.
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Thanks a lot
 
There is MSI RX560 4GB AERO ITX (not low profile) but using only onboard power supply (so ideal for those prebuilds withou 6 or 8 pin power supply connectors). I tried it on my Prodesk 490 with 300W PSU and worked basically out of the box. I believe that also apple presents this card as MacOS compatible. It costs about 125 EUR here in Czech Republic.
I had some issues with my mother board on that Prodesk 490 (which was not graphic card related) so I came back to my Elitedesk 600 SFF G1 with 4770 which works flowlessly but only with integrated 4600 (which I dont see as limitation as I am using only for 1080 60p video editing in iMovie and Photos for color correction etc. Very important is dual channel set-up of RAM (adds about 10% overal performance and it doubles memory bandwidth, which iGPU benefits a lot). But if you have 300+W power supply and standard size (not SFF) case or even mATX case the MSI RX 560 4GB AERO is probably good option for you...
 
I want to say Thank You especially to @Sniki and @trs96 for this well done guide. My HP 6300 SFF with I3 3225, Nvidia 710 and an apple compatible WLAN/Bluetooth card works like a charm with no extra kexts.
For iMessage (@P1LGRIM thank You for the guide) I had to do nothing special to get it running. Everything was prepared. Airdrop and Handoff are working.
I know there are many others contributing to the guides!
I did not disable hibernation. I've set hibernation mode to 25. It wakes up and continues working. Unfortunately wakeup doesn't work with my Bluetooth mouse. The card seems to switch off Bluetooth during sleep.
Last, but not least, I have replaced the two 92mm fans with beQuiet PWM fans. (folks be careful when opening the power supply. There is high voltage danger!)

Thanks!
 
MSI Radeon RX580 8gb - only working with Legacy - not UEFI.

First - I’ve installed several clover Lenovo laptops, and two HP 6300 SFF with GT 710 GPU on one and Intel working with the other. All working great. But I am probably just smart/dumb enough to be dangerous here. Great at reading guides, but I’m not 100% sure what exactly is happening under the hood with my setup. Sorry if this is frustrating to some of you who are really good at this stuff.

Long story, but everything I know:

I came across an i7 8300 MT for less than $50, and did another successful Catalina install using Sniki and trs96’s guide. Onboard 4000 graphics were perfect, but I wanted to install a GPU for video rendering, went with an MSI Radeon RX 580 8GB GDDR5.

I installed the card - powered by an SATA/PCIE power adapter. Then the problems started.

On boot it the fans spun up as expected, BUT both onboard and all ports of the RX580 were black. No HP boot screen - nothing. F10/F9 Bios/Boot keys didn't work. Nothing. The HP showed up on my network after a long while, but I could not remote into it.

I removed the GPU card.
The onboard Intel 4000 returned, working as expected.

Power issue?
I reinstalled the card and connected a second PSU just to power the GPU. Same thing, black screens across the board.

Other bad hardware?
I removed most of the RAM, the Apple/Broadcom Wifi card, and all hard drives. The Radeon DP showed me the hardware change alert. I hit F1 - accepting the change. The Clover bootloader showed up! (very low res and distress a bit). I selected my install -it started - and hung/froze at the very end of the Apple progress bar.

Reboot - black screens across the board.

Software or bad GPU?
I connected a Windows 10 SSD. Several second of black screen. But then I saw the HP screen, and windows booted up. Checked the hardware, and yep - shows up as Radeon 580 8gb. Worked perfectly.

Next boot, I double checked the bios and strangely the selections I had made were changed. Specifically UEFI was flipped back to Legacy. I guessed that this happened in the hardware change alert?

Curious, I started over with the guide, but this time used Legacy instead of UEFI. And it sort of works? But it's a LONG boot process and it's fairly hairy feeling.

-> There is a long black pause on power up
-> then the HP screen shows up
-> then it sounds like it reboots
-> then I see HP again
-> then green bars go across the screen
-> then I see the bootloader.
-> Extra long Apple progress bar + picture is stretched on boot, but fixes at the desktop.
-> Audio was not working, but finally got VoodooHDA to work instead.
-> Apple Broadcom Wifi wasn't working, but played around with Kexts and got it back up.

It's not the most elegant situation, but it seems to work. My question is whether I can do better?
 
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