Well you have to remember one key principle: if it ain’t broke then don’t fix it. If your hack is already working and performance is acceptable then do you really need to upgrade? If you do need to upgrade and you choose z590 and above, then you will need to tinker, so just brace yourself for some frustration. Keep in mind that there are no macs with the z590 chipset or with rocket lake or maple ridge, so workarounds were always going to be necessary. And the same will be true with alder lake, sapphire rapids, raptor lake and all the new lakes.
We might be excited to see Intel come back and bring performance increases. But we don’t know how or if the new hybrid cores will interact with the power management and thread scheduling features of the macOS kernel that has been built for monolithic big x86 cores. For all we know, running the new lakes on macOS might be a disaster, or it might not, only time will tell. But some significant updates were necessary for the Linux kernel to get ready for alder lake, and we don’t know what, if anything, Apple has baked into its kernel to support hybrid x86 cores.
Also, z590 itself, in my opinion, was a rushed chipset. For whatever reason, Intel felt the need to push rocket lake out in April even though the motherboard bioses and cpu microcode were not ready for prime time. Many of the motherboards from all vendors had some serious bugs in the early bioses. For instance, some of the z590 motherboards had memory training issues and would not post if xmp profiles were turned on with certain ddr4 memory kits. Really bad quality control. Hell, Intel didn’t even release the official windows driver for the new igpu UHD750 graphics until after the product launched and they got called out for it in the press. But the later bioses and microcode updates seem to have turned things around for the most part.
Also, at this point, July 2021, keep in mind that alder lake is going to be announced in August at the hot chips event (see:
https://hotchips.org/ Efraim Rotem from Intel will discuss the Alder Lake architecture) and the motherboards and silicon will likely be launched later this year. When that happens, you’ll have a choice between z590 and z690 and rocket lake or alder lake. So if I were you, I’d wait a couple of months to see what’s coming before committing to purchasing any new equipment.
That being said, my z590 vision d works mostly okay. I don’t have any problems with windows and Linux and thunderbolt hotplugging works well on those operating systems. But for some reason on macOS, thunderbolt hotplugging doesn’t work properly (in order for thunderbolt devices to hotplug properly I have to first enter s3 sleep… when the motherboard resumes from sleep, thunderbolt devices attach to the kernel). But it’s not a problem for me because my thunderbolt devices sit on my desk attached to my docks, and I don’t move them around. The other issue is for some unknown reason whenever I restart macOS Big Sur, thunderbolt devices are not available in the preboot environment, so I have to power cycle in order to be able to boot from any thunderbolt drive attached to the thunderbolt bus. This doesn’t happen if I restart from windows or Linux and it seems to have been fixed in Monterey.
That being said, my z590 build is stable, my 11700k is overclocked to 5.2 GHz on 4 cores and 5.0 GHz on 8 cores. It doesn’t crash. It games quite well in windows. The 6800xt is a very good upgrade over my older radeon. I was never really a Radeon fan as I always had nvidia cards, but since the latest nvidia cards stopped working in macOS 10.14 and above, I had to go with team red, and I am very impressed with the 6800xt. So I’m mostly good with my build. But it was a rocky experience in the beginning.
So to summarize: if you can wait a couple of months then I’d advise to do so since alder lake is coming. If you do decide to go with a new cpu and platform to take advantage of the performance increases, you will have to tinker. But such is the nature of hackintosh as we’re running macOS on hardware that Apple probably never tested. But that is part of the fun.
