MacBook Pro to Hackintosh?

[Shayolen]

Hi. I have the last 17" Macbook Pro that Apple made. It is no longer booting (other than on occasion when I do a recovery - and then it only works for a while before it crashes). The problem is with the graphics card which is apparently a known issue and has no fix. I spent a lot of money on this laptop many years ago but it's been a great laptop. I don't have 4500 to buy a new 15" laptop (and don't want a smaller laptop). So I'm here for advice.

I am wondering if there is a way to turn my Macbook Pro into a hackintosh by replacing the graphics card or some other work around.

While I've never worked on laptops, I am comfortable working on computers. I no longer live in the world of IT but have retained enough from my years there to work on this. Not super familiar with Mac hardware as my degree way back when was all Microsoft based, but I can't stand Windows anymore after years of working with Macs, especially in my field. I do graphics design, photography, and videography, so I need a system that can handle that.
Is there any way I can save my laptop?

 

[Stork]

...

Is there any way I can save my laptop?

Yes,but... Long story short. @dosdude1 has discussed your problem several times in his MacRumors forum sections Sierra, High Sierra and Mojave threads on macOS on unsupported Macs threads. He has a patcher that disables the GPU chipset and uses the onboard Intel graphics.

macOS Sierra (10.12)

forums.macrumors.com

macOS High Sierra (10.13)

forums.macrumors.com

macOS Mojave (10.14)

forums.macrumors.com

 

[Shayolen]

Thanks. I read through. I hesitate to do all this soldering and rewiring myself...
@dosdude1 is this a service you perform?

 

[stephenllee]

Hi, I have an A1398 MacBook Pro mid 2012 that was working well, but also has a similar (I think) poor soldering problem affecting power to the graphics chip. I think the work around was to use the graphics utility to restrict graphics to the native Intel chipset instead of the GPU. The problem with the new macOS (Sierra, High Sierra, Mojave) is that this utility no longer works. It switches back to the GPU on demand. I am trying to either

1. revert back to the an older OS X but going back via recovery partition or time machine doesn't work or
2. learn how the utility works and modify it (if possible, to make it work with the newer OS)

For my abilities, I'm thinking option 1, and using UniBBeast. Not sure how far back I need to go, but I would like to go back to the Snow Leopard since I have the DVD.