New 12th Gen Build on a $700 budget

[trs96]

I'm not currently building new but thought it would be interesting to see what it would cost to create a macOS Sonoma compatible 12th gen system today. I've got a great Fractal Design ATX case and a 650W Seasonic 80+ gold PSU already. So that helps from the start. What can you build for under $700 ? A pretty capable system that will also run Win11 flawlessly. If you install Sonoma this Fall and Apple drops Intel support next year, you will still be able to run Sonoma and get security updates for at least 3 years, maybe more. So for the small investment now, I think it might be worth it to many people. It will certainly be able to run Windows 11 or 12 and get security updates for the next 10 years. Definitely blows away the $650 system I built with all new parts to run OS X Lion back in late 2011. All of these prices are in US dollars for US residents as of 08/29/23.

Comes in at under $715 at Amazon.com when taxes are applied. Would be delivered in less than a week too. Pretty good deal.

 

[trs96]

Compared to a new M2 Mac mini upgraded to 24GB of ram and a 1TB NVMe the Intel 12th gen Hackintosh is a better deal. Even when you add $150 for the case and PSU for the Hackintosh it would cost around $500 less. You probably already have a case and PSU available for use. The biggest drawback of the 12th gen hack is that you don't get the 2 TH4 ports. If you're not an Audio Pro, you can easily get by without them. Two big advantages of the hackintosh. You have two more M.2 slots for lower cost NVMe drives. So for just $100 more, you could have 3TB of NVMe storage. You can upgrade the graphics card later on to a 6800XT for even better graphics.

The third advantage is of course, ram upgrades to 64GB or more.