- Joined
- Mar 28, 2019
- Messages
- 1
- Motherboard
- Gigabyte GA-H110-D3A
- CPU
- G4560
- Graphics
- GT 710
- Mac
- Mobile Phone
Greg's Budget Rackmount Hackintosh Build
GA-H110-D3A - Pentium G4560 - GT 710
GA-H110-D3A - Pentium G4560 - GT 710
Components
Gigabyte GA-H110-D3A motherboard
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B072NDFT1D/
Corsair CMK16GX4M2A2133C13 Vengeance LPX 16 GB DDR4 RAM (2x8GB)
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0123ZCD36/
Intel Pentium G4560 Kabylake 3.5GHz dual-core CPU
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01N7U18M1/
MSI GeForce GT 710 1GB graphics card
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01AY7927A/
Kingston A400 SSD 480 GB
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01N0TQPQB/
LG GH24NSD1 internal DVD drive
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B013J7P05U/
Corsair VS550 550 W Active PFC 80 PLUS Certified Power Supply Unit
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B078XXNC3J/
Already Owned
ATX 3u rack-mount case (as pictured)
LG 22" flatscreen monitor with DVI input, unsure of exact model
Comments
This was my first attempt at a Hackintosh after doing a lot of reading online. I needed a rack-mountable case, and I didn't want to spend a lot of money on the components. I wanted lots of RAM, an average CPU and cheap graphics & motherboard. Rationale: the lack of RAM on my old MacBook Air was making it unusable with Mojave, and the CPU was only 1.3GHz which is puny compared to anything new in 2019. I don't use any apps which are heavy on graphics, so a 1GB Nvidia GeForce graphics card was a good budget solution. Mojave runs very quickly and smoothly on this hardware, but it did require a bit of configuration using Clover Configurator (see below).
BIOS Settings
Load optimized defaults, then...
- disable VT-D
- disable serial and parallel ports
- enable XHCI
On another Mac, download Mojave. Then use UniBeast to create a bootable USB stick. This was the first issue - some USB sticks will not work, others work with no problem. I was successful using a cheap non-branded USB 3 stick, but my old Sandisk USB 2 stick would not work.
Download Clover Configurator and mount the EFI partition on the USB drive. Browse to the config.plist file in /EFI/CLOVER/ directory, right-click and open with Clover Configurator.
Due to the Pentium G4560 CPU not being Mac-compatible, you need to fool the OS into thinking it's an i5. Under "Kernel and kext patches" select fake CPU ID "0x0306A0". Without this step, macOS will not install with this processor. I also installed the following kexts on Clover Configurator to support the H110 chipset, ALC887 audio and Realtek RTL8111 Ethernet...
- AppleALC.kext
- FakePCIID.kext
- FakeSMC.kext
- NullCPUPowerManagement.kext
- RealtekRTL8111.kext
- Lilu.kext
Once it's installed, run MultiBeast to install Clover to the SSD. Then, using Clover Configurator, mount the EFI partitions on both the USB and SSD, and delete everything from the SSD EFI partition. Copy everything from the USB EFI partition to the SSD EFI partition. The system should now boot from SSD and it will remember the Fake CPU ID. Ethernet also worked perfectly. The only other issues were graphics and audio...
Graphics - the graphics were very unstable and slow, and showed on system info as "Nvidia 7MB graphics". This was resolved by adding boot argument "nv_disable=1" which stopped Clover trying to inject Nvidia drivers and allowed macOS to "see" the card properly. On system info, the correct graphics info is now shown.
Audio - this was more difficult to fix, but after a quick search I found a post by Besro which I have adapted...
- Copy most recent Lilu and AppleALC kexts into Clover/EFI/Kexts/others/ folder;
- Change HDAS to HDEF on list of patches; and
- Set layout 7 on EFI/Clover/Devices/Audio/inject
Here's my system information...
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