Switch a 2011 iMac for a Hackintosh

[ripventura]

Hi guys, ripventura here.
I hope you can help me with my case...

A couple of years ago (5 - 7) I used to have a PC and love to use my hackintosh.
The problem at that time was that the hardware requirements were a pain in the ***, and was pretty common to have some parts like audio / wifi cards not working properly...

I got tired of the hacking thing and bought a MacBook White, and now I have this:
iMac 21.5" Mid 2011, i5 Quad-core 2.5GHz, AMD 6750M 512MB, 12GB RAM DDR3

It's a pretty good build for common tasks, even dealing with some video editing (the 12GB RAM works like charm) and some "XCoding" (I'm an iOS developer).

The thing is that I really want to build a hardcore gaming beast, and for that I must sell my iMac.
On the other hand, I CAN'T abandon Mac OSX (1: Because it's not even comparable to windows 2: I need it for work).

Here's the PC I'm about to buy:
i7 3770 3.4GHz, AMD 7870 2GB (or G-Force GTX 660-Ti 2GB), 8GB DDR3 Corsair Vengeance, Mother Board MSI H61MU-B35.My question is: Is it a good choice to dump a really good iMac, and start depending on hacks to use Mac OSX (but with the hardware 5x better)?

Thanks in advance!


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EDIT: What about this build?
i7 3770 3.4GHz, G-Force GTX 660 2GB, 8GB DDR3 Corsair Vengeance, Mother Board GibaByte GA-Z77X-UD5H

 

[nobodynose]

Hi guys, ripventura here.
I hope you can help me with my case...

A couple of years ago (5 - 7) I used to have a PC and love to use my hackintosh.
The problem at that time was that the hardware requirements were a pain in the ***, and was pretty common to have some parts like audio / wifi cards not working properly...

I got tired of the hacking thing and bought a MacBook White, and now I have this:
iMac 21.5" Mid 2011, i5 Quad-core 2.5GHz, AMD 6750M 512MB, 12GB RAM DDR3

It's a pretty good build for common tasks, even dealing with some video editing (the 12GB RAM works like charm) and some "XCoding" (I'm an iOS developer).

The thing is that I really want to build a hardcore gaming beast, and for that I must sell my iMac.
On the other hand, I CAN'T abandon Mac OSX (1: Because it's not even comparable to windows 2: I need it for work).

Here's the PC I'm about to buy:
i7 3770 3.4GHz, AMD 7870 2GB (or G-Force GTX 660-Ti 2GB), 8GB DDR3 Corsair Vengeance, Mother Board MSI H61MU-B35.

My question is: Is it a good choice to dump a really good iMac, and start depending on hacks to use Mac OSX (but with the hardware 5x better)?

Thanks in advance!

I would choose a different motherboard. (1) That's a Sandy Bridge board, and you're buying an Ivy Bridge CPU. It's better to keep them the same; (2) I can't find any mention of the MSI H61MU-B35 on the forums, meaning apparently nobody has built a system based on it, so you'd be pretty much on your own if you ran into any problems; (3) that board appears to be discontinued and you may have a hard time finding it anyway. I recommend that you look at the motherboards recommended in the CustoMac Buyer's Guide and choose from those; they're known to work well with Mac OS X.

 

[ripventura]

Thanks, I'll check on that!

 

[joseelsantos]

I wouldn't buy the 7870 if I were you, not yet atleast.
I never got it to work with my build.

But yeah, I just built my first hackintosh, going from a 2010 Macbook Pro, (since dropbox nowadays handle the multiple location issues . I first put my system HDD in the wrong slot (p1) which made it very funky, but when I discovered this issue, it took me about 20 minutes to have a stable build. So at the moment, I'm truly satisfied!