- Joined
- Apr 14, 2013
- Messages
- 20
- Motherboard
- Gigabyte Z170XP-SLI
- CPU
- Intel i7
- Graphics
- GTX 970
- Mac
- Mobile Phone
I have been a Hackintosh tinker for more than 4 years. Little by little I realized that my PC mindset was not working anymore when building a Hackintosh. More often than not newest is enemy of good. Let me explain myself.
When building a Hackintosh choosing the right components is paramount. This is particularly true when it comes to GPUs. As for today, NVidia macOS drivers support up to the 900 series, and soon the 1000s, which work perfectly in El Capitan but not quite perfectly in Sierra. Apple introduced a signature protection that make many things in Sierra not work or do it badly. I had a nVidia 970 running three monitors and Sierra 10.12.3 installed and after installing nVidia drivers and setting all up the best I could this is the list of issues I experienced.
1. IBooks rendered transparent windows.
2. Safari and OS crashes after waking up due to some Safari internal crash related to OpenGL.
3. Rare Illustrator and Photoshop crashes.
4. Mouse cursor not visible during OS login screen.
5. The canvas flickers when adjusting sliders in ON1 Photo Raw.
6. Transparent windows using some instrument panel in Logic.
7. Issues using same Xcode debugging tools.
All these pointed to some kind of GPU problem. They were frustrating and forced me to make many compromises and stop using apps that I like. I decided to step back and reconsider my GPU choice. I did same research and realized that the nVidia GTX 770 has native support in macOS and it is still a good card in 2017. In fact it is capable of throwing much better benchmarks than the GPU used by an iMac 5K. I borrowed one, replaced my 970 and uninstalled the third party drivers, and all issues went away.
My piece of advice to anybody who is trying to build a new Hackintosh is if you are neither a gamer nor a video editor, just get yourself a GTX 760/770/780 card. You will be happier and still have a better performance than you would get from a current iMac and a macBook Pro.
I hope this helps.
When building a Hackintosh choosing the right components is paramount. This is particularly true when it comes to GPUs. As for today, NVidia macOS drivers support up to the 900 series, and soon the 1000s, which work perfectly in El Capitan but not quite perfectly in Sierra. Apple introduced a signature protection that make many things in Sierra not work or do it badly. I had a nVidia 970 running three monitors and Sierra 10.12.3 installed and after installing nVidia drivers and setting all up the best I could this is the list of issues I experienced.
1. IBooks rendered transparent windows.
2. Safari and OS crashes after waking up due to some Safari internal crash related to OpenGL.
3. Rare Illustrator and Photoshop crashes.
4. Mouse cursor not visible during OS login screen.
5. The canvas flickers when adjusting sliders in ON1 Photo Raw.
6. Transparent windows using some instrument panel in Logic.
7. Issues using same Xcode debugging tools.
All these pointed to some kind of GPU problem. They were frustrating and forced me to make many compromises and stop using apps that I like. I decided to step back and reconsider my GPU choice. I did same research and realized that the nVidia GTX 770 has native support in macOS and it is still a good card in 2017. In fact it is capable of throwing much better benchmarks than the GPU used by an iMac 5K. I borrowed one, replaced my 970 and uninstalled the third party drivers, and all issues went away.
My piece of advice to anybody who is trying to build a new Hackintosh is if you are neither a gamer nor a video editor, just get yourself a GTX 760/770/780 card. You will be happier and still have a better performance than you would get from a current iMac and a macBook Pro.
I hope this helps.
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