What is the latest OS that my hardware will support?

[Macintyre]

I am re-building an older PC which I want to re-purpose for OSX and Linux. I was previously able to run Snow Leopard and upgrade to El Capitan on this setup although the partition was deleted a long time ago. The hardware is an Asus P8H61 Pro motherboard, Intel i7 2600k CPU (Sandy Bridge), Asus EN210 (Nvidia Geforce 210) passively cooled graphics card, 8Gb ram, 128GB SSD, 2TB HDD. I have managed to get SL re-installed again and backed up and am in the process of upgrading to El Capitan, but was wondering whether I can go further and upgrade to at least Catalina or even maybe Big Sur or Monteray?

 

[Jamesbond007]

I am re-building an older PC which I want to re-purpose for OSX and Linux. I was previously able to run Snow Leopard and upgrade to El Capitan on this setup although the partition was deleted a long time ago. The hardware is an Asus P8H61 Pro motherboard, Intel i7 2600k CPU (Sandy Bridge), Asus EN210 (Nvidia Geforce 210) passively cooled graphics card, 8Gb ram, 128GB SSD, 2TB HDD. I have managed to get SL re-installed again and backed up and am in the process of upgrading to El Capitan, but was wondering whether I can go further and upgrade to at least Catalina or even maybe Big Sur or Monterey?

Your system should be compatible with MacOS High Sierra and earlier (you are running Snow Leopard yourself), but not Monterey.

The GT 210 and HD 3000 CPU integrated graphics in your CPU does not work properly in MacOS Mojave and later, due to lack of support for Metal, Apple's graphics framework.

If you want to run later MacOS versions, consider upgrading to a more recent graphics card with Metal support, for example the Nvidia Kepler series (e.g. GT 640 / GTX 760, which allows you to run up to MacOS Big Sur), or better, a supported recent AMD graphics card (e.g. RX 560 / RX 570 / RX 580 / RX 5700 XT) which should allow you to run MacOS Monterey and later.

However, as your CPU is quite old (more than 10 years), it is possible it may have problems with the latest MacOS versions like Monterey and Ventura, e.g.

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