What to expect of a CustoMac vs an original

[MunkOil]

What to expect of a Hackingtosh?

Hi,

Have been thinking about building a Hackingtosh for a while now. There are two reasons, performance and second I recently had a second Apple computer die on me probably because of a long-time heat problem. Repair prices have been ridiculous, actually cost more to repair then buy a completely new one with better hardware. Sigh!

I wonder what to expect from a Hackingtosh, is there things that don't work properly and so on?

I have built many computers from scratch before but never tried to get OS X running on them. Very familiar with both OS X and Linux so a little manual configuring does not scare me if the final result is very close to a real Mac.

This is the build I'm thinking about:

CPU: Intel Core i7-3770​

MB: Gigabyte, GA-Z77X-UD5H​

RAM: 32GB 1600Mhz, DDR3 CMZ32GX3M4X1600C10​

Case: Corsair Carbide 300R​

PSU: Corsair 650 Watt Modular Gold, CP-9020030-EU​

GPU: EVGA GeForce GTX 680, 02G-P4-2682-KR
W-LAN: TP-Link TL-WDN4800
HDD:
System: SanDisk SSD Extreme 240GB, SDSSDX-240G-G25
Storage: Seagate Barracuda 1TB, ST1000DM003​

I know all components are from the buyers guide. But is there any component that will get me trouble? Will all fans, temperature measurements and so on work and can the fan-speeds be controlled?

How do Hackingtoshes usually do with system upgrades, am I to expect to only be able to run 10.8 or is it reasonable to expect being able to upgrade to 10.9 and so on without major changes? Anyone who has been doing this for a while who can share their experience?

Is there any other downsides with a hackingtosh thats good to know?

 

[Going Bald]

Hi,

Have been thinking about building a Hackingtosh for a while now. There are two reasons, performance and second I recently had a second Apple computer die on me probably because of a long-time heat problem. Repair prices have been ridiculous, actually cost more to repair then buy a completely new one with better hardware. Sigh!

I wonder what to expect from a Hackingtosh, is there things that don't work properly and so on?

I have built many computers from scratch before but never tried to get OS X running on them. Very familiar with both OS X and Linux so a little manual configuring does not scare me if the final result is very close to a real Mac.

This is the build I'm thinking about:

CPU: Intel Core i7-3770​

MB: Gigabyte, GA-Z77X-UD5H​

RAM: 32GB 1600Mhz, DDR3 CMZ32GX3M4X1600C10​

Case: Corsair Carbide 300R​

PSU: Corsair 650 Watt Modular Gold, CP-9020030-EU​

GPU: EVGA GeForce GTX 680, 02G-P4-2682-KR
W-LAN: TP-Link TL-WDN4800
HDD:
System: SanDisk SSD Extreme 240GB, SDSSDX-240G-G25
Storage: Seagate Barracuda 1TB, ST1000DM003​

I know all components are from the buyers guide. But is there any component that will get me trouble? Will all fans, temperature measurements and so on work and can the fan-speeds be controlled?

How do Hackingtoshes usually do with system upgrades, am I to expect to only be able to run 10.8 or is it reasonable to expect being able to upgrade to 10.9 and so on without major changes? Anyone who has been doing this for a while who can share their experience?

Is there any other downsides with a hackingtosh thats good to know?

With the parts listed you should have no problems installing and running 10.7.x or 10.8.x. As for 10.9.x, who knows until Apple comes out with it? I can say that there are several builds both in User Builds and Golden Builds using the same board and CPU and the builders are reporting minimal problems and stable systems.
Using a case with good airflow and the stock CPU fan, you should be fine with temps. The CPU fan is a 4 pin PWM fan, connects to the board and is controlled by the BIOS. You can set up in BIOS different parameters on how you want the fan to work - read your manual for info.
System updates are usually painless, but it is recommended to first clone the OS partition, download the update combo and apply it to the clone first so if there is a problem you can figure out a fix without disturbing your main drive. Normally, updates are no problem and you usually only have to replace the patched AppleHHDA.kext.
So far on the build in my sig I have gone from 10.6.0 to 10.7.5 to 10.8.3 with no problems. Had to use a GT120 from 10.6.0 to 10.6.7 due to lack of support for the HD5770, but 10.6.7 gained support and I swapped out the card.

 

[MunkOil]

With the parts listed you should have no problems installing and running 10.7.x or 10.8.x. As for 10.9.x, who knows until Apple comes out with it? I can say that there are several builds both in User Builds and Golden Builds using the same board and CPU and the builders are reporting minimal problems and stable systems.
Using a case with good airflow and the stock CPU fan, you should be fine with temps. The CPU fan is a 4 pin PWM fan, connects to the board and is controlled by the BIOS. You can set up in BIOS different parameters on how you want the fan to work - read your manual for info.
System updates are usually painless, but it is recommended to first clone the OS partition, download the update combo and apply it to the clone first so if there is a problem you can figure out a fix without disturbing your main drive. Normally, updates are no problem and you usually only have to replace the patched AppleHHDA.kext.
So far on the build in my sig I have gone from 10.6.0 to 10.7.5 to 10.8.3 with no problems. Had to use a GT120 from 10.6.0 to 10.6.7 due to lack of support for the HD5770, but 10.6.7 gained support and I swapped out the card.

Hi,

Thanks for your reply! Stupid of me not thinking of the fan control in BIOS. Just had a Mac for to long where you are not supposed to control it yourself .

Do you know of any of these minimal problems? I just found some that sounded like hardware defects not trouble with having os x running on it? As far as I can understand it is just the sound and LAN drivers missing in OS X. And those looks like an easy post-installation with multibeast.

Now I just need the green light from my wife .

 

[zaptoons]

I was in the same boat you're in 4 years ago. Needed a new Mac (even got the green light from the Mrs. to buy a MacPro) but I was hesitant to throw so much money at Apple. I stumbled upon Hackintosh, hacked my PC that I had at the time- that worked way better than I expected, so I custom built a machine just for OSX.

That first machine of mine still runs today, repurposed as an HTPC. I built it in 2008 to run Leopard 10.5.4 and it currently runs Lion 10.7.5. I could probably run the very latest Mountain Lion on it, but haven't bothered.

So anyway, that was 3 (possibly 4) versions of OSX on the same motherboard. (Could have been same graphics card too, but I updated it a few times). And I'll say that in my estimation, Lion runs just as well on that old hardware as Leopard did.

Anyway, I've been majorly satisfied with using a Hackintosh vs. an actual Mac. As long as a Hackintosh is possible, I'll likely prefer it over the real deal.

Things that possibly don't work? Sleep is a big one. Apparently, sleep requires a low-level hardware integration with OSX, and certain things with the system can throw it off. You'll put the machine to sleep, and it will be unable to wake up, forcing you to restart, losing work that was unsaved before the sleep. Most times it's a motherboard/BIOS/ issue, other times it can even be something unexpected like an incompatible DVD-R drive. But with really compatible hardware, there's usually a fix. (Or it just works OOB). I haven't found it a particular issue; sleep works fine on my current system.

I've had some updates that broke sleep on my systems, but then there's almost always a fix for it. I don't use sleep that much anyway, so it was never that big an issue. When I first went from Leopard to Snow Leopard on my original Hack, there were all sorts of problems that needed to be ironed out with Snow Leopard. I simply ran SL on another hard drive, while I left my working Leopard install intact, and eventually just grew into SL as the bugs were worked out. I pretty much do the same thing with any full version jump in the OS.

Sometimes people experience issues with audio and LAN. Both are generally avoided by choosing a motherboard with native support for both, or simply using supported add-on cards. If a certain kext is required for your components to work, an update will likely take them out, so you have to install the kexts again using Multibeast.

Graphic card choice is key also- many that are supported natively work with just a simple Graphics Enabler flag in the boot.plist file. Others take a bit more fiddling. My personal experience building many systems for myself and clients is that nVidia cards tend to be less trouble. ATI cards at first seem to give more bang-for-buck. But IMO they tend to be harder to set up, and straight up compared to their nVidia counterparts, fall a little short on performance, making the cheaper costs not much of an advantage. Others may have a different experience, but this has been mine.

My basic philosophy with a Hackintosh has been: stick with what works, test the new until it's proven before getting rid of the old. System Updates are the biggest concern. In keeping with my philosophy, I always first read what issues to expect with an update. Then I test it on a cloned install of OSX, not my main install. Once everything is working and stable, I update my main install. Since version 10.5.4 I've run every single version and update to OSX and not suffered any downtime.

 

[MunkOil]

Thank you zaptoons for taking time to answer!

I feel more comfortable now to make the step towards a hackingtosh! After I started to actually pick out components I found many posts about the specific hardware above, and even if it probably wont be without hassle in the future, there seems to be a very good community that is willing to help each other with eventual problems. By buying hardware on the recommended list in no way guarantees a working system, at least there will be more people running similar hardware and more people looking to solve the same problem.

Is there any tips on how to clone my system before upgrade? More specific, any extra hardware needed? Of corse an extra harddrive, but do I need a dedicated harddrive for this or can I clone the system drive to a partition on another drive? Any guides or information regarding best practices when upgrading your hackingtosh?

Anyone who can give me recommendations for a GeForce 680GTX? My concerns are performance and noise. I have no which one to get, or are all very similar?

By the way, my wife gave me her approval .

 

[zaptoons]

Thank you zaptoons for taking time to answer!

I feel more comfortable now to make the step towards a hackingtosh! After I started to actually pick out components I found many posts about the specific hardware above, and even if it probably wont be without hassle in the future, there seems to be a very good community that is willing to help each other with eventual problems. By buying hardware on the recommended list in no way guarantees a working system, at least there will be more people running similar hardware and more people looking to solve the same problem.

I find this site to be invaluable for sorting any issues that arise. It's almost guaranteed that someone here has run into any problem you may encounter and has posted a solution. Usually if an issue can't be solved, then it goes beyond the scope of OSX's built-in limitations. (For example, unsupported graphics hardware, socket types etc. will likely never work unless Apple themselves creates drivers for them.)

Is there any tips on how to clone my system before upgrade? More specific, any extra hardware needed? Of corse an extra harddrive, but do I need a dedicated harddrive for this or can I clone the system drive to a partition on another drive? Any guides or information regarding best practices when upgrading your hackingtosh?

You can use Carbon Copy Cloner (free, fully-working for 30 days, $40 full version) or SuperDuper (basic version free, $30 for advanced features.)
All you need is enough hard drive space to clone a basic install. (10-20GB)

You can clone either to an entire drive, or yes, just a partition of a drive. OSX clones are bootable. The Chimera bootloader will recognize and boot any bootable partition of any drive in your system. If 10.9 dropped tomorrow and I wanted to test it, I'd simply use a small partition of one of my drives and install it there without touching any of my working installs.

If a person only has one drive for OSX, I usually recommend they set aside an extra 30GB or so partition when they first set the drive up. After installing OSX to the main partition and getting everything fully working, clone it to the 2nd. Chimera will boot either partition independently. This really comes in handy when it's time to do system updates- you can use the clone partition to test the update before messing with the primary install of OSX. If the install fails, you can always boot back into the main partition and figure out what went wrong with the update, or reclone it. The thing is, you never leave yourself without a way back into your system.

Better is to clone OSX to a complete separate drive that can boot completely independently of the main drive. You can still use this drive as storage, just maintain an extra bootable install of OSX on it for emergencies.

Both CCC and SuperDuper have advanced features that are really useful and make either worth buying. (CCC's full features work for a full month for free). For example, I now make a sparce bundle backup of my entire OS drive that are updated incrementally every day. What this means is, even if my main hard drive blew up and took everything with it- all my settings, installed programs, etc... I'm about ten minutes away from restoring everything, exactly as it was, completely bootable from the sparce bundle image, and since it's updated daily, my system and all installed applications will return exactly as I had them. For someone like me that relies on my systems for work, it's better than an insurance policy and makes my setup absolutely bullet-proof.

Anyone who can give me recommendations for a GeForce 680GTX? My concerns are performance and noise. I have no which one to get, or are all very similar?

By the way, my wife gave me her approval .

I can't speak specifically for the GTX680 cards, but most cards are similar if not identical for Hackintosh use regardless of brand. The main thing is to make sure any card you get has the cooling options you want (fans, heatsinks) and the ports you'll need. (DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort, VGA, etc.) VGA out doesn't work for Hackintoshes, but DVI to VGA in on a monitor does work. The safe bet is as always to check out the buyer's guide and buy what's linked to there. If it's in the guide, it's a safe bet it's been tested to work.

As always, review other's builds and setup guides using the same hardware.

 

[Solidww]

Hi,

Have been thinking about building a Hackingtosh for a while now. There are two reasons, performance and second I recently had a second Apple computer die on me probably because of a long-time heat problem. Repair prices have been ridiculous, actually cost more to repair then buy a completely new one with better hardware. Sigh!

I wonder what to expect from a Hackingtosh, is there things that don't work properly and so on?

I have built many computers from scratch before but never tried to get OS X running on them. Very familiar with both OS X and Linux so a little manual configuring does not scare me if the final result is very close to a real Mac.

This is the build I'm thinking about:

CPU: Intel Core i7-3770​

MB: Gigabyte, GA-Z77X-UD5H​

RAM: 32GB 1600Mhz, DDR3 CMZ32GX3M4X1600C10​

Case: Corsair Carbide 300R​

PSU: Corsair 650 Watt Modular Gold, CP-9020030-EU​

GPU: EVGA GeForce GTX 680, 02G-P4-2682-KR
W-LAN: TP-Link TL-WDN4800
HDD:
System: SanDisk SSD Extreme 240GB, SDSSDX-240G-G25
Storage: Seagate Barracuda 1TB, ST1000DM003​

I know all components are from the buyers guide. But is there any component that will get me trouble? Will all fans, temperature measurements and so on work and can the fan-speeds be controlled?

How do Hackingtoshes usually do with system upgrades, am I to expect to only be able to run 10.8 or is it reasonable to expect being able to upgrade to 10.9 and so on without major changes? Anyone who has been doing this for a while who can share their experience?

Is there any other downsides with a hackingtosh thats good to know?

I know your concerns. When I first had a Hackintosh I was so worried of it failing that I never did anything and/or updated the computer. Ever since Snow Leopard 10.6 the updating process has been a lot less finicky and reliable.

Who knows what the future will hold though.

What kind of work do you plan to do on this computer?

 

[andrewe92]

@ OP. im in the same boat as you, my main concern is the future ... im afraid my build will be broken at same point due to an update.. I havent started my build yet but I will soon, the only thing we could do is go with hardware on the buyers guide list and pick the most compatible hardware we can!

 

[MunkOil]

Thank you all for all the replies!

@zaptoons: I will check the softwares out. Any reason for using these instead of time machine for incremental backups? Is it because you want to use just one software or is it just that much better?

@Solidww: My plans for this computer is a little bit of everything. Work, developing, photography, gaming. A little bit of everything. Yes, I know 32 GB RAM is a little bit more than I probably need, but it is not that much of a cost compared to 16 GB and I might need it for some tasks I'm planning to do.

 

[MunkOil]

By the way I changed my mind about some hardware and decided to go:

CPU: Intel Core i7-3770K
MB: Gigabyte, GA-Z77X-UP5-TH
Case: Corsair Carbide 500R


3770K is just to be able to play around with over-clocking when I want to play around with water-cooling .