I'm back and I've built (just a few wrinkles left) a new Hackintosh! I actually went legit for a short while - parted out all of my old systems on ebay/local - and bought a new Mac Studio M2 Ultra (64GB, 1TB).. best configuration they carried in stores and I wasn't willing to wait 1.5 months for an SSD/RAM upgraded model to arrive.
(tried USB before I upgraded everything to TB4)
I must admit, maybe my standards are too high but I was very disappointed for the price I paid (almost $4300 just for the studio, with tax, not counting an additional $2000+ on external TB4 gear (4 4TB SN850X, TB4 NVME enclosures and ultimately both an OWC and a CalDigit TB4 Hub - wasn't sure if one or the other was faulty). Returned the Studio about 10 days later. Numerous issues that were just not acceptable for the cost. Honestly, my past Hackintosh's delivered better.
Specific problems with the M2 Studio...
1) Constant Thunderbolt disconnects both awake and asleep. Because I had the 1TB model I initially tried using the internal drive solely as a boot drive, mounting /Users/~Home on an external TB4 drive. Worked Ok in partial practice, but yeah, constant disconnects. Not acceptable.
2) When I had the studio fully built I found I was using nearly the entire 1TB internal storage because of all the stuff that I couldn't easily relocate to external storage (like /Users/Shared - aliasing and symlinks would not work and resulted in a lot of data corruption because of the aforementioned disconnects)). Data corruption aside, that much data on the internal drive killed IO performance, not to mention would significantly speed SSD demise turning the Studio into a brick that much quicker. Not acceptable.
When the internal SSD is dead, that's it.. it's a brick. Even if...
3) At this point I figured why not just use the 1TB as a speedy scratch drive, and run everything on a TB drive externally. Boot from a TB4 drive. Bypass the internal SSD altogether. Used to do this on my old MacMini 2018 and it worked great. This was almost perfect, except..
While Apple does allow you to boot Apple Silicon from external TB/USB devices, it's a one and done process. I never did track down the exact terminology and I can't really make sense of it coming from an x86 background, but external AS boot drives are not considered valid/blessed/legit in the chain of ownership for Apple Silicon. You can install the system via what is essentially internet recovery, but you can never update it. In my short time with the Studio Apple released both Rapid Security Response for Ventura 13.4.1 as well as Ventura 13.5. Couldn't update to either. The only way to get newer system software was to completely reactivate and reinstall the system. With 13.4.1 I thought maybe it was a bug, but when 13.5 landed and I still couldn't update it was pretty clear it wasn't, it's by design - there are a lot of posts regarding this over on Apple's forums. The cynic in me thinks this is one of Apple's way of sticking it trying to get around their ridiculous upgrade pricing. Anyway, not acceptable and back it went.
SO
Took all that Apple money and built the best 13900K my local Microcenter had parts for.
13900KS with MSI Coreliquid S360
MSI MEG Godlike z790
192GB Crucial DDR5
AMD 6950XT Reference (older 6950XT was a Powercolor and parted out)
4 4TB WD SN850x, 3 2TB Crucial P5
MSI 1300w ATX3.0 PSU
Hyte Y60
All that and still cost just under what I paid for the Studio. Returned the TB4 hubs and enclosures.
(realizing this is kinda long at this point, going to start a new message with what my actual predicament is)