Why build a Hackintosh in 2017?

Oklasoft
Oklasoft
Aug 26, 2017 · 5 min read

The Hackintosh has long been a popular and largely misunderstood niche in the Mac community, after the latest updates this summer and a renewed commitment from Apple to keep machines up to date many will question why build one at all in 2017? While the individual reasons are as varied and as numerous as there are users here are some of my reasons on why I built mine and details on the build.

Nostalgia

While this factor probably carried the least weight in making the decision, it was probably the straw that broke the camel’s back. I first really started to notice the Mac and become drawn to them late in high school. Of course as a kid working only part time after class and on weekends for minimum wage even a used mac would take months to be able to afford and a new one was completely unattainable. This was also the time the first hackintosh “distros” started hitting the internet. With those new resources available I managed to install jas 10.4.7 my 3 year old Pentium 4 Dell. By all accounts these set ups where pretty limited and could not be updated with out their patches being over written, but this was the machine that made me fall in love with the Mac.

Upgradeability

Despite how much use I was able to squeeze out of that hacked together little rig, when Leopard finally came out the hacintosh was no longer able to cut it. It was time to look for a real Mac to make this run. In what might be the only time in history someone has upgraded from an intel mac to a PPC I managed to get my hands on a Quicksilver PowerMac specifically for running Leopard. While this machine was much older than the Dell performance wise it was almost identical. Even though at 5 years old this machine had long since quit being a power house, because of it’s expandability in many ways the G4 towers where the ultimate Macs. Basic upgrades included maxing out the ram, installing a larger HDD, adding Airport, bluetooth, and USB 2.0 to support my iPod touch. It could even play Halo. Around this time I knew several people who weren’t even enthusiast who would buy these machines second hand from school auctions for pennies on the dollar and use them as primary machines on Tiger long after they had reached vintage and obsolete status.

xMac

It was these machines that really laid out the template for what an xMac should look like. The xMac is mythical highly upgradable Mac tower that a small sampling of power users have been crying out for ever since the beginning of the post iMac era. Unlike the PowerMacs and Mac Pros this machine would cover a large range of configurations from smaller cheaper budget configurations all the way up to high performance gaming PC style configs. Think eXpandable iMac. Even though the MacPro has delivered on upgradeability, it’s focus on ultra high end workstation components drive up the point of entry and limit upgrade options. This type of machine unfortunately is one we’re very unlikely to see be delivered in the form of a real Mac any time soon. However in the years since the first Tiger based hackintosh installs came out the process and abilities of third party hardware on macOS has only gotten more accessible and less limited to the point where a well thought out build can do everything a real Mac can do. According to sources inside Apple the unofficial stance on hackintoshes is that Apple does not support nor restrict macOS’s ability to run on any unsupported hardware.

About this Mac

So, enough with the hows and whys of this build and on the the good stuff. The hart of this build is a Gigabyte GA-z270-UD3 motherboard, Intel 7700k, 64GB DDR4 ram, 2 TB Samsung NVMe M.2 SSD and overclocked GTX 1080. In most ways the core components are very similar to a maxed out iMac, with the CPU overclocked from 4.2 GHz to 4.6 and significantly faster graphics. While doing research on this build I’ve read where the 7700k is supposedly able to be reliably speed up to 5.0 GHz but in my testing even with liquid cooling my specific CPU became extremely unstable both in windows and macOS at 5.0 and still saw the occasional issues under heave load at 4.8. 4.6 seems to be the sweet spot for stable overclocking and keeping the temps in a reasonable range. For more information on this build see the parts list below.

Parts list.

GA-Z270-UD3

GTX 1080

iMac Wifi/BT card

Intel Core i7 7700k

Ram

SSD

Cooler

Power supply

Case

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