macOS Sierra on an Asus X99 Deluxe II
This build guide is for a X99 macOS Sierra Hackintosh on the Asus X99 Deluxe II motherboard. This guide is broken up across different posts. Please read the entire guide prior to attempting this build.
Table of Contents For This Series
- macOS Sierra on Asus X99 Deluxe II
- Creating a bootable macOS Sierra Installer
- Installing Clover on the macOS Sierra Installer
- EFI drivers & kexts for an Asus X99 Deluxe II Hackintosh
- Patching support for NVMe SSDs on macOS Sierra
- Configuring the clover config.plist for an Asus X99 Deluxe II
- Installing macOS Sierra via the Clover bootloader*
- Installing Nvidia Web Drivers on a Hackintosh*
- Generating a SSDT for CPU Power Management on a Hackintosh*
- Post Installation steps for macOS Sierra on an Asus X99 Deluxe II*
*: Not yet published
Caveats of Building a Hackintosh
Though this build is very stable it faces the same problems as other hackintoshes. System updates must be applied carefully as it may leave your machine in a broken state. Building and maintaining a hackintosh is not hard but it is also not trivial. There are certainly some performance and cost savings to be found but understand that a hackintosh will never be a real mac.
The Build
This is a purpose built box for machine learning and artificial intelligence workloads. This box has 2 GTX 980 Ti GPUs as there is currently no support for the GTX 10xx series GPUs. It also has 2 NVMe drives running in RAID-o that backup hourly to a Non-NVMe SSD. The Non-NVMe SSD is not only used for backups but also serves as our boot drive. The x99 chipset unfortunately does not have the ability to boot directly into an NVMe SSD like the Z170/Z270 chipset. Lastly the machine is running an i7 6900k overclocked to 4.3Ghz with 64GB of DDR4 RAM clocked at 3200Mhz.
The following are the parts used in this build: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/kkMQLD
- Asus X99 Deluxe II Motherboard
- Intel Core i7–6900K
- Corsair RM1000i Power Supply
- 8 Corsair Dominator Platinum 8GB 3200Mhz
- 2 EVGA GTX 980 Ti Classified GPUs
- 2 Samsung 960 Evo NVMe SSDs
- Samsung 850 Pro SSD
- Corsair h115i Liquid CPU Cooler
- FiiO E10K USB DAC and Headphone Amplifier
- USB Thumb with at least 8GBs of Storage
- A mac or hackintosh to carry out building the installer
Required Applications & Files
In order to complete this project you’ll need an existing mac or hackintosh from which to build the installer. Listed below are tools and files that should be downloaded ahead of time. The items on this list are mandatory except Carbon Copy Cloner. Carbon Copy Cloner is used for backups especially necessary in a RAID-o setup.
- macOS Sierra
- Windows 10
- UNetbootin
- Clover EFI Bootloader
- Clover Configurator
- KextBeast
- AGDPfix
- Nvidia Web Drivers for macOS Sierra
- EFI Configuration for this build
- MaciASL
- SoftRAID
- Carbon Copy Cloner *optional
A Note on SoftRAID
SoftRAID is a replacement for AppleRAID that has more/newer/better features than the latter but costs $49. The reason I use it here is because it creates a “Boot OSX” partition on the RAID-o that you are able to point to later in your Clover config.plist to allow for autoboot. You may use SoftRAID to create this “Boot OSX” partition and convert the RAID-o array back to AppleRAID. It should also be noted that though AppleRAID is still useable today it has since become abandonware.
Performance
Here are the results of a GeekBench 4 run. Note that this is after overclocking the CPU to 4.3Ghz & having DDR4 RAM running at 3200Mhz.
Compare these numbers to the highest multi-core scores for a real Mac Pro.
Finally here are some numbers on the RAID-o array of 2 960 Evos. Note that this is on a SoftRAID setup using the server optimizations.
Conclusion
Was it worth it? I certainly think so.
The system is stable and certainly fulfills a gap left by Apple in their offerings for professionals. From a cost perspective this machine offers greater performance at a much lower price tag. The Mac Pro capable of the GeekBench 4 results show above currently costs $9,399.00 whilst my Hackintosh Pro costs $4,413.39 (Based on PCPartPicker’s Price List).
You also have to consider the upgradeability aspect of this build. As costs of NVMe SSDs fall you will be able add more drives to your RAID-o for better performance and capacity. The vast majority of the parts of your system will be upgradeable and will keep you seeing higher performance numbers than any of Apple’s hardware year over year.
All things considered I believe the Hackintosh is a great alternative to a “new” Mac Pro currently available at Apple stores.
