Transition to Apple/macOS

[XMan]

I call Hackintoshes science projects. Granted, the technology has advanced over the years to the point where it is very easy to build one these days. A few tips:

1. I use a NIC card & USB sound card. The motherboard drivers usually get funky when upgrading, so by using a natively-supported PCI/PCIe Gigabit NIC & USB audio adapter, you can bypass that headache.

2. I use separate drives for Windows & OSX. You can dual-boot off a single drive if you want to, but it just makes things more complicated. Storage is cheap these days; I recommend dual drives for convenience.

3. One additional layer of convenience is putting all of the Hackintosh on a USB boot stick, rather than onto the boot drive itself. I like to keep my OSX boot drive 100% stock Mac. This typically means very easy upgrades, and also lets you swap the drive into a real Mac if needed (& vice-versa), unlike Windows where if you swap from hardware to hardware it will typically bluescreen on you.

4. My personal Hackintosh is 100% stable. I've been running the system system I think since 2011...Core i5, 10 gigs of RAM, etc. Would love to upgrade, but it never crashes & is still super zippy, so no need to lol.

At some point, I would like to upgrade to a 5K iMac, but again, no need to right now because my rig is fast & stable, especially since a 27" iMac is a pretty hefty investment & wouldn't really give me any ROI right now.

1. Interesting. I've seen the USB sound cards, what network card are you using?

2. Moot for me, I'm using a dedicated system. I have a newer/faster Win10 system. Using a KVM switch as needed to go back and forth on the same monitor.

3. I have it imaged to a thumb drive so if anything crashes I've got a working state to flash it back to.

4. Yeah, I haven't done anything intensive yet, but it seems solid. i7-3770K, 16GB of RAM, onboard video.

 

[Kaido]

1. Interesting. I've seen the USB sound cards, what network card are you using?

2. Moot for me, I'm using a dedicated system. I have a newer/faster Win10 system. Using a KVM switch as needed to go back and forth on the same monitor.

3. I have it imaged to a thumb drive so if anything crashes I've got a working state to flash it back to.

4. Yeah, I haven't done anything intensive yet, but it seems solid. i7-3770K, 16GB of RAM, onboard video.

1. For the NIC, I use Encore (gigabit), available in both PCI & PCIe format. For the sound, I use Syba (the $10 stereo adapter). The sound is actually nice because it isolates the analog jack from the motherboard through USB - I've had some issues in the past with onboard audio jacks & picking up system sounds and stuff, especially on the cheaper chipsets/boards.

2. NIce, perfect. KVM FTW!

3. The method I'm referring to has the bootloader portion actually on the USB stick itself, with the OS (and no Hackintosh stuff) on the boot drive. The bootloader does optionally give you the ability to select Mac/Win when booting, if doing dual drives. Anyway, it's not for everyone, as you have to leave the USB stick plugged in all the time & set it to be the default boot device, but I like it for the convenience of having a clean OSX-only drive & also for being able to tinker around with different bootloaders & tweaks. As far as imaging goes, I am personally a fan of SuperDuper. If you clone to a sparseimage bundle, you can boot your Unibeast stick (if using Tonymac's software) up & then do an image restore using that backup file, very convenient!

4. Excellent! Really, the only two reasons for a Hackintosh to crash is faulty hardware (run memtest+, SMART, etc.) or a bad driver configuration. Hackintosh really just boils down to the bootloader & drivers. The bootloader stuff is really solid, and if you use compatible parts for your Hackintosh, then the driver support is solid. It's been a good six years of using the last Hackintosh I built & it's still running strong 24/7. It's as good as a dedicated linux box in terms of stability!

 

[Kaido]

That's what velcro's for. Plenty of open space on the back of that big screen.

Haha! Well, they do sell very slim 1TB SSD drives with Thunderbolt connectors