with its factory tuning and data center dna an Intel 730 series SSD is an
amazing choice for gamers and performance enthusiasts
welcome to our mac pro killer hackintosh
guide the goal here was to build a video editing or general content creation
machine that runs os 10 mavericks and delivers similar raw performance and
low noise operation to a premium 8 core
mac pro but at a much lower price so
let's open this right off the bat with the answer to the big question why would
you want to build a hackintosh we all know at least the folks who are somewhat
paying attention know that spec for spec hardware for hardware if you actually
tried to build the exact same thing apple pcs are fairly price competitive
these days with an equivalent pc so why not just buy an apple well couple of
reasons number one is to save money as i
just mentioned like four seconds ago buying the same hardware apple is using
to build a pc will usually yield a similar pricing but the trick is that
apple's hardware choices are not always the best bang for the buck and by
choosing completely different hardware similar performance can sometimes be
achieved for much cheaper especially if you're willing to get into a little
overclocking number two is that apple doesn't always design their hardware
with upgradability in mind and by adding extra pci express cards and better
hardware over time the life of a system can be significantly extended something
you can't do with RAM solder to your motherboard or a complete absence of
internal storage and pci express expansion number three is that you might just be a
tinkerer who also appreciates os 10 and
just plain old wants to do it in which case rock on brother
now that's not to say that hackintoshing doesn't come with challenges you need to
carefully select your hardware ahead of time like seriously carefully sometimes
even video card firmware revisions or
motherboard BIOS updates can cause problems and even then while support for
stuff like wireless and onboard sound is much better now than it was in the early
days you might still not be able to get certain stuff like advanced CPU power
management features working that last bit is actually an issue we're still
having on this particular machine but ive hackintoshing is still in early
stages and there are actually other boards it works on so i'd be surprised
if that last issue doesn't get resolved for our rig at some point here so let's
walk through the rationale of our parts choices we went with a six core core i7
4930k this chip at stock speeds is about
equivalent to the six cores neon that's available for the mac pro xeon
advantages include support for ecc registered memory dimms an essential
feature on servers and suggested on workstations but something that many
folks can live without and theoretically tighter quality control but frankly
anything that says Intel on the box could say tighter qc and i would believe
it anyway for RAM we went with the highest performance most compatible just
best 64 gig ddr3 2400 megahertz kit that
we could find g skills rip jaw z 8x8 kit
even though we knew we'd end up running it at 1866 or 2133 on this particular
board running it below spec gives us peace of mind that we're not even
pushing the rated limits of it so we should be in pretty good shape there our
motherboard is a Gigabyte x79 up4
Gigabyte boards are famous for being relatively easy to get going in
hackintosh's and this one ended up being fairly straightforward other than the
power management thing that's still being worked on our video card is a gtx
780 reference card and we chose it for its excellent compute performance and
great acoustics remember that goal of this system you're going to want to
avoid non-reference cards for the most part unless you can find evidence that
they are specifically supported or that they can at least be successfully
flashed with the BIOS of a card that does work and GPU support is something
that changes frequently so make sure to double check before clicking that buy
button other silence optimized components in the system include our ax860i power
supply that only runs the fan under medium to heavy system load our nhu 12s
CPU cooler from Noctua our nf f12 case
fans also from Noctua and our nzxt h440
case with this tower CPU cooling setup
we avoid needing the loud fans that come with our RAM to keep them cool and by
switching all the case fans to undervolted Noctua fans for the h440 we
are able to achieve near silence for our system just like the mac pro
finally the SSD was actually a component that i waffled on a fair bit but i ended
up going with a samsung 840 evo 500 gig
because i wanted capacity enough for some growing room so it's not like you
download a couple videos and photos off the internet and boom your drives full
but i actually didn't care that much about performance beyond
making sure i wasn't using magnetic media for my boot drive
this choice was based on my assumption
that serious content creators are not doing real work on an SSD no not even a
one terabyte one in spite of apple's marketing about how fast it is and how
great it is for working on 4k video because it's just not enough space
anyway and whether those professionals
want to expand the internal storage of the machine with a raid array or build a
nas they're going to be keeping their massive images and raw 4k footage
somewhere else anyway so the SSD just needs to be fast enough to run the os
and applications so with that in my head even though there are tons of other
storage options available especially because this system actually has storage
options i chose an SSD with middling performance decent background garbage
collection an excellent price to performance to
capacity ratio so without further ado
get yourselves a mac because you'll need one to create
your bootable media as well as a couple of usb drives one for the actual os
installation and one for like drivers and stuff just to have that handy and
i'm gonna hand off to luke to show you how to install os 10 mavericks
on a pc first you're going to want to download
os x mavericks this will come from the apple website and can only be downloaded
on a mac next you're going to want to download my hack this should be done on the same
computer that you downloaded os x on now go into your downloads folder and
open the myhack.dmg accept the terms and conditions or else
it won't work go to your applications folder and drag
and drop the icon that's on the desktop for myhack into the applications folder
then double click the myhack symbol in the application window
select open on the popup type in your password
select create os x installer
let it know which version of osx you want to install
select the drive you want to install it on that should be a flash drive
and just tell it to scan your system to find os x considering you downloaded it
earlier it'll find it right away and then just click ok now you've got quite a way ahead of you
this will take a little while just a heads up
near the end of the my hack installation process it'll ask you if you want to
patch the installer for mbr support the answer that is no you should be
installing your os x on a guid partition type and you won't need the mbr support
because of that next you want to download your
motherboards dmg directly off of dev's website you can do that by going to the
x79 dmg downloads page and selecting the manufacturer for your motherboard
once you're there you're going to scroll down and select the actual model of your motherboard for this example we're using
a ga x79 up4 so we'll download that dmg
right now next you're going to want to take that
dmg you just downloaded and move it to a flash drive for later use
next you're going to want to boot onto that flash drive that you were just setting up
under startup volume you're going to want to select my hack install disk and
then for boot flags if you're running lga 2011 or lga 1366 you're gonna run
dash v space cpus equal one space npci
equals zero x 2000. if you're running lga 1150 or 1155 you're gonna run one uh
dash v and pci equals zero x2 000 no need for that cpus equal one flag you
will also need unique parameters depending on what graphics card you have
so if you have an AMD 6800 series card or an NVIDIA gtx 500 series card or
NVIDIA 610 or 650 ti you will need to
use the parameter graphics enabler equal yes if you have an AMD 7000 series plus
card or an NVIDIA gtx 660 plus or an
NVIDIA gtx 760 plus you'll need to use
the graphics enabler equals no flag
once the beach ball finally stops spinning you're going to select your preferred language
and then go to the utilities tab disk utility
select the hard drive or SSD that you want to install a macOS x onto
for format you're going to use macOS extended journaled name it whatever you
want i name it macdrive and then click erase
once it's done erasing you can simply close this window
and then click continue agree to the terms and conditions so you
can actually do anything select that drive that we just set up
and click install
near the end of your osx mavericks install hack will pop up asking you
about extra folders completely ignore this popup do not click on it do not
click on anything just hard restart the computer
if you run into a halt on system uptime in nanoseconds in verbose mode i would
recommend going into your BIOS and resetting to default so the only time i
actually ran into this problem was when i was overclocking but as some of you
might be running this setup on a system that you've had before which might be
overclocked this is just a heads up this also applies later in the video when we
talk about overclocking all right now that we've done the initial install
we're ready to actually boot onto the drive so you're going to want to select the startup volume as your mac drive and
then enter the same parameter flags as you did when you first use the
installation disk to do the initial setup
all right now you can relax a little bit you're in the easy mode part now you
just got to set up your user account and then you're good to go after that you're
going to want to select my computer does not connect to the internet because you have no drivers right now so it's not
going to connect to the internet anyways
other than that everything's pretty much up to you until we get into the operating system
now you're going to want to grab that flash drive we put the dmg on and
extract the dmg next you're going to want to go into files tools and then run
kext helper b7 going back to your motherboard
manufacturer and then your then the text folder inside of there you're going to
want to grab all the kecks that are there move them to the kext helper 0.7
application type in your password
and then just click easy install
ignore the reboot instruction you do not want to reboot at
this point this error message is fine it's saying that it's from an
unidentified developer but it's loading
anyways so it's okay don't worry about it again just ignore the reboot
next you're going to want to go into your chameleon folder once inside you're going to want to drag the extra folder
into the macintosh hd shortcut and click
authenticate and then type in your password
next you're going to want to go into the files directory and then into your
motherboard manufacturers folder after that you'll go into the model
number of your motherboard into the ssdt folder and then into the respective
manufacture of your graphics cards folder then you have to open up your macintosh
hd link that we opened earlier and then go into that extras folder that you
dragged into there previously and move the ssdt file into that extra folder
now we get to install the bootloader so you're going to want to go into the flash drive that you used to install
your operating system and then open the my hack shortcut once that's open you
should type in your password select install chameleon you're going to
want to install it to root which is just the forward slash
and it should be done very quickly now that you've installed the majority
of your drivers and you have your bootloader installed you can actually
restart your system you don't have to boot it up with any parameters you just
have to make sure that you select your mac drive and you boot there but i do
recommend using verbose mode also known as dash v in the parameter sector so
that you can actually see everything that's going on and see what it's halting on if it fails to boot
now you're going to want to identify what audio patch you need you can do
this by going to your motherboard's manufacturer's website going to the specifications and checking out the
audio codec that it uses for us it is a real tech alc alc892 codec next we're
going to use that handy dandy dmg that we downloaded earlier to install the
other drivers although this time we're going to go into
files and then the manufacturer of our motherboards folder and then into kext
again but instead of using the kex we'll use the safari download links in this
case all we need is alc892 although i do download all of them
once they're downloaded you're just going to want to go into the folder of the one that lines up with the codec
that your motherboard uses so in this case again alc892
there are many command files within this patch folder you're going to have to find the one whose last numerics within
the name line up with the last numerics in the codec that your motherboard uses
so in this case 9 after running this command file security
is gonna freak out you're gonna have to allow it to run the script you can do that by going to system preferences
security and privacy and clicking open anyway
once the command window opens up type your password and press enter and then
you're good to go you'll need a restart at this point for audio to actually start working and you can restart now as
you've installed your bootloader and all your other drivers
overclocking this platform is pretty standard fare and with minimal
overvolting and without pushing it too hard we were able to get the CPU to 4.2
gigahertz and the memory to 1866 megahertz
so with all that fun stuff out of the way it's time to find out how the
machine actually stacks up to a real mac pro so since neither luke nor i are
really mac guys and we don't even know like what are the benchmarks of choice
for for apple folks we decided to just you know
find another mac pro review in this case we went with mkbhd's video review of his
acor mac pro and run the same suite of benchmarks and marcus was even kind
enough to allow us to include his results in our review for easy
comparison so there you go guys we've had these overlaying here this gives you
some idea of how closely our hackintosh performs
to an acor mac pro in spite of the
dramatic difference in price between our configuration and marcus's but with the
raw performance comparison between our admittedly overclocked consumer grade
hackintosh and marcus brownlee's acor mac pro out of the way i want to be the
first to point out that this is not an apples to apples comparison so to speak
our machine is desktop grade it's consumer grade and the mac pro is
workstation grade hardware but the beauty of a hackintosh is that we
can choose whether or not to spend the extra money that workstation grade
hardware costs to make the machine more
mac pro like one big difference is the CPU we saved a ton of money going with a
core i7 but xeon chips will actually run
in a variety of atx motherboards we could have bought one of those and ecc
memory can then be used with them if we thought that that was necessary for this
config another big difference is the gpus but other than for cad or serious
3d rendering i would argue that a workstation grade GPU is a luxury not a
necessity and anyway you could once again put a quadro in the hackintosh if
you really felt like it one more thing is that our SSD solution i've mentioned
this before but i'm going to mention it again is really nothing special compared
to apple's pci express solution but
as we saw it didn't affect our benchmarks much anyway since most things
really aren't that i o limited and we could always chuck a few in there in
raid if we felt like it but like i said before an actual content creation pro
will likely be editing off a storage array connected via 10gb Ethernet usb 3
or Thunderbolt anyway which is a perfect
segue into the elephant in the room our hackintosh lacks the mac pro's six
Thunderbolt expansion ports your opinion may differ but
ultimately i believe it's okay we sacrificed those ports yes but we gained
pci express slots that will give us expansion to 10 gigabit usb 3 if needed
in the future and even allow us to set up more exotic solutions i mean for the
money that we saved we could build a wicked nas with a bunch of hard drives a
high performance raid card and a 10 gigabit Ethernet connection then we
could grab a 10 gigabit Ethernet switch and an adapter for our pc and then we've
created a storage solution that unlike a Thunderbolt enclosure which is
accessible to one pc is accessible to several and offers much more flexibility
the flip side of which is of course just like the hackintosh that it requires
more tinkering speaking of tinkering i would like to take this opportunity to
give a big thanks to andrew there's going to be a link to his website here
he helped us out a lot and asked me to
reinforce that no hackintosh guide is meant to be the be-all and end-all and
unless you're building this exact machine with this exact os you'll very
likely need a bit of assistance and that's okay the good news is that thanks
to andrew and others like him who he asked me to credit here in this video
help is out there and you can reach out to those guys who are members of this
great community if you you know your appetite was wedded by
this video and you really want to set out and make yourself a hackintosh and
if you do go for it have fun we certainly did
although we just really don't know what to do with the machine now since neither of us are really care that much about os
x maybe let me know guys if you think i should if i should legitimately try and
use it for a little while i would be as as my favorite game reviewer yahtzee
would say it's going to be about like watching a cat try to fly a kite
so we'll see anyway guys like this video if you liked
it dislike it if you disliked it you'll find a link to the parts that we used
and a discussion thread on the Linus tech tips form in the video description
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