Ultimate Overclocked Hackintosh Workstation Build Guide
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
3,668 words · ~18 min read
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with its factory tuning and data center dna an Intel 730 series SSD is an
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amazing choice for gamers and performance enthusiasts
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welcome to our mac pro killer hackintosh
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guide the goal here was to build a video editing or general content creation
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machine that runs os 10 mavericks and delivers similar raw performance and
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low noise operation to a premium 8 core
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mac pro but at a much lower price so
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let's open this right off the bat with the answer to the big question why would
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you want to build a hackintosh we all know at least the folks who are somewhat
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paying attention know that spec for spec hardware for hardware if you actually
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tried to build the exact same thing apple pcs are fairly price competitive
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these days with an equivalent pc so why not just buy an apple well couple of
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reasons number one is to save money as i
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just mentioned like four seconds ago buying the same hardware apple is using
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to build a pc will usually yield a similar pricing but the trick is that
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apple's hardware choices are not always the best bang for the buck and by
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choosing completely different hardware similar performance can sometimes be
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achieved for much cheaper especially if you're willing to get into a little
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overclocking number two is that apple doesn't always design their hardware
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with upgradability in mind and by adding extra pci express cards and better
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hardware over time the life of a system can be significantly extended something
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you can't do with RAM solder to your motherboard or a complete absence of
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internal storage and pci express expansion number three is that you might just be a
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tinkerer who also appreciates os 10 and
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just plain old wants to do it in which case rock on brother
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now that's not to say that hackintoshing doesn't come with challenges you need to
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carefully select your hardware ahead of time like seriously carefully sometimes
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even video card firmware revisions or
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motherboard BIOS updates can cause problems and even then while support for
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stuff like wireless and onboard sound is much better now than it was in the early
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days you might still not be able to get certain stuff like advanced CPU power
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management features working that last bit is actually an issue we're still
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having on this particular machine but ive hackintoshing is still in early
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stages and there are actually other boards it works on so i'd be surprised
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if that last issue doesn't get resolved for our rig at some point here so let's
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walk through the rationale of our parts choices we went with a six core core i7
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4930k this chip at stock speeds is about
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equivalent to the six cores neon that's available for the mac pro xeon
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advantages include support for ecc registered memory dimms an essential
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feature on servers and suggested on workstations but something that many
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folks can live without and theoretically tighter quality control but frankly
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anything that says Intel on the box could say tighter qc and i would believe
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it anyway for RAM we went with the highest performance most compatible just
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best 64 gig ddr3 2400 megahertz kit that
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we could find g skills rip jaw z 8x8 kit
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even though we knew we'd end up running it at 1866 or 2133 on this particular
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board running it below spec gives us peace of mind that we're not even
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pushing the rated limits of it so we should be in pretty good shape there our
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motherboard is a Gigabyte x79 up4
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Gigabyte boards are famous for being relatively easy to get going in
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hackintosh's and this one ended up being fairly straightforward other than the
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power management thing that's still being worked on our video card is a gtx
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780 reference card and we chose it for its excellent compute performance and
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great acoustics remember that goal of this system you're going to want to
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avoid non-reference cards for the most part unless you can find evidence that
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they are specifically supported or that they can at least be successfully
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flashed with the BIOS of a card that does work and GPU support is something
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that changes frequently so make sure to double check before clicking that buy
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button other silence optimized components in the system include our ax860i power
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supply that only runs the fan under medium to heavy system load our nhu 12s
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CPU cooler from Noctua our nf f12 case
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fans also from Noctua and our nzxt h440
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case with this tower CPU cooling setup
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we avoid needing the loud fans that come with our RAM to keep them cool and by
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switching all the case fans to undervolted Noctua fans for the h440 we
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are able to achieve near silence for our system just like the mac pro
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finally the SSD was actually a component that i waffled on a fair bit but i ended
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up going with a samsung 840 evo 500 gig
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because i wanted capacity enough for some growing room so it's not like you
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download a couple videos and photos off the internet and boom your drives full
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but i actually didn't care that much about performance beyond
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making sure i wasn't using magnetic media for my boot drive
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this choice was based on my assumption
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that serious content creators are not doing real work on an SSD no not even a
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one terabyte one in spite of apple's marketing about how fast it is and how
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great it is for working on 4k video because it's just not enough space
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anyway and whether those professionals
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want to expand the internal storage of the machine with a raid array or build a
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nas they're going to be keeping their massive images and raw 4k footage
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somewhere else anyway so the SSD just needs to be fast enough to run the os
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and applications so with that in my head even though there are tons of other
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storage options available especially because this system actually has storage
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options i chose an SSD with middling performance decent background garbage
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collection an excellent price to performance to
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capacity ratio so without further ado
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get yourselves a mac because you'll need one to create
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your bootable media as well as a couple of usb drives one for the actual os
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installation and one for like drivers and stuff just to have that handy and
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i'm gonna hand off to luke to show you how to install os 10 mavericks
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on a pc first you're going to want to download
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os x mavericks this will come from the apple website and can only be downloaded
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on a mac next you're going to want to download my hack this should be done on the same
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computer that you downloaded os x on now go into your downloads folder and
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open the myhack.dmg accept the terms and conditions or else
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it won't work go to your applications folder and drag
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and drop the icon that's on the desktop for myhack into the applications folder
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then double click the myhack symbol in the application window
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select open on the popup type in your password
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select create os x installer
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let it know which version of osx you want to install
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select the drive you want to install it on that should be a flash drive
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and just tell it to scan your system to find os x considering you downloaded it
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earlier it'll find it right away and then just click ok now you've got quite a way ahead of you
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this will take a little while just a heads up
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near the end of the my hack installation process it'll ask you if you want to
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patch the installer for mbr support the answer that is no you should be
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installing your os x on a guid partition type and you won't need the mbr support
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because of that next you want to download your
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motherboards dmg directly off of dev's website you can do that by going to the
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x79 dmg downloads page and selecting the manufacturer for your motherboard
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once you're there you're going to scroll down and select the actual model of your motherboard for this example we're using
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a ga x79 up4 so we'll download that dmg
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right now next you're going to want to take that
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dmg you just downloaded and move it to a flash drive for later use
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next you're going to want to boot onto that flash drive that you were just setting up
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under startup volume you're going to want to select my hack install disk and
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then for boot flags if you're running lga 2011 or lga 1366 you're gonna run
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dash v space cpus equal one space npci
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equals zero x 2000. if you're running lga 1150 or 1155 you're gonna run one uh
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dash v and pci equals zero x2 000 no need for that cpus equal one flag you
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will also need unique parameters depending on what graphics card you have
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so if you have an AMD 6800 series card or an NVIDIA gtx 500 series card or
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NVIDIA 610 or 650 ti you will need to
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use the parameter graphics enabler equal yes if you have an AMD 7000 series plus
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card or an NVIDIA gtx 660 plus or an
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NVIDIA gtx 760 plus you'll need to use
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the graphics enabler equals no flag
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once the beach ball finally stops spinning you're going to select your preferred language
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and then go to the utilities tab disk utility
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select the hard drive or SSD that you want to install a macOS x onto
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for format you're going to use macOS extended journaled name it whatever you
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want i name it macdrive and then click erase
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once it's done erasing you can simply close this window
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and then click continue agree to the terms and conditions so you
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can actually do anything select that drive that we just set up
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and click install
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near the end of your osx mavericks install hack will pop up asking you
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about extra folders completely ignore this popup do not click on it do not
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click on anything just hard restart the computer
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if you run into a halt on system uptime in nanoseconds in verbose mode i would
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recommend going into your BIOS and resetting to default so the only time i
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actually ran into this problem was when i was overclocking but as some of you
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might be running this setup on a system that you've had before which might be
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overclocked this is just a heads up this also applies later in the video when we
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talk about overclocking all right now that we've done the initial install
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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
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then enter the same parameter flags as you did when you first use the
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installation disk to do the initial setup
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all right now you can relax a little bit you're in the easy mode part now you
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just got to set up your user account and then you're good to go after that you're
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going to want to select my computer does not connect to the internet because you have no drivers right now so it's not
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going to connect to the internet anyways
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other than that everything's pretty much up to you until we get into the operating system
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now you're going to want to grab that flash drive we put the dmg on and
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extract the dmg next you're going to want to go into files tools and then run
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kext helper b7 going back to your motherboard
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manufacturer and then your then the text folder inside of there you're going to
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want to grab all the kecks that are there move them to the kext helper 0.7
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application type in your password
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and then just click easy install
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ignore the reboot instruction you do not want to reboot at
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this point this error message is fine it's saying that it's from an
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unidentified developer but it's loading
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anyways so it's okay don't worry about it again just ignore the reboot
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next you're going to want to go into your chameleon folder once inside you're going to want to drag the extra folder
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into the macintosh hd shortcut and click
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authenticate and then type in your password
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next you're going to want to go into the files directory and then into your
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motherboard manufacturers folder after that you'll go into the model
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number of your motherboard into the ssdt folder and then into the respective
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manufacture of your graphics cards folder then you have to open up your macintosh
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hd link that we opened earlier and then go into that extras folder that you
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dragged into there previously and move the ssdt file into that extra folder
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now we get to install the bootloader so you're going to want to go into the flash drive that you used to install
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your operating system and then open the my hack shortcut once that's open you
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should type in your password select install chameleon you're going to
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want to install it to root which is just the forward slash
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and it should be done very quickly now that you've installed the majority
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of your drivers and you have your bootloader installed you can actually
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restart your system you don't have to boot it up with any parameters you just
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have to make sure that you select your mac drive and you boot there but i do
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recommend using verbose mode also known as dash v in the parameter sector so
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that you can actually see everything that's going on and see what it's halting on if it fails to boot
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now you're going to want to identify what audio patch you need you can do
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this by going to your motherboard's manufacturer's website going to the specifications and checking out the
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audio codec that it uses for us it is a real tech alc alc892 codec next we're
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going to use that handy dandy dmg that we downloaded earlier to install the
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other drivers although this time we're going to go into
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files and then the manufacturer of our motherboards folder and then into kext
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again but instead of using the kex we'll use the safari download links in this
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case all we need is alc892 although i do download all of them
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once they're downloaded you're just going to want to go into the folder of the one that lines up with the codec
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that your motherboard uses so in this case again alc892
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there are many command files within this patch folder you're going to have to find the one whose last numerics within
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the name line up with the last numerics in the codec that your motherboard uses
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so in this case 9 after running this command file security
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is gonna freak out you're gonna have to allow it to run the script you can do that by going to system preferences
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security and privacy and clicking open anyway
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once the command window opens up type your password and press enter and then
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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
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you've installed your bootloader and all your other drivers
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overclocking this platform is pretty standard fare and with minimal
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overvolting and without pushing it too hard we were able to get the CPU to 4.2
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gigahertz and the memory to 1866 megahertz
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so with all that fun stuff out of the way it's time to find out how the
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machine actually stacks up to a real mac pro so since neither luke nor i are
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really mac guys and we don't even know like what are the benchmarks of choice
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for for apple folks we decided to just you know
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find another mac pro review in this case we went with mkbhd's video review of his
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acor mac pro and run the same suite of benchmarks and marcus was even kind
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enough to allow us to include his results in our review for easy
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comparison so there you go guys we've had these overlaying here this gives you
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some idea of how closely our hackintosh performs
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to an acor mac pro in spite of the
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dramatic difference in price between our configuration and marcus's but with the
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raw performance comparison between our admittedly overclocked consumer grade
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hackintosh and marcus brownlee's acor mac pro out of the way i want to be the
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first to point out that this is not an apples to apples comparison so to speak
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our machine is desktop grade it's consumer grade and the mac pro is
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workstation grade hardware but the beauty of a hackintosh is that we
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can choose whether or not to spend the extra money that workstation grade
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hardware costs to make the machine more
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mac pro like one big difference is the CPU we saved a ton of money going with a
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core i7 but xeon chips will actually run
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in a variety of atx motherboards we could have bought one of those and ecc
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memory can then be used with them if we thought that that was necessary for this
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config another big difference is the gpus but other than for cad or serious
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3d rendering i would argue that a workstation grade GPU is a luxury not a
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necessity and anyway you could once again put a quadro in the hackintosh if
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you really felt like it one more thing is that our SSD solution i've mentioned
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this before but i'm going to mention it again is really nothing special compared
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to apple's pci express solution but
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as we saw it didn't affect our benchmarks much anyway since most things
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really aren't that i o limited and we could always chuck a few in there in
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raid if we felt like it but like i said before an actual content creation pro
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will likely be editing off a storage array connected via 10gb Ethernet usb 3
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or Thunderbolt anyway which is a perfect
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segue into the elephant in the room our hackintosh lacks the mac pro's six
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Thunderbolt expansion ports your opinion may differ but
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ultimately i believe it's okay we sacrificed those ports yes but we gained
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pci express slots that will give us expansion to 10 gigabit usb 3 if needed
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in the future and even allow us to set up more exotic solutions i mean for the
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money that we saved we could build a wicked nas with a bunch of hard drives a
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high performance raid card and a 10 gigabit Ethernet connection then we
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could grab a 10 gigabit Ethernet switch and an adapter for our pc and then we've
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created a storage solution that unlike a Thunderbolt enclosure which is
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accessible to one pc is accessible to several and offers much more flexibility
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the flip side of which is of course just like the hackintosh that it requires
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more tinkering speaking of tinkering i would like to take this opportunity to
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give a big thanks to andrew there's going to be a link to his website here
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he helped us out a lot and asked me to
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reinforce that no hackintosh guide is meant to be the be-all and end-all and
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unless you're building this exact machine with this exact os you'll very
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likely need a bit of assistance and that's okay the good news is that thanks
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to andrew and others like him who he asked me to credit here in this video
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help is out there and you can reach out to those guys who are members of this
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great community if you you know your appetite was wedded by
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this video and you really want to set out and make yourself a hackintosh and
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if you do go for it have fun we certainly did
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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
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x maybe let me know guys if you think i should if i should legitimately try and
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use it for a little while i would be as as my favorite game reviewer yahtzee
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would say it's going to be about like watching a cat try to fly a kite
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so we'll see anyway guys like this video if you liked
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it dislike it if you disliked it you'll find a link to the parts that we used
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and a discussion thread on the Linus tech tips form in the video description
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as well thank you for watching and as always don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips for unboxings reviews
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