Building the Perfect Hackintosh or Buying a New Mac Pro, Which is For You?

Sometimes, even those working in a Windows environment want to experience Mac OS at some point, but don’t want to give up the flexibility of a PC and some wouldn’t mind jumping into the Mac platform but simply cannot afford one, which results in those above looking towards a Hackintosh.

Apple really has not done a lot since 2008 with the advancement of the Mac Pro, the machine that many studios and media editors earn their bread and butter on, and that has respectively cost them sales. From 2008-2012 the same case, look and essentially most upgrade options has remained the same with motherboard, CPU and memory option upgrades, but always a few steps behind the real McCoy PCs with SATA 3, Thunderbolt, etc. That is supposed to change when the new “Trashcan” Mac Pro comes out, but what if you want something right now that is affordable and actually smokes even the latest available Mac Pro? That is why we are here today, so lets talk new Mac Pro for a moment.

Apple’s upcoming 2013 Mac Pro has steered away from the big bulky Silver Mac Pro of Christmas past in favor of a much smaller and more externally expandable system than any of the previous generation Mac Pro systems. The one big thing that I and most Mac Pro users liked about the Mac Pro was its internal expandability options that are almost entirely nixed in favor of external options.

You will have to have an external Thunderbolt 2 chassis that will have to be used in order to house the PCI cards that many people have already invested in so it’s a mixed bag of good and bad I suppose depending on your outlook or need. These changes may garnish some sales for those who just want to have a Mac Pro regardless of investment costs and Apple is probably relying on that factor to pump money back into their already silver lined pockets. My friends who just have to have the latest will of course jump into this head first, but I am not axing out my Mac Pro.

For a new buyer or for someone who already has some cash invested in parts, but wants the newer options that are available on Intel’s latest motherboards and CPUs, but cannot afford or plainly fragging hates Apple, there is another way. The way of the Hackintosh. Now, before we continue, I want to clear up a couple things because a lot of those wanting to dive into a Hackintosh aren’t sure if it’s ok on the legal side of things and don’t want the police knocking on there door or Apple’s legal team dropping by with a present. If you plan on selling a Hackintosh, whether that’s on eBay, your own website, ect, then you will get in trouble. If you make sure to legally purchase the OS and build one for your own use, then you’re a-ok.

I have to say thanks right off the bat to the folks over at tonymacx86.com and InsanelyMac as without their recourses and guidance these types of builds could never happen as everyone who is building one has gone to their site for information at one point or another.  I will state that Hackintosh systems can be a bit buggy sometimes, but overall you can usually find a workaround to get where you need to be albeit sometimes it does take some brainwork to make things run smooth.

I have built now at least 7 different versions of a Hack and everyone had its little quirk, even the one I am working on now as to open the CD I cannot have any music program open or the door will not open requiring a restart to open the damn thing, but beyond that is it a smoking machine that smokes my current 2008 quad-core Mac Pro. The really cool things about a Hackintosh are that all the things you like about a PC can usually be used on your Hack, things like the coolest case, custom looking mods and whatever you can think of can be put into your build making it way more personal. The one thing about the Mac Pro that I think has just bugged me is it does look so sterile after years of viewing it, as well as its limitations as far as SATA 3 and Thunderbolt goes as well.

At this point in time it seems very feasible to do a DIY Mac Pro that not only will save you some hard earned cash, it will also be amazingly faster, which is always worth talking about. So if you are still reading that means this must be of interest to you so now lets talk about putting together a machine that not only can have the flair of a custom PC, you can also the ability to run any of the applications that are native to the Mac environment. Not only that if you spend a little bit more time and effort you can build a dual-boot machine that can double as your gaming and your productivity rig. That to me is the biggest appeal and usually how I make my personal systems unless they are going into a music situation, as in that case I just keep it a clean Hackintosh build and move forward. The most tricky thing about building a Hackintosh system is the parts as believe me the difference is night and day depending on what you put into your build. Mac-World did a Frankenmac build, we did the Blackintosh build and many others have had their spin on the system, but using the correct parts internally is the most important factor in any Hack build regardless of name.

So now lets talk parts and the ones that we have seen work well for us as well as the suggested parts by the guys over at Mac World. My experience has shown that using Gigabyte motherboards has shown the most success overall, but the Mac World guys went with an ASUS board that they claim worked just fine after some initial software glitches. Let me just say this for the record, building a Hackintosh is not the simple just insert the disc and away we go and the truth is my best Hacks have come from a combined effort of both a PC guy and a Mac guy working together as the PC guys usually know how to build and the Mac guys understand the quirks of the Mac OS you need to understand to get the system functioning like a normal Mac. I am not going to do a build guide as I fell others have already done a great job of educating people on how to the build, but the parts that I am going to list work 100% with no BS problems other than a driver tweak here and there. So far I have build at least 10 Hackintosh systems and the parts used on my latest builds have worked for me and for others so I am confident they will work for you in your build.

If you have read this article until this point I will assume you are into this or at least open minded to the idea so lets talk preparation and some things that you will need before even getting started. As I stated earlier you will need to buy the OS which you will need access to a Mac to do, then you will need a USB thumb drive as the OS will go on that device and will be used in the process of creating your personal Hack. If you are planning on doing a Dual Boot system, it is very important to make sure your BOOT drive has ample room on it. Some of the new terms you will get to know will be UniBeast and MultiBeast both things that are used in the configuration of your Hackintosh. I know that some people have tried unsuccessfully build themselves a functioning Hackintosh using random parts that have not been tried and tested by the hard-core people at tonymacX86 and I would strongly suggest not taking that route and trusting in the footsteps of those who took the time to figure out what ticks. I am going to list a series of parts both of which have been known to work well and without too many hurdles needing jumped over in order to get them to work. The first system listed was called the Bride Of FrankenMac that was featured originally on Mac World and the other is the Jumping Jack Mac that was originally featured on Newegg TV by yours truly and it has worked flawlessly since we built it 4 months ago.

Here are the parts for the Bride of Frankenmac system.

• Asus P8Z77-VPro/Thunderbolt motherboard with USB 3, Thunderbolt, and 7 PCI slots in a variety of flavors
• Quad-core Intel Core i7-3770 processor
• EVGA Nvidia GeForce 660Ti graphics card
• Seagate Barracuda ST11000DM003 7200-rpm hard drive
• Blu-ray drive
• 16GB of Crucial Ballistix Sport DDR-1600 RAM
• Antec EarthWatts 750W power supply
• Cooler Master ATX Mid Tower Case with room for up to 8 drives

Here are the parts for the Jumping Jack Mac system.

• Gigabyte Z77-UD5H
• Quad-core Intel Core i7-3770k processor
• Thermaltake Water 2.0 Pro CPU Cooler
• Gigabyte GeForce GTX 680 graphics card
• ADATA 128GB mSATA drive
• WD 1TB SATA 3 Black drive
• DVD/RW
• 16GB of Kingston HyperX Beast at 1866MHz
• Thermaltake Toughpower 750W PSU
• Thermaltake Level 10GT White Edition Case

If you have built a PC before this is just like that only with a few extra steps along the way to get it running properly with all the drivers intact. The only real tricky part is if you are doing a dual Windows/ Mac OS system as that does require that you partition the primary hard drive into 2 partitions and sometimes the drivers take a few workarounds to get working exactly right on the Hackintosh side of things, but nothing that cannot be achieved if you follow the directions on the site www.tonymacx86.com. I could write up something, but this dude and his followers have done so much for the ‘Hack” community that its just better to direct to the folks who do this for fun and more. I can tell you from personal experience though that a Hackintosh if done right can work as well if not better than its current Mac Pro counterpart.

For video editing, Photoshop and music a Hack machine can save you a lot of hard earned cash over a traditional Mac product and for those who want the functionality and productivity benefits of a Mac Pro, but can’t afford one, this is the “A” ticket folks. I would have added the links to the actual videos of my system, but Newegg removed them after I quit working there, but you guys have seen us build the Blackintosh and a few other Hacks for our home use and all have worked just fine. Before I finalize this article I want to give warning to the one major thing that messes a Hackintosh up and that is updating the Mac OS before making sure all your parts have been certified with your build, there is usually a patch or program that will fix all the issues, but this is the only thing in my personal experience that is a setback to a Hack as you have to wait awhile to do the update. Really no big deal as waiting a month just to do an OS upgrade is really not worth complaining about in the long haul.  If you are a Apple fan and Mac Pro user sick of limitations or a person who wants to be able to utilize Apple software, but without a big budget building the perfect Hackintosh may be just what you are looking for.

Source: MacWorld