I love Macs. I have 3 Macbooks, 1 Macbook Pro, and 2 iMacs in the house. Of course, all of them are being used by the rest of the family. My workhorse is a PC running Ubuntu/XP Pro — Until now… That’s right, I built a HACKINTOSH!
Continue reading if you want to see what and how I did it…
This is not for the faint of heart. If you’ve had trouble installing Ubuntu or Vista, you probably don’t want to be doing this. For the rest of you, this could be a fun little exercise.
First of all, you have to do a ton of reading. You can’t simply run out and get some hardware from NewEgg and just install OSx on it. The primary source of my reading was at the OSx86 project site. The site has two parts: the wiki side which is the OSx86 portion and the forum side – insanelymac. I would recommend that you start with the forums to see what other people are doing. Once you feel a little comfortable, head over to the wiki where you can find lists of compatible equipment to choose from.
In my case, my existing rig was getting a little long in the tooth and didn’t have the horsepower to run some of the latest and greatest PC games out on the market. So my main objective was to build a gaming rig and see if I could get a Hackintosh installed on it in a dual boot situation. It worked out so well, I made the OS X partition my default partition and now I only reboot when I want to play those PC games.
So here is the equipment I ordered for this little project:
- GIGABYTE GA-P35C-DS3R LGA 775 Intel P35 ATX Intel Motherboard
- 2x Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3250410AS 250GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive
- EVGA 512-P3-N802-AR GeForce 8800GT Superclocked 512MB Video Card
- Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Kentsfield 2.4GHz LGA 775 Quad-Core Processor Model BX80562Q6600
- Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound
- LITE-ON 20X DVD±R DVD Burner with LightScribe Black SATA Model LH-20A1L-05
- Antec P182SE Silver Mirror-finished stainless steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case
- Silverstone 6″ ATX extension cable kit Model PP04
- COOLER MASTER SLC-S41-U1 Copper Fan&Heatsinks
- Antec True Power Trio TP3-650 ATX12V 650W Power Supply with Three 12V Rails
- ARCTIC COOLING Freezer 7 Pro 92mm CPU Cooler
- 2x G.SKILL 4GB(2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)
- ViewSonic VX2835WM 28″ Piano Black 3ms(GTG) Widescreen FULL HD 1080p HDMI LCD Monitor
All the above can be order from NewEgg. All hardware w/o the monitor cost me about $1400 – not including all rebates, etc. If you build this rig, I doubt if you need as much memory or disk space — and I did go crazy on the case — but OMG! what a case. Click on the link above if you don’t believe me.
I do recommend two hard drives however. One for each OS. You technically don’t need to do this as you can mess with partitions on a single drive to have the same effect. I wanted more flexibility so I went with a two hard drive situation.
I’ll write more about how I got all the above working with OSX in another article. For now, let me say that EVERYTHING works with OSX! Sound, networking, even the graphics card is running that 28″ monitor at full resolution (1920×1200). Even after owning and working on this rig for the last week or so, I’m still in love with it. Stay tune for other articles on this build.