I just finished a 48-hour Hackintosh building marathon. It was a fun experience and I learned a lot of new things.

In this post I’ll try to convince you to choose a Hackintosh as your next main computer.

Why a Hackintosh?

Performance 🚀

At the moment the current Mac line up is pretty obsolete in terms of the performance. Sure, new products are just around the corner, but you be one step ahead by building your machine with the components you want (or need).

Flexibility ⚒

Try to swap the RAM on your iMac / MacBook. Not a very fun task, right?

What if you want a new, more powerful GPU? It’s not happening.

Replacing faulty components? Call Apple.

Overclocking your CPU? Just forget about it.

With a custom build Hackintosh, you can always swap out older components for newer ones, and easily change them if they stop working for some reason.

Price–performance ratio 💰

Needless to say that it would a very bad investment to throw a couple of thousands of dollars on a 3-year-old Mac Pro when you can get twice the performance with a custom-built computer.

My Build 🖱

When I started choosing my components, I had four things in mind: I wanted a fully macOS compatible motherboard, powerful overclockable CPU, plenty of RAM, and a decent GPU.

I mainly do mobile/web development, and occasionally some Photoshop/Sketch/Light video editing. So these are the components I found to be the best for those tasks:

Motherboard : Gigabyte Z170MX-Gaming 5

: Gigabyte Z170MX-Gaming 5 Processor : Intel Core i7–6700K (Overclocked at 4.5Ghz)

: Intel Core i7–6700K (Overclocked at 4.5Ghz) Memory : G.SKILL Ripjaws V Series 32GB DDR4, 3200Mhz

: G.SKILL Ripjaws V Series 32GB DDR4, 3200Mhz GPU : Gigabyte GeForce GTX 960, 4GB

: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 960, 4GB PSU : Corsair CS650M

: Corsair CS650M CPU Cooler : Corsair H100i v2

: Corsair H100i v2 SSD : Samsung 850 Evo, 500GB

: Samsung 850 Evo, 500GB Wi-Fi : TP-Link PCI-E card

: TP-Link PCI-E card Case: BitFenix Prodigy M, Arctic White

Total Price: ≈$1350

What To Expect

Switching from a 2014 Retina MacBook Pro, the difference in performance is fairly noticeable. Compiling an app is now 3x faster, export times dropped significantly, and now I can finally use my Mac with more than 10 tabs opened in Chrome.

Here are the Cinebench results for you geeks:

And the mandatory (wannabe) sexy-shots of the finalized build: