The Build

When you build a Hackintosh (or any custom PC) you need to actually build the machine, which means getting a ton of boxes delivered to your door from Amazon, taking every one out of the package, and then assembling the computer from scratch. Before this build, I had only assembled one other computer, and that was back in the early 2000s as part of a college networking class. Things have definitely changed: some things are much easier, some things are more complex. Fortunately, there is now a website called YouTube where people walkthrough how to build a computer, and you can watch them do it and learn how to do it yourself. Incredible, right?

I watched a number of videos of people putting a Hackintosh together, from boxes to finished build, and I think that’s basically the best way to learn how to do it and to feel confident in what you can accomplish. Here are my favorites.

Building a Hackintosh is basically a 2-step process. The first step is going from boxes of parts to a completely built computer that can turn on. If you don’t have any computer hardware knowledge, or have never been elbow-deep inside a computer case before, building your Hackintosh and getting it to turn on will be challenging unless you read instruction guides, follow manuals and watch YouTube videos. I had to install and uninstall case fans multiple times, unplug and re-plug motherboard wires because other wires were in the way, so it definitely wasn’t a 30-minute process for me to get the computer to turn on.

The Setup

After I finally got my system to turn on (remember my power supply was bad, and I didn’t realize it until exhausting all other possibilities for what was going on) it was time to turn this PC into a Hackintosh, which means making it boot Mac OS X.

Something to note about running a Hackintosh: system software updates can break your configuration and stop your computer from working without some tweaks. Right now the latest non-beta version of Mac OS X is 10.11.5, so my goal was to build a Hackintosh that can run 10.11.5, which is also the minimum OS requirement for Xcode 8, needed to build apps against iOS 10. When 10.11.6 makes it out of beta, I won’t be immediately upgrading my system to it like I would have in the past with a real Mac. Instead, I’ll be keeping a keen eye on the TonyMacx86 forums and blog to make sure it’s safe and others have been successful.

To get my machine running Mac OS X, I primarily followed this TonyMacx86 step-by-step guide which walks you through the entire process. The 9to5Mac article and video linked above also has an excellent guide. In general, you need to:

Already own a Mac, download El Capitan from the App Store Have a USB stick with at least 16GB of storage Reformat the USB stick so you can boot from it Use an application called UniBeast to make the USB stick bootable Once you’ve booted from the USB stick, update some BIOS settings Install Mac OS X onto your computer’s hard drive Use an application called MultiBeast to tweak various system and driver parameters once you’ve booted into Mac OS X Download the right graphics drivers for your video card and install them onto your new Mac. Important: I had to make sure to download the right NVIDIA driver for my OS X version (10.11.5) because if you download the wrong driver, nothing works. Boot up with the nvda_drv=1 option set so your Hackintosh will use those downloaded graphics drivers. Be joyful that you have a working Hackintosh!

Not everything is rosy in Hackintosh land though, so here’s a call-out to some issues I encountered:

My audio doesn’t work. There are simple guides to make your audio work, but I haven’t followed them yet, mostly because I have a USB DAC I use, so I don’t need to use the headphone jack.

Continuity and Handoff don’t work. After a lot of research and reading, the core reason why they don’t work on most Hackintosh systems is because the chip that runs the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth needs to be a Broadcom chip which is what Apple uses for all their computers. This is the PCI-E card you need to purchase if you need Continuity and Handoff to work. I believe there are some software hacks you can use as well if you don’t want to buy that card.

iMessage on my Mac doesn’t work. Getting iMessage to work on a Hackintosh is basically the holy grail of the Hackintosh community, because its functionality is tied to your computer’s serial number and other settings, and spoofing/setting this to make iMessage work is tricky. Search for “Hackintosh iMessage El Capitan” on Google or YouTube to read more about this issue. Here’s one tutorial, but it seems a little shady.

AirDrop between this Mac and other Macs works, but I have to choose “Search for Older Macs” from AirDrop to get my Hackintosh to be discoverable. Not too annoying, but if you rely on AirDrop, keep this in mind. I’ve read that you can solve this issue by using a Broadcom Wi-Fi chip like the PCI-E card I linked above.

I had a hell of a time getting my Hackintosh to recognize and use the graphics card drivers that I downloaded. I had the right drivers, they were installed, but when I connected my monitor to my graphics card and rebooted with the nvda_drv=1 flag set (forcing my Hackintosh to use NVIDIA drivers I downloaded) the screen would go blank. After a lot of research and reading, it appears that if Mac OS X thinks your system is an iMac (you can choose what system you want to appear to be as you setup your Hackintosh, I selected a 27" iMac as it’s supposed to be a pretty compatible system definition) there’s a chance it won’t recognize a graphics card in a PCI-E slot because iMacs don’t use that slot. I found this incredible page on the TonyMacx86 forum, downloaded the AGDPFix script at the bottom of it, ran it, and now my Hackintosh works great and the graphics card is recognized. You can probably avoid this issue by choosing a Mac Pro system definition when you’re configuring MultiBeast.

Performance

People used to build Hackintoshes because they were a good bit cheaper than an equivalent Mac you could buy from Apple. Now though, since the Mac Pro hasn’t been updated in 3 years (and the components on the board were already about a year old) people are building Hackintoshes because you can build a Mac that is faster than the fastest computer Apple can sell you and, oh yeah, it costs $1,000+ less than even the base Mac Pro model. If you’re a professional photographer, programmer or video editor that currently owns a Mac Pro, Apple has forsaken you. Maybe it’s time to look into building a Hackintosh.

Here’s a comparison of my Hackintosh’s Geekbench runs compared to all other Macs. The multi-core score isn’t surprising considering my CPU only has 4 cores in it, but it does almost beat a 6-core Mac Pro. And the single core test shows my system is faster in day-to-day usage than any Mac that Apple makes.