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Zack
New Member
 
Join Date: Jun 2008
Location: Los Angeles, CA
 
2008-06-28, 07:16

Anyone curious about Hackintoshes should go ahead and build one and see for yourself. Don't start with a $1,000 system if you're afraid of the concept due to a lot of FUD from people that didn't really try all that hard- these days you can build a MHack for $300 and be amazed at how well the machine performs even at that price range.

The machines I've built are amazingly stable. I've never even seen a kernel panic on any of 3 machines I've built, and frankly, for those of you who've had that experience this late in the game, I truly believe you weren't following a decent setup guide, and didn't pay attention to use 100% compatible hardware.

It doesn't take all that much work- at this point the majority of the work has been figured out by others- if you can follow a few instructions, and take 5 minutes worth of time after the basic install to patch a few things, you can have a stable system for a fraction of the cost of say, a Mac Pro. And it will perform about 90% as good, and much better than anything else from Apple.

Yonzie, you simply didn't give the Gigabyte DS4 it's due- that's a 100% OSX compatible system, and is CHILD'S PLAY to set up so it runs correctly. There's no more to figure out to running OSX flawlessly on that setup, than there is to running it on a real Mac, because others have already figured it out, and tons of 'just connect the freakin' dots' guides for that very machine abound.

My system of very similar specs runs flawlessly, and I've been using it for Final Cut work for over a month now, no issues at all. Do any search of the web, that model board, (now the EP35-DS4 rev. 2) + Hackintosh and you'll find hundreds of satisfied MHack users.

Ditto dozens of other compatible boards.

I also built a very nice sub-$400 system based around the Intel BOXDG31 motherboard and a cheap Core2 Duo. Again, the system is flawless. Runs Final Cut, Photoshop, and everything else better than anything from Apple other than a MacPro, for so little money it's almost foolish not to build something similar if you have a need for a decent mid-range desktop Mac.

If you never see the tower, you'd never know you weren't using a 'real' Mac with either of my systems.

For anyone curious to build a hacked Mac,- check out forums like insanelymac, and read up on all the successful installs.

If you do take the plunge, don't just go by the naysayers who just want to say only Apple can get it right- not true. You can build an extremely capable Hackintosh very easily- just you have to actually commit to it, cherry pick hardware that works perfectly, and follow guides from others who have the same hardware, and GUARANTEED have already made and worked out any mistakes that it's silly to quit because of without merely taking 2 MINUTES (!!) to read up and figure things out.

With my systems, I merely *ahem* installed the OS correctly to begin with, had to patch my 8600GT video card to enable QE/CI, (literally took a minute or two), and applied a few fixes to make sure sleep worked properly. Beyond that, I've had to do nothing else involving the Mac OS specifically- it took a little bit of effort to set up quad booting with OSX, Windows XP, Linux and Vista- but that's the case no matter the OS.
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