Hackintosh

Over Christmas break I built a Hackintosh. I was partly inspired by my son, Adam, who built, a few months ago, an Intel i7 920 based Hackintosh using a solid state hard drive, an ASUS P6T Deluxe V2 motherboard, 6GB of Corsair memory, and a Sapphire Radeon HD4870 1GB DDR5 Dual DVI / TVO PCI-Express Graphics Card. I was also inspired by a Hackintosh how-to article on Lifehacker. I could have gone the safe route and used the exact components of Adam’s or the Lifehacker build. Instead i decided to build a Hackintosh based on the Intel i7 860 Lynnfield. From reports on tech websites the 860 seems like a slightly better processor than the 920 (for example, this anandtech review). Both are of a 4 core/8 thread design, but the 860 has a slightly better clock speed and a higher single core turbo frequency. My build included the Gigabyte GA-P55-UD3R, 8GB of Patriot memory, and a GeForce 9800 video card (based mainly on its compatibility with Snow Leopard). The total cost of the build was around $700 (not including a case, power supply, and a CD/DVD drive, which I salvaged from my previous computer–an Ubuntu Box I built).

Regarding installing Snow Leopard, I was unsuccessful in getting either the boot CD method or the USB method to work with this build (both methods described on the  tonymacx86 website). The method that did work was to install the OS on the hard drive by using another Mac. My Hackintosh runs the stock 10.6.2 kernel. I used a DSDT specific to my motherboard and available at DSDT Database for P55 Motherboards. To get networking working I used a kext specific to the network chipset. Most of the information on how to do this is available on the tonymacx86 website. Sound does not work even with trying various kexts specific to the audio chipset. I hope to resolve this by using a usb audio interface. Other than sound, everything seems to be working great!