Hey guys. Looking to build my first desktop hackintosh.

[lichy13]

Hi all, greetings from Leeds. I have been reading through many posts over the past few days/weeks and am really impressed with the hackintosh community which exists here at insanelymac.com. I have just registered and am looking forward to becoming a part of what you have here. I have got a hacintoshed dell mini 10v which has been running OS X snow leopard for over a year now, it is a great little machine and have found it runs really well with OS X compared to XP, W7 and Ubuntu.

 

Recently, I've been eyeing up Apple's current iMac range and was very close to buying one until a couple of weeks ago. I thought I'd dig around and find a hackintosh community for desktops and have a go at accompanying my netbook with a desktop version with the extra power that I need. I have an ageing PC desktop which I've had for close to 7 years now. Each year I've slowly been upgrading it bit by bit, component by component until I can't really get anything more out of it. Also, I have an overwhelming urge to move over to OS X completely (maybe a bit of windows for some odd gaming). At the moment it has an AMD 6000+ overclocked to 3.6ghz with a corsair h50 for cooling, M2N-SLI mobo, 4gb 800mhz ram, nVidia 8800gt and an ocz 64gb vertex II SSD as my boot drive with a couple of 250gb drives in there for media.

 

So, I want to hackintosh this desktop. From my research and reading it seems that all I need to buy is a new mobo and intel cpu to go along with it. I am completely happy with purchasing these two components providing that I'll be able to achieve the OSX install. My ultimate question from this post is what is the least problematic hardware to purchase that will allow for a silky smooth install of OSX.

 

I've read that Asus and Gigabyte mobos are the best to deal with but I'm lost when it comes down to current models as quite a lot of what I've read is at least 6months old (this may well be my searching skills, in which case, please point me in the right direction). I think the current core 'i' processors are my best bet too, with the i3 looking to be a bit of steal at roughly £85. But if you guys recommend quad core and i5, I will definitely consider it. I wouldn't really like to spend past £200 (but will go higher) on this build seeing as it is supposed to be a mega money saver compared to buying an iMac.

 

I completely understand that it is common to run into problems and I have probably encountered them just as much as anyone else coming from my macbook 'mini' I'd simply love to hear your suggestions on which motherboard and cpu to purchase to achieve a stable, fully functioning OSX install.

 

Also, I'm assuming that my current nVidia card will be fine. I understand that graphics cards can cause a lot of problems.

 

Cheers guys!