Newbie questions regarding what Hackintosh can/can't do

[truthfulie]

Hello everyone, I am a newbie who is looking into building my first hackintosh system. I've been a Mac user for almost a decade now. But I am sick of not having a proper desktop and decided to take the matters into my own hands since Apple most likely will not be offering such product in the future considering Apple's answer to long awaited Mac Pro refresh. Enough of rambling and some questions and concerns. I want to know what a hackintosh can and cannot do. I know that most of these questions' answer will be 'depends on what hardware I use', but I'd like to know if some of these things are either straight out impossible (even with the most compatible hardware available) or almost too complicated for newbie for me to figure out.

 

• Will hackintosh have properly functioning power management? I tend to leave the PC on 24/7 so it's important for me that this will work.
• Can it use virtualization software such as Fusion and Parallels to utilize existing Windows installed SSD(I will use seperated hardware fore this for the ease of install and management instead of partitioning), similar to how they can do the same with Bootcamp partition?
• Can hacked OSX use iCloud seamlessly as a real Mac? I am also a user of various iOS device and this makes things easy  and is one of the essential feature for me.
• Will I be able to choose following GPU sets? I am considering GTX 700 series for now, but am considering Quadro in the future as this will mostly serve as a workstation.
• Will I be able to use UEFI booting option instead of legacy BIOS? Is it more challenging for me to use UEFI?

 

I apologize for the list of questions and appreciate in advance for your view and hopefully some answers. Thanks. 

 

[Alex009988]

1) yes speed step, and sleep work well on Modern intel processors. Such as Intel Core i3/5/7.

2) it works as well as on real macs

3) yes. It work very well as well as on real Macintoshes

4) there is no guarantee. It depends on certain PC. To make it working you must edit a plist of AppleGraphicsPowerManagee and

choose correct Mac model. Even if AGMP is loaded and warnings doesn't show up at Console. Graphic card can be working on constant frequency.

Ps my ATI seems to be working well as it has low temperature.

5) yes you can. But it is only possible on Clover Bootloader.

[3.14r2]

• Will hackintosh have properly functioning power management? I tend to leave the PC on 24/7 so it's important for me that this will work.
• Can it use virtualization software such as Fusion and Parallels to utilize existing Windows installed SSD(I will use seperated hardware fore this for the ease of install and management instead of partitioning), similar to how they can do the same with Bootcamp partition?
• Can hacked OSX use iCloud seamlessly as a real Mac? I am also a user of various iOS device and this makes things easy  and is one of the essential feature for me.
• Will I be able to choose following GPU sets? I am considering GTX 700 series for now, but am considering Quadro in the future as this will mostly serve as a workstation.
• Will I be able to use UEFI booting option instead of legacy BIOS? Is it more challenging for me to use UEFI?

1. Power management should work with all CPUs used in Apple products (or CPUs of the same families/lines). Again CPUs used in Apple computers will work best. There could be issues with GPU power management, but these can be avoided by using compatible hardware. As you plan to use the PC 24/7, sleep/wake function is not important to you, but it may not always work with some notebooks. Another thing to note that properly working power management, may (and usually does) require some additional adjustments in Hackintosh specific files. It is not like with Macs - install it and forget it. Here the logic is different - install it, configure it and then forget it.
2. Virtualisation in general, does work as with Macs (have Windos XP running in Fusion). I'm not familiar with running Windows in virtual environment using the existing Windows installation on a HDD, so can't tell if it will work.
3. There could be issues with iCloud, but it can be avoided with proper hardware or there are methods to fix this.
4. UEFI can be used. It is not more challenging then legacy boot. As Alex Auditore said, just use the UEFI compatible bootloader (Clover) instead of legacy mode only bootloader (Chameleon).

Some other notes:

• Bootcamp will not work on Hackintoshes (not that you'd need it on a PC, but still).
• Software updates (OS X version updates) may sometimes mess the OS X, but again it is hardware specific and depends greatly on how the system is configure (both hardware and software wise).
• You should be prepared to face issues that are not present on Macs, but in general these could be avoided by carefully choosing the hardware.

[Alex009988]

[*]Bootcamp will not work on Hackintoshes (not that you'd need it on a PC, but still).

I always thought that everybody, who has UEFI PC, have this opportunity.

http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ru&tl=en&u=http%3A//www.applelife.ru/threads/uefi-clover-boot-camp.37641/

[theconnactic]

1) Yes, when you're using compatible CPUs. This includes but are not limited to Intel Core2Duos, Nehalem/Westmere i5/i7s, Sandy Bridge i5/i7s and Ivy Bridge i5/i7s (which are a little bit harder to configure than the other three). Haswell i5/i7s PM support is not officially out, but should be no problem when Mavericks reaches the App Store. I didn't list any i3 CPU because apple doesn't use them, and if you want a high-end computer they're not an option. LGA 2011 PM is a controversial subject, but these CPUs are supported by RampageDev, one of our best developers, so you should ask him directly in his blog about LGA 2011 status. Graphics Power management is heavily dependable of using compatible GPUs, as 3.14r2 said;

 

2) Conventional virtualization ("VT-x") works out of the box as long is enabled in the BIOS, and that means all virtualization software will work without issues. There's no way to use your real Windows hard disk as a virtual machine (but you can access it from a VM and even clone it to a VM), and that's true even for real Macs: boot camp installations cannot be used as virtual machines, being nothing more than Apple EFI's version of a dual boot machine. By all effects, Chameleon/Clover is boot camp, as long as each OS has its own HDD, unless you enable quiet boot;

 

3) As for now, iCloud services and other services like FaceTime and iMessage are rather easy to set up, but there's no guarantees Apple will make no changes that break them for hackintoshes. That happened recently, when an internal update broke the way iMessage was set up on non-Apple HW, and it was only fixed thanks to a bunch of very savvy users;

 

4) You can google for a list of cards that are used by real Macs: all of them will work pretty out of the box, including some Quadro and, when the new MacPro reaches retail, FirePro models;

 

5) UEFI boot can be used but it's not as mature as legacy boot. But Clover has a very active team of developers who seem capable to fix any reported bugs quickly. You must read the Clover forums and pick up the motherboard models that are supported the most, if you really want UEFI boot. The model which comes immediately to my mind is the GA-Z77-UD5H from Gigabyte, which has even a UEFI boot tutorial written in the Genius Bar section.

 

All in all, a Z77-UD5H/i7-3770K/GTX 680 combo plus a good power source, lots of ram and at least one SSD will give you a pretty reasonable prosumer machine around your budget.

 

All the best!

[3.14r2]

I always thought that everybody, who has UEFI PC, have this opportunity.

http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ru&tl=en&u=http%3A//www.applelife.ru/threads/uefi-clover-boot-camp.37641/

Sure, but only if Clover is used in UEFI mode (it can also be used in Legacy mode). Chameleon does not support BootCamp at all.

[truthfulie]

Thank you everyone for your time and answers much appreciated! I didn't think I would get such great responses from many of you.

[theconnactic]

No problem, and welcome to Insanelymac!

[RobertX]

1) I didn't list any i3 CPU because apple doesn't use them,

...perhaps not currently, but... there was the iMac 21.5 inch i3 3.06 GHz 

[theconnactic]

Thank you, Robert! I stand corrected!