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My $300 Hackintosh

Vic320

By Vic320,
in Hardware Components and Drivers

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Vic320
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I recently decided to build a hackintosh and like most people, I initially thought about building the most powerful “monster” machine I could afford. After doing some research I started to get nervous that I would spend $1,000 or more on hardware and end up with a machine that could not run MacOS well, if at all so I decided to go the other way and see if I could build a machine for less than $300. If it worked, then I could feel confident spending more and upgrading the hardware.

 

To be fair, I was only able to build this hackintosh for less than $300 because I already had some key components. First, I had a 250GB hard drive laying around. I also had a Apple OEM nVidea GeForce 7300 GT card that was pulled from a MacPro some years back. I also had a Pioneer DVR-109 DVD drive. If you have to buy everything, you will need to spend closer to $450 to build this box. This is still a lot cheaper than an iMac or even a Mac Mini and you gain quite a bit.

 

I also am not including the keyboard, mouse or monitor in this price. You will need these regardless of what machine you build and any USB keyboard or mouse will work - I am sure you can scrape these up just about anywhere — you can find these on the side of the road on trash day. Lastly, older CRT monitors are a dime a dozen now days. I happen to have two Dell LCD displays that I am using in my setup that work just fine (the nVidea GeForce 7300 GT supports two displays) but if you are on a tight budget, a CRT will work just fine but they won’t give you the best image.

 

For this machine I purchased a Gigabyte H55-USB3 motherboard which supports the i3, i5 and i7 processors. This is an LGA1156 socket ATX motherboard. I also purchased the Intel Core i3-540 processor since it was the least expensive I could find. Lastly, I purchased two 2GB Kingston memory DIMMs (DDR3 1333 PC3 10600 Model KVR1333D3N9K2/4G) that is listed on Gigabyte’s compatibility chart for this motherboard. Since this motherboard supports the i7 processor, this gives me an upgrade path.

 

I also bought the Linkworld F3131-C2628-P4 Black/Silver Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case which was the cheapest once I could find. It is a bit big and fairly cheaply constructed but it was inexpensive and did come with a 500W power supply and has a built in carrying handle - it’s not a bad case. I have had an issue with the power supply emitting a noxious, chemical smell for a while but that seems to have “burned off”.

 

Motherboard $104.99 (with rebate)

Processor $119.99

Memory $44.99

Case $29.99 (on sale)

Total $299.96

 

Installing MacOS was much easier than I expected and turned out to me much easier than installing Windows 7 on the same box! You will need the Snow Leopard Install DVD (which I also had) and the [url="http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/279450-why-insanelymac-does-not-support-tonymacx86/"]#####[/url] boot loader CD downloadable from the http://www.tonymacx86.com/ website. While you are there, you should also download [url="http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/279450-why-insanelymac-does-not-support-tonymacx86/"]#####[/url], which is a “post installation” tool that will install the needed drivers and hacks to get the machine up to it’s full capabilities. Also download the DSDT file from the DSDT database for this motherboard.

 

Here is a big tip that most people willing to build a Hackintosh need to hear. READ THE INSTRUCTIONS FOR [url="http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/279450-why-insanelymac-does-not-support-tonymacx86/"]#####[/url] FIRST! As well as info in the DSDT file on the website. As a very technical person so I often skip the instructions and just dive right in. This was a mistake for me and lead to many hours of poking around trying to get things to work correctly. This is also where things get a little murky in terms of describing exactly what I did to get my machine to work so I will not go into detail. Just follow the directions and you should have an easier time.

 

What I will do is give you are some things that I learned along the way:

 

1) After I proved that this all worked, I purchased a 1.5TB hard drive as my primary boot drive. I purchased the same drive as my Time Machine drive in the hopes of using the two drives together with the motherboard’s on-board raid controller to someday create one 3TB raid 0 array as the boot drive and buying a 3TB drive to use as my backup drive (backups are very important if you are using a raid 0 array because if one drive fails, the raid fails and your data is gone). By the way, I have not tried this yet, but it looks like there are drivers to be able to do this. If anyone has tried using the built-in raid controller, I would love to hear if it works. Anyway, I partitioned my 1.5TB drive as one large volume which was a mistake. Apparently, the bootloader ([url="http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/279450-why-insanelymac-does-not-support-tonymacx86/"]#####[/url]) does not work on partitions larger than 1TB. It will work if you don’t mind booting off of the [url="http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/279450-why-insanelymac-does-not-support-tonymacx86/"]#####[/url] CD every time, but if you want to boot directly from the hard drive, you will need a partition smaller than 1TB. I am hoping that they will fix [url="http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/279450-why-insanelymac-does-not-support-tonymacx86/"]#####[/url] in the future to boot off of partitions larger than 1TB, which is why I have not repartitioned my drive (a lot of work) and am still using the [url="http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/279450-why-insanelymac-does-not-support-tonymacx86/"]#####[/url] CD to boot. For some reason I am not able to partition the drive when booting of the CD and using disk utility without erasing the whole drive.

 

2) If you do not have a good understanding of computer, how they work and/or you do not know your way around MacOS/Unix, I would not recommend trying this. Things can get pretty hairy if things go wrong. However, if you are careful to read the directions, unlike me, you might have an easier time of it.

 

3) Do not automatically install any updates that come through Software Updates. Look on the message boards first to see what others have experienced - particularly for updates to the OS rather than application updates.

 

4) I use my machine primarily for iOS development. I found that somethings, after an update, my iOS devices do not show up in iTunes or xCode. I have not narrowed down exactly what needs to happen to get this to work again but after running the latest [url="http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/279450-why-insanelymac-does-not-support-tonymacx86/"]#####[/url] and installing the disk drivers, USB IO Rollback, NVenabler, audio drivers and network drivers it works again. I assume it’s USB IO Rollback that actually fixed it but I have not narrowed it down.

 

5) If you use Time Machine mount the disk internally via SATA or get an eSATA enclosure. Connecting the drive this way delivers smoking fast backups! Something you can’t do with an iMac or Mac Mini.

 

6) The machine is very stable. It does crash but my MacBook Pro crashed just as often. However, I do occasionally see kernel panics but they are fairly rare (about once every 2-4 weeks of hard use) and usually only at boot or shutdown. This is something I rarely, if ever saw on the MacBook Pro.

 

7) If you want to use a BlueTooth device everyone seems to recommend the D-Link BDT-122 so I picked one up on eBay for about $10. Works fine with my Apple Magic Mouse although the mouse can be temperamental at startup. I have also noticed that on rare occasions (twice in thee months) something gets “messed up” and the mouse does not scroll properly and “jumps” around the screen. It seems that unplugging the D-Link BlueTooth adapter then plugging it back in gets it to work correctly again. Regardless, always have a wired mouse nearby.

 

8) I was able to over clock the CPU to just over 4GHz and it ran perfectly stable. I did noticed that the CPU was running hot so I throttled back to 3.51GHz and I have left it there ever since without any problems. If I where to get a better heat sink, I am sure running at 4GHz would be fine and since the CPU only costs about $100, if I fry it, it wouldn’t be a big deal. It would have saved me a lot of time not waiting for the CPU over those month/years.

 

9) I installed a couple of extra fans to keep things cool. I hate the sound of fans so I purchased the Scythe SY1225SL12SL 120mm "Slipstream" Case Fan which was the quietest one I could find and it is completely inaudible.

 

10) I also purchased the nMEDIAPC ZE-C98 All-in-one USB 2.0 Card Reader and installed it in one of the 5.25” drive bays. It’s nice. It has three USB ports, a firewire port, eSATA port, audio jacks and memory card reader slots. Very convenient! The only problem is that MacOS has an issue dealing with that many audio connections (since all Macs have at most two) so I suggest either not connecting this one, or not connecting the case jacks.

 

11) Make sure you run the correct network driver installer which is the Lnx2Mac RealTek RTL81xx Driver. This will ensure that your Ethernet will operate at gigabit speed.

 

12) My older style external firewire iSight camera works fine but getting the audio configured correctly took a couple of minutes - not hard.

 

13) There are drivers in [url="http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/279450-why-insanelymac-does-not-support-tonymacx86/"]#####[/url] for the USB 3.0 ports on the motherboard. I have installed them and these ports do work with USB 2.0 devices but I do not have any USB 3.0 devices to test with. They do show up as a “Super-Speed” bus in Apple System Profiler so I assume they will work at USB 3.0 speeds.

 

14) I have been running this box for almost six months now and am very glad I built it. It’s way more machine then I could afford from Apple and does some things (such as eSATA) that I wouldn’t be able to get on any Mac (or at least not without difficulty).

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