Gadgetory

with its factory tuning and data center DNA and Intel 730 series SSD is an amazing choice for gamers and performance enthusiasts welcome to our Mac Pro killer hackintosh guide the goal here was to build a video editing or general content creation machine that runs OS 10 mavericks and delivers similar raw performance and low noise operation to a premium 8 core mac pro but at a much lower price so let's open this right off the bat with the answer to the big question why would you want to build a hackintosh we all know at least the folks who are somewhat paying attention know that spec 4 spec hardware for hardware if you actually tried to build the exact same thing Apple PCs are fairly priced competitive these days with an equivalent PC so why not just buy an apple well a couple of reasons number one is to save money as I just mentioned like four seconds ago buying the same hardware Apple is using to build a PC will usually yield a similar pricing but the trick is that Apple's Hardware choices are not always the best bang for the buck and by choosing completely different hardware similar performance can sometimes be achieved for a much cheaper especially if you're willing to get into a little overclocking number two is that Apple doesn't always design their hardware with upgrade ability in mind and by adding extra PCI Express cards and better Hardware over time the life of a system can be significantly extended something you can't do with ram solder to your motherboard or a complete absence of internal storage and PCI Express expansion number three is that you might just be a tinkerer who also appreciates OS 10 and just plain old wants to do it in which case rock on brother now that's not to say that hack and toshing doesn't come with challenges you need to carefully select your Hardware ahead of time like seriously carefully sometimes even video card firmware revisions or motherboard BIOS updates can cause problems and even then while support for stuff like Wireless and on sound is much better now than it was in the early days you might still not be able to get certain stuff like advanced CPU power management features working that last bit is actually an issue we're still having on this particular machine but I ve hackintosh Inge is still in early stages and there are actually other boards it works on so I'd be surprised if that last issue doesn't get resolved for our rig at some point here so let's walk through the rationale of our parts choices we went with a six core Core i7 49 30 K this chip at stock speeds is about equivalent to the six cores neon that's available for the Mac Pro Xeon advantages include support for ECC registered memory dims an essential feature on servers and suggested on workstations but something that many folks can live without and that's theoretically tighter quality control but frankly anything that says Intel on the box I could say tighter QC and I would believe it anyway for RAM we went with the highest performance most compatible just best 64 gig ddr3 24 hundred megahertz kit that we could find g.skill ripjaws z 8x8 kit even though we knew we'd end up running it at 1866 or 2133 on this particular board running it below spec gives us peace of mind that we're not even pushing the rated limits of it so you should be in pretty good shape there our motherboard is a gigabyte x79 up4 gigabyte boards are famous for being relatively easy to get going in hacking Tosh's and this one ended up being fairly straightforward other than the power management thing that's still being worked on our video card is a gtx 780 reference card and we chose it for its excellent compute performance and great acoustics remember that goal of this system you're going to want to avoid non-reference cards for the most part unless you can find evidence that they are specifically supported or that they can at least be successfully flashed with the bios of a card that does work and GPU support is something that changes frequently so make sure to double check before clicking that buy button others silence optimized components in the system include our a x86 TI power supply that only runs the fan under medium to heavy system load our n hu 12s CPU cooler from Noctua our n FF 12 case fans also from Noctua and our and the Xth 440 case with this tower cpu cooling setup we avoid needing the loud fans that come with our RAM to keep them cool and by switching all the case fans to under bolted not to a fans from the aged 440 we are able to achieve near silence for our system just like the Mac Pro finally the SSD was actually a component that I watch on a fair bit but I ended up going with a Samsung 840 Evo 500 gig because I wanted capacity enough for some growing rooms so it's not like you download a couple videos and photos off the internet and boom you drives full but I actually didn't care that much about performance beyond making sure I wasn't using magnetic media for my boot drive this choice was based on my assumption that serious content creators are not doing real work on an SSD no not even a one terabyte one in spite of Apple's marketing about how fast it is and how great it is for working on 4k video because it's just not enough space anyway and whether those professionals want to expand the internal storage of the machine with a raid array or build an as they are gonna be keeping their massive images in RAW 4k footage somewhere else anyway so the SSD just needs to be fast enough to run the OS and applications so with that in my head even though there are tons of other storage options available especially because this system actually has storage options I chose an SSD with middling performance decent background garbage collection and excellent price to performance to capacity ratio so without further ado get yourselves a Mac because you'll need one to create your bootable media as well as a couple of USB drives one for the actual OS installation and one for like drivers and stuff just to have that handy and I'm gonna hand off to Luke to show you how to install OS 10 mavericks on a PC first you're going to want to download oh s X Mavericks this will come from the Apple website and can only be downloaded on a Mac next you're going to want to download my hack this should be done on the same computer that you downloaded OS X on now go into your downloads folder and open the my hack dmg accept the terms and can else it won't work go to your Applications folder and drag and drop the icon that's on the desktop for my hack into the Applications folder then double click the my hack symbol in the application window select open on the pop-up type in your password select create OS X installer let it know which version of OS X you want to install select the drive you want to install it on that should be a flash drive and just tell it to scan your system to find OS X considering you downloaded it earlier it'll find it right away and then just click OK now you've got quite a wait a head of you this will take a little while adjust the head top near the end of the my hack installation process it'll ask you if you want to patch the installer for MBR support the answer that is no you should be installing your OS X on a GUI d partition type and you won't need the MBR support because of that next you want to download your motherboards dmg directly off of rampage devs website you can do that by going to the x79 dmg downloads page and selecting the manufacturer for your motherboard once you're there you're going to scroll down and select the actual model of your motherboard for this example we're using AGA x79 up4 so we'll download that dmg right now next you're going to want to take that dmg you just download it and move it to a flash drive for later use next you're going on a boot onto that flash drive that you were just setting up under startup volume you're going to want to select my hack install disc and then for boot Flags if you're running LGA 2011 or LGA 1366 you're in around - V space CPU is equal one space NPC I equals 0 X 2000 if you're running LGA 1150 or LM 55 your own ax 1 - v NPC I equals 0 X 2000 no need for that CPU is equal 1 flag you will also need unique parameters depending on what graphics card you have so if you have an AMD 6800 series card or an nvidia gtx 500 series card or nvidia 610 or 650 TI you will need to use the parameter graphics enabler equal yes if you have an AMD 7000 series + card or an nvidia gtx 660 + or an nvidia gtx 760 + you'll need to use the graphics enabler equals no flag once the beachball finally stops spinning you're going to select your preferred language and then go to the utilities tab Disk Utility select the hard drive or SSD that you want to install a Mac OS X onto for format you're going to use Mac OS extended journaled name it whatever you want I named it Mac Drive and then click erase once it's done erasing you can simply close this window and then click continue agree to the terms and conditions so you can actually do anything select that drive that we just set up and click install near the end of your OSX Mavericks install my hack will pop up asking you about extra folders completely ignore this pop-up do not click on it do not click on anything just hard restart the computer if you run into a halt on system uptime in nanoseconds in verbose mode I would recommend going into your BIOS and resetting to defaults the only time I actually ran into this problem was when I was overclocking but as some of you might be running this setup on a system that you've had before which might be overclocked this is just a heads up this also applies later in the video when we talk about overclocking all right now that we've done the initial install we're ready to actually boot onto the drive so you're going to want to select the start up volume as your Mac Drive and then enter the same parameter flags as you did when you first use the installation disk to do the initial setup all right now you can relax a little bit you're in the easy mode part now you just got to set up your user account and then you're good to go after that you're gonna want to select my computer does not connect to the internet because you have no drivers right now so it's not gonna connect to the internet anyways other than that everything is pretty much up to you until we get into the operating system now you're gonna want to grab that flash drive we put the dmg on and extract the dmg next you're gonna want to go into files tools and then around text helper b7 going back to your motherboard manufacturer and then your then the text folder inside of there you're gonna want to grab all the texts that are there move them to the text helper zero-point-seven application type in your password and then just click easy install ignore the reboot instruction you do not want to reboot at this point this error message is fine it's saying that it's from an unidentified developer but it's loading anyway so it's okay don't worry about it again just ignore the reboot next you're going to want to go into your chameleon folder once inside you're going to want to drag the extra folder into the Macintosh HD shortcut and click authenticate and then type in your password next are going to want to go into the Files directory and then into your motherboard manufacturers folder after that you'll go into the model number of your motherboard into the SSD T folder and then into the respective manufacturer of your graphics cards folder then you have to open up your Macintosh HD link that we opened earlier and then go into that extras folder that you dragged into there previously and move the SSD T file into that extra folder now we get to install the boot loader so you're gonna want to go into the flash drive that you use to install your operating system and then open the myhacc shortcut once that's open you should type in your password select Install chameleon you're gonna want to install it to root which is just the forward slash and it should be done very quickly now that you've installed the majority of your drivers and you have your bootloader installed you can actually restart your system you don't have to boot it up with any parameters you just have to make sure that you select your Mac Drive and you boot there but I do recommend using verbose mode also known as dash V in the parameter sector so that you can actually see everything that's going on and see what its halting on if it fails to boot now you're going to want to identify what audio patch you need you can do this by going to your motherboards manufacturers website go into the specifications and checking out the audio codec that it uses for us it is a real tech alc 892 codec next we're going to use the handy dandy dmg that we downloaded earlier to install the other drivers although this time we're going to go into files and then the manufacturer of our motherboards folder and then it took hex again but instead of using the qex will use the Safari download links in this case all we need is a LC 892 although I do download all of them once they're downloaded you're just going to want to go into the folder of the one that lines up with the codec that your motherboard use it so in this case again al eight nine - there are many command files within this patch folder you're gonna have to find the one who's last numerix within the name line up with the last numerix in the codec that your motherboard uses so in this case nine to running this command file Security's gonna freak out you're gonna have to allow it to run the script you can do that by going to the system preferences security and privacy and clicking open anyway once the command window opens up type your password and press enter and then you're good to go you'll need a restart at this point for audio to actually start working and you can restart now as you've installed your bootloader and all your other drivers overclocking this platform is pretty standard fare and with minimal / volting and without pushing it too hard we were able to get the CPU to 4.2 gigahertz and the memory to 1866 megahertz so with all that fun stuff out of the way it's time to find out how the machine actually stacks up to a real Mac Pro so since neither leek nor I are really Mac guys and we don't even know like what are the benchmarks of choice for for Apple folks we decided to just you know find out another Mac Pro review in this case we went with mkbhd s video review of his 8 core Mac Pro and run the same suite of benchmarks and Marcus was even kind enough to allow us to include his results in our review for easy comparison so there you go guys we've had these over laying here this gives you some idea of how closely our hackintosh performs to an 8 core Mac Pro in spite of the dramatic difference in price between our configuration and Marcus's but with the raw performance comparison between our admittedly overclocked consumer-grade hackintosh and Marcus Brown these 8 core Mac Pro out of the way I want to be the first to point out that this is not an apples to apples comparison so to speak our machine is desktop great it's consumer grade and the Mac Pro is workstation grade hardware but the beauty of a hackintosh is that we can choose whether or not to spend the extra money that workstation grade hardware costs to make the machine more MacPro like one big difference is the CPU we saved a ton of money going with a core i7 but Xeon chips will actually run in a variety of ATX motherboards we could have bought one of those and ECC memory can then be used with them if we thought that that was necessary for this config another big difference is the GPUs but other than for CAD or serious 3d rendering I would argue that a workstation grade GPU is a luxury not a necessity and anyway you could I once again put a Quadro in the hackintosh if you really felt like it one more thing is that our SSD solution I mentioned this before I'm gonna mention it again is really nothing special compared to Apple's PCI Express solution but as we saw it didn't affect our benchmarks much anyway since most things really aren't that i/o limited and we could always chuck a few in there and raid if we felt like it but like I said before an actual content creation Pro will likely be editing off a storage array connected via 10 Gigabit Ethernet USB 3 or Thunderbolt anyway which is a perfect segue into the elephant in the room our hackintosh lacks the Mac Pros 6 Thunderbolt expansion ports your opinion may differ but ultimately I believe it's ok we sacrifice those ports yes but we gained PCI Express slots that will give us expansion to 10 gigabit USB 3 if needed in the future and even allow us to set up more exotic solutions I mean for the money that we saved we could build a wickedness with a bunch of hard drives a high-performance raid card and a 10 Gigabit Ethernet connection then we could grab a 10 gigabit ethernet switch and an adapter for our PC and then we've created a storage solution that unlike a Thunderbolt enclosure which is accessible to one PC is accessible to several and offers much more flexibility the flipside of which is of course just like the hackintosh that it requires more tinkering speaking of tinkering I would like to take this opportunity to give a big thanks to Andrew there's going to be a link to his website here he helped us out a lot and asked me to reinforce that No hackintosh guide is meant to be the be-all and end-all and unless you're building this exact machine with this exact OS you'll very likely need a bit of assistance and that's okay the good news is that thanks to Andrew and others like him who you asked me to credit here in this video help is out there and you can reach out to those guys who are members of this great community if you you know your appetite was wetted by this video and you really want to set out and make yourself a hackintosh and if you do go for it have fun we certainly did although we really don't know what to do with the machine now since neither of us are really care that much about OS 10 maybe let me know guys if you think I should if I should legitimately try and use it for a little while be as my favorite game reviewer Yahtzee would say it's gonna be about like watching a cat trying to fly a kite so we'll see anyway guys like this video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it you'll find a link to the parts that we used and a discussion thread on the Linus tech tips form in the video description you'll also find a support link we have options to buy t-shirts give us a monthly contribution to help us keep making videos and even do stuff that's as simple as changing your amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate code so we get credit every time you buy any random stuff so please do check that out as well thank you for watching and as always don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips for more unboxings reviews and other 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