Hackintosh help! System Setup???

egroh1991

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I am wondering if this setup will work for building a hackintosh. My friend has built this computer from the ground up and I am going to buy it off of him and I wanted to install Mac OSX onto it. Please let me know if this will be possible to do. Thank you very much.

His setup is:

i7 920 2.6ghz OC'ed to 3.5ghz
Megahalems CPU Heatsink
MSI X58 Pro Motherboard
500gb Hard Drive
6gb Corsair XMS triple-channel RAM
OCZ Tech 750W Power Supply
Sapphire 6850 - Crossfire
 

danraies

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Don't get discouraged here...but the answer is almost certainly no. Building a "hackintosh" is very difficult and it can only be done on a very small set of hardware.

Theoretically OSX should be able to run on any intel machine, however the drivers are a problem. The only drivers that exist to run OSX on homebuilt machines are drivers that have been hacked together manually from pieces of other drivers by individual users. As such there are very few hardware drivers that have been tested on OSX, and hence there are few pieces of hardware compatible with OSX.

The bottom line is that if you're willing to pick hardware piece by piece specifically to run OSX then you can build a homebuilt PC running OSX, but if you take any random windows-based PC the odds are that there won't be hardware drivers available.

That being said, the computer is kind of nice for gaming depending on the price if you're willing to run windows.

(P.S. I'm not doing the research as to whether or not there happen to be OSX drivers for those particular pieces of hardware. Sorry.)
 

egroh1991

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Thanks a lot for that. I am very new to building a computer in general. And this is one that my friend has built and I was going to buy it off of him so thats why I am up here posting this.

Do you know where I could find piece that I could possible exchange out parts to get the right hardware?

And do you know what specific drivers I should be looking for to make sure that they are compatible?
 

danraies

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The drivers you'll need are for the motherboard and the video card, however the motherboard will have several drivers. I did find an HD6850 driver but the comments make it seem very hit-or-miss.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231416
I would be very surprised if you found a way to get crossfire to work.

A couple of good resources are here:
http://www.kexts.com/index.php
http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/3rdPartyDrivers
http://www.hackintosh.com/

Most Tom's members will simply tell you that OSX is a waste of time and money, but I do think that Apple has a place in the world. I have a homebuilt machine with an i5-2500K for gaming, programming, and ftp, however I'm writing this to you from a macbook pro. That being said, we've surpassed the point where there are things you can only do on a mac or things you can only do on a PC so there is no reason you *need* OSX. From where I'm sitting there are two economical choices:
1) If the price is right, buy your friend's computer and use windows.
2) Buy an iMac. I don't know what your friend is charging you, but that computer was pretty expensive when it was new and by the time you start replacing parts you're probably going to spend more than the price of an iMac and that's nothing to speak of the hassle that it will cause you.

Building a homebuilt computer with OSX is possible, but it is rarely the best economic choice or the best choice for utility. People who do it usually do it for the challenge, because it's fun, or so that they can say that they did. You're in for a long, uphill battle where you'll be editing drivers by hand, spending a lot of money, and spending a lot of time in the far corners of some questionable forums. Not to say that you shouldn't do it, but it's a project so be aware of what you're getting in to.