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Comment by granda | Hacker News Reader

Where do you recommend for someone that wants to build one?

I've been building hacks (as the community calls them) since 2010.

If you get a golden build and get it working it's almost like a real mac. It's possible to get everything working 100% but it's time consuming and even in the best case scenario macOS updates will probably be a pain.

Another aspect to consider is noise. If you come from the Mac world you are probably spoiled by low noise or silent computers. PCs are very noisy and you will probably have spend time in research and money in expensive silent parts to solve this.

Finally, a common problem with hackintoshes is wifi. I've tried everything, believe me. If you intend on using Wifi your best bet is buying the same chip Apple uses with an adapter. Many manufacturers offer their Wifi drivers for macOS but those are usually finicky or outdated.

This is expensive, but it's IMO the best choice: http://www.osxwifi.com/apple-broadcom-bcm94360cd-802-11-a-b-...

If anyone's looking for information on silent PCs, http://silentpcreview.com/ is a handy resource.

I briefly ran a hackintosh when my Biostar motherboard died and I was frustrated with how slow my old Macbook Air was running. Pretty simple process: replaced it with a Gigabyte, downloaded an installer image from my Mac, and used to TonyMac tools to set it up. Unfortunately wasn't able to get Xcode to work reliably. Everything else seemed to work but Xcode was a crashfest.

I'm not sure it's the hackintosh... now and then I hear a lot of complaints about a particular version of xcode even on native macs. I don't use it, but I have work colleagues who do.

I was running the same version of Xcode on the same version of Mac OS on a 4-5 year old Macbook Air and it worked fine there, just slow.

I've certainly had Xcode crash once in a while, but this was something else. Tried reinstalling it and no change. I don't think I even got it to finish a build.

The FC R5 is a HUGE case, and it's as good as my mac pro 2008 really. Lighter too! Very, VERY well designed, excellent filters, and I run 3 140mm fans in it so it doesn't make a noise; the fans are permanently just over the stalling speed. Really very good cases.

Closed loop liquid cooling is silent and can be had for around $100.

Macs (maybe with the exception of a Mac Pro) are only silent at idle, not in full load. By my definition of 'silent' at least. If you can't hear the system while gaming because you use headphones, sorry, it's not silent.

If you just randomly build a beige box hackintosh, it will be noisy. If you spend some quality time on silentpcreview, you can get one that is silent even under load. I know, I have one.

Still, I'd very much like to get a decent Mac Pro instead. Devil's in the details, let's wait and see. My hackintosh isn't becoming obsolete any time soon.

Silent computers at full load are very rare, but a common PC is noisy even at idle.

My point is simply that one has to put special effort when building a PC to even get silence at idle.

The TonyMac community has some great resources, including guides to the hardware:

https://www.tonymacx86.com/buyersguide/march/2017

There was also a great hackintosh discussion on HN a couple days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13901752

Their utilities (Multibeast, Unibeast, Kextbeast...) are well-though and easy to use, but it worth noting that Tonymacx86 doesn't have any plans to open source them -- you have to trust him (no one seems to know his real name, mostly for legal reasons related to Apple I think) to execute binaries with root rights on your fresh OS, or go the Vanilla (and harder) way.

That's true and it's probably a bad idea, but I never had any problems with that. And I am using my second hackintosh in 5 years now without problems.

I have a fully working hackintosh. Just take someones confirmed build and buy the exact same parts. I lucked out in that every piece of hardware (besides the wifi card) worked out of the box. It runs just like a mac, better actually, and I use it all the time.

The truth is that the best hackintosh is Niresh but since it's even more illegal than Unibeast and such it's banned from the tonymacx86 forum and /r/hackintosh/ both.

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