 With its factory tuning and data center DNA, an 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 X 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 for spec, hardware for hardware, if you actually tried to build the exact same thing, Apple PCs are fairly price 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 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 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 upgradability 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 soldered 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 X and just plain old wants to do it, in which case, rock on, brother. Now that's not to say that hackintoshing 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 onboard 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 IVE hackintoshing 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 6-core Core i7-4930K. This chip at stock speeds is about equivalent to the 6-core Xeon that's available for the Mac Pro. Xeon advantages include support for ECC registered memory DIMMs, an essential feature on servers and suggested on workstations, but something that many folks can live without, and theoretically tighter quality control, but frankly anything that says Intel on the box could say tighter QC, and I would believe it anyway. For RAM, we went with the highest performance, most compatible, just best 64GB DDR3 2400MHz kit that we could find. G.Skill's Ripjaw 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 we 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 Hackintoshes, 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. Other silence-optimized components in the system include our AX860i power supply that only runs the fan under medium to heavy system load, our NH-U12S CPU cooler from Noctua, our NF-F12 case fans also from Noctua, and our NZXT H440 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 undervolted Noctua fans for the H440, we are able to achieve near silence for our system, just like the Mac Pro. Finally, the SSD was actually a component that I waffled on a fair bit, but I ended up going with a Samsung 840 EVO 500GB, because I wanted capacity enough for some growing room, so it's not like you download a couple videos and photos off the internet and boom, your drive's 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 1TB 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 a NAS, they are going to be keeping their massive images and 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 an 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 going to hand off to Luke to show you how to install OS X Mavericks on a PC. First, you're going to want to download OS 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 MyHack. This should be done on the same computer that you downloaded OS X on. Now go into your downloads folder and open the MyHack.dmg. Accept the terms and conditions or else it won't work. Go to your applications folder and drag and drop the icon that's on the desktop for MyHack into the applications folder. Then double click the MyHack 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 ahead of you. This will take a little while, just a heads up. Near the end of the MyHack installation process it'll ask you if you want to patch the installer for MBR support. The answer to that is no. You should be installing your OS X on a GUID partition type and you won't need the MBR support because of that. Next you want to download your motherboard's DMG directly off of Rampage Dev's website. You can do that by going to the x79dmg 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 a GAX79UP4, so we'll download that DMG right now. Next you're going to want to take that DMG you just downloaded and move it to a flash drive for later use. Next you're going to want to boot onto that flash drive that you were just setting up. Under Startup Volume you're going to want to select MyHack Install Disk and then for Boot Flags, if you're running LGA2011 or LGA1366, you're going to run dash v space CPUs equal 1 space NPCI equals 0x2000. If you're running LGA1150 or LGA1155 you're going to run a 1 dash v NPCI equals 0x2000, no need for that CPUs equal 1 flag. You will also need unique parameters depending on what graphics card you have. If you have an AMD 6800 series card or an Nvidia GTX 500 series card or Nvidia 610 or 650Ti, you will need to use the parameter GraphicsEnabler equal Yes. If you have an AMD 7000 series plus card or an Nvidia GTX 660 plus or an Nvidia GTX 760 plus, you will need to use the GraphicsEnabler equals No flag. Once the beach ball 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 Journalled, name it whatever you want, I name 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 OS X Mavericks install MyHack 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 default. 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. Alright 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 startup volume as your Mac drive and then enter the same parameter flags as you did when you first used the installation disk to do the initial setup. Alright 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 going to want to select My Computer Does Not Connect to the Internet because you have no drivers right now so it's not going to 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 going to want to grab that flash drive we put the DMG on and extract the DMG. Next you're going to want to go into files, tools and then around Kext Helper B7. Going back to your motherboard manufacturer and then the Kext folder inside of there you're going to want to grab all the Kext that are there. Move them to the Kext Helper 0.7 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 anyways 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 you're 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 SSDT 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 SSDT file into that extra folder. Now we get to install the bootloader so you're going to want to go into the flash drive that you use to install your operating system and then open the MyHack shortcut. Once that's open you should type in your password, select install Chameleon. Now you're going to 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 it's 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 motherboard's manufacturer's website, go into the specifications and checking out the audio codec that it uses. For us it is a Realtek ALC892 codec. Next we're going to use that 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 into KeX again. But instead of using the KeX we'll use the Safari download links. In this case all we need is ALC892 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 uses. So in this case again ALC892. There are many command files within this patch folder. You're going to have to find the one whose last numerics within the name line up with the last numerics in the codec that your motherboard uses. So in this case 92. After running this command file security is going to freak out and you're going to have to allow it to run the script. You can do that by going to 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 overvolting and without pushing it too hard we were able to get the CPU to 4.2 GHz and the memory to 1866 MHz. 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 Luke nor I are really Mac guys and we don't even know like what are the benchmarks of choice for Apple folks we decided to just you know find 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 overlaying 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 Brownlee's 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 grade 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 Mac Pro 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 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 but I'm going to 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 IO 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 okay. We sacrificed 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 wicked NAS 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 flip side 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 he 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 whetted 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 really care that much about OS X maybe let me know guys if you think I should if I should legitimately try and use it for a little while. Be as as my favorite game reviewer Yahtzee would say it's going to be about like watching a cat try 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 line is tech tips form in the video description. You'll also find a support link with 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 computer videos.