Hackintosh finally working

After going back to the iPhone, I started to miss using a Mac for my desktop. I have an older iMac but it’s just too slow/old. I have a nice i7 iMac at work but it doesn’t have SSD (once you go SSD, it’s kind of hard to use anything else). I have a very nice hexacore 3930K build running Windows 8 that I’m bored of using – maybe it’s just Windows I’m bored of, the hardware is a beast. I decided to give Hackintosh another try.

I found a nice guide http://www.tonymacx86.com/mountain-lion-desktop-guides/100560-guide-gigabyte-ga-x79-up4.html. It wasn’t a quick hack. I did run into some issues but at the end I’m able to run 10.8.5 with everything running normal, including network and audio. Just to sum up, I had to add the following entry to my org.chameleon.Boot.plist file.

npci=0x2000

Using 0x3000 killed my network. Removing the entry gave me a kernel panic. So the entry has to exist. I’m not overclocking. It’s running at the stock 3.5GHz with 32GB ram. I ran Geekbench and was able to get 17025 –http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/2324148. It’s slightly a lower score than when I ran it on Windows 8 – http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/1999535. Too lazy to really look into it. I just wanted the numbers to be where the average is. Some are getting over 21000 but their CPU is overclocked. I’m more for running something stable. Shout out to @jampot for giving me some tips.

So far I found 3 things of a minor complaint. Other than that, it’s running great so far. Hopefully it stays stable.

1. The blu-ray drive spins randomly for a few seconds.
2. The internal card reader doesn’t work. I have to plug my DSLR using the USB.
3. My old webcam doesn’t work. I’ll have to find something that’s compatible. Here are some screenshots I took.

This screenshot shows it doesn’t recognize the processor. However, everywhere else it recognizes it just fine.

I’m currently running 4 hard drives. Mountain Lion is installed on SSD 120GB. A 1TB for data. 2x 1TB in a RAID0 for scratch disk, temp folders, and Time Machine. I may move Time Machine to an external drive or a drive that’s not raided just to be safe.

4x8GB ram with quad channel. Not sure if OSX recognizes/utilizes the quad channel. Only using half the slots. I could get another set and get 8x8GB for a total of 64GB but for now 32GB is plenty. We’ll see once I start doing video production again. I have a nice ADVC110 to play with.

UPDATE: 2013-10-17

I forgot I had set my bios to default and did not change my memory profile. This is why my ram was running at 1333 MHz instead of 1866MHz. After setting it to Profile 1, it now detects it correctly. Still the benchmark is lower than what I had with Windows 8. It did go up about 300 points.

You can see the full score at http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/2328011

Here’s a peak at my Cinebench scoring. I’m just running everything stock.