Rx 570 Hackintosh

[Alma Wass]

AsI am more of a hobbyist then a serious developer at present, I'd basically like to get my feet wet before fully committing to this endeavor. In the long term I know that it would be better to purchase a Mac...

Whether it's worth it or not really comes down to how difficult it is to get a hackintosh install (Kalyway / iATKOS) running on your PC. With some PCs it's trivial and everything works. For others it's a nightmare and your networking/audio/graphics will never work completely. If you need to run a patched kernel (e.g. you don't have an Intel Core 2 Duo chipset) things become really awkward.

Assuming you get everything working the only future concern is software updates. iPhone SDKs generally require the very latest OSX update (e.g. 10.5.6), but installing updates on hackintoshes with patched kernels is a nightmare.

If you enjoy tinkering with this type of thing and are comfortable partitioning your HDD and playing with boot flags then I'd say go for it. If not, consider picking up a used Mac-Mini on eBay/craigslist or something. If you find out that iPhone development really isn't for you then you can resell it lose practically nothing.

It's possible. But you are restricted to the choice of hardware for the hackintosh. Even if you get it right, no one can guarantee everything will work (sound, lan, etc.). If you can run the OS, you can run xcode with the SDK. But I don't think you'll be 100% satisfied with the end result.

I was in this dilemma recently, and decided to go with a real Mac rather than a Hackintosh after hearing the stories of my friend (who is doing it specifically for iPhone development). He was able to get iPhone development working, but his hackintosh is always having one issue or another; the most recent one was a constant boot cycling, wherein the machine would immediately reboot after loading the OS.

Look on the bright side: Apple products are popular and easy to sell. If you get one and sell it before the next generation comes out you can get most of your money back - money that would have been spent anyways on a new hard drive (to quarantine your hackintosh, heh) or OSX (assuming you meant to get the software in at least a remotely legal fashion).

Now you will have a billion guys come down on me for saying that because some guys have built some truly impressive rigs but they are missing the point of a Mac. Macs just work well and are a pleasure to use while PC's just get stuff done and you probably secretly hate it.

I did it just for fun but I ended up spending more on a Hackintosh than I would have if I just bought a Mac Mini. Of course my computer is 4x as fast but it's just not the same as a real Mac. On Mac's everything just works... it's really nice. But on my Hackintosh nothing works without direct intervention on my part... not very nice.

One problem I see with the Hackintosh approach is that if you get it working now, you are not guaranteed to have the same machine working when an update to Mac OS comes out in the future, and this could be especially important if the iPhone SDK and/or developer tools that you want to use are hosted only on the next generation of the system software.

On a $10 P4 2.4GHz, 1GB RAM, hackintosh works fine and xcode/iphone sdk works as well. Its a little slow, but stable, and a very viable option for someone looking to just test the water of iphone development, without committing the cash.

You want to go with a Gigabyte brand Z87 motherboard, Intel Core i CPUs, Nvidia graphics, and SSDs. Avoid budget hardware, it usually isn't compatible. Or you could go the Intel NUC route and get a NUC, a small PCIe SSD (32GB or 64GB should do the trick), and some laptop ram.

In my case, I have an IPhone and would like to develop an IPhone app however I was being forced (until this day) to buy a Mac (or at least chosing the Hackintosh way) develop an IPhone App. Now I can write and debug my app directly on my IPhone (which is fair!).

You have to run code on a iPhone or touch, because the emulator is not perfect and will mislead you without you even being aware of it - I have code that runs on the emulator but not as expected on hardware

Apple's key signing is hard enough to get working with the real thing, it took me a couple of hours and I'm not alone - there's a great many posts out there on development forums from people having difficulties managing it. Getting it working on a Hacked machine - well you may be lucky, but are you prepared to gamble?

When my 2012 MacBook Pro crashed on me about a month ago, it ended up being a cheap/simple problem, but it was the scare I needed to dive into the world of hackintoshing. I had absolutely no experience or knowledge about computer building before I started.

There are two ways of getting Mac OS to boot on a PC: Clover and OpenCore. I ended up going with OpenCore because I found an in depth video walkthrough of an OpenCore install with my exact motherboard and CPU.

Everything fits nicely into the case, except when one wants to connect the case header (Power, Reset etc.) at the bottom of the board. Since the Pins are angled by 90 it is rather difficult to connect the header , see photo. It worked out at the end, but as written earlier I will swap the case with a Define XL in a few weeks to address these space limits.

I pulled the cards and swapped them back and forth, at the end PCIe 6 (2nd slot from top) turned out to trigger this behavior, once it was occupied with a card like the Inateck or T919. So I adjusted the card setup and so far everything works fine. The slot is now covered by the GPU cooler. All additional cards, except the Asus Hyper M.2 adapter, are bind to VFIO and passed through the Hackintosh VM resp. the RX560 to one Win VM.

One of the main reason to move from Ryzen to Epyc was also to have more flex for the hardware passthrough for the VMs. Now that I have enough lanes and slots available it was easy to add a GPU, WIFI, BT and a USB controller for the peripherials so the virtual Mac acts close to a physical.

I have remote messaging through Pushover installed, however want to tweak the alerting and auto-shutdown in the coming weeks. I can shut down the host remotely though. Also have the idea to install a water sensor / sensors in the case and connect that to the alerting. The pump is running at 2600RPM / 9V afaik, something I also want to tinker with and see how the whole monitoring can be improved.

Have you run tests on how long it takes the CPU to heat up with no coolant? When running unattended I'd be afraid of not getting it shut down quick enough to avoid frying something. That's the major advantage of air cooling, typically when a fan fails you still have a big ole chunk of metal to absorb the heat so the CPU doesn't skyrocket temps.

I had 2 of them in my 2 servers to cool the xeons since at that time I was using windows for heavy computational calculations (24 h/day for some months) with tdp of 150W for each cpu, and each server had 2 of them.

I share your point @JonathanM, still I wanted to set up a water cooled system to see how it goes over time. I think I am going to go for a custom solution at some point, where monitoring is easier due to availability of addons like sensors. @ghost82 At this point I picked an all-in-one solution because it is basically sealed, sold million times and its the 2nd gen of the silent loop product. First one had a few issues, and with version 2 a lot seems to have improved. I am surprised that we still have to deal with leaking radiators nowadays.

Nice build and nice set up. Clearly mentioned everything others my be finding usefull. (Like RDIMMS).

Like your build and even your AIO-Watercooled solution should be fine. ?

Also to mention not problem while helping you out with your hackintosh. It was a pleasure! ?

Good Luck with your new build. Mine is also already set up and running but atm just as a backup unraid ? (Trial) cuz I want to get all working before I switch my "Working-Monster"

I used the Fractal design riser cable. Quality of the cable is ok, however I had to remove the little slider which locks the card since I couldn't slide the card into the slot. That could be designed in a better way. The cable is relatively stiff.

I messed with the PCIe cards in different slots and apparently the current config seems to be the only one which works for my VM set up (GPU in PCIe 5). I could also add a second GPU in another slot, but I think PCIe 1 also didnt work for me. I am using the Riser card for thermal reasons.

I am running a Windows 10 VM with GPU passthrough (KVM + VFIO). It is working fine, when the GPU is in PCIE slot 2 or 3. However it is not working, when the GPU is in PCIE slot 1. Is this a known issue?

I have a friend who has never owned a Mac. He has just built a "hackintosh" by installing VMWare on his PC running Windows, and downloading a pirated, hacked copy of Mac OS X Yosemite in a portable VMWare virtual machine volume from somewhere online.

He tells me that he installed some hacked "distro" of Mac OS X called "Niresh". He tells me that he assumed that it was legitimate because it appeared to be supported by a large community of computer enthusiasts. He actually said to me "It wouldn't be on the Internet if it was illegal".

Now he's hitting me up for help doing further hacks to make his "hackintosh" behave exactly like a real Mac. He's asked me to run a Terminal script on my Macintosh to output my UUID, MLB (Main Logic Board serial number) and ROM values from my real Macintosh so he can clone these identifying numbers to his "hackintosh" volume.

I also warned him that because he'd installed a version of Mac OS X that had been completely and thoroughly hacked, cracked, and had all its Apple-built-in security disabled, this means that it would be likely that what he downloaded and installed is pre-infected with any manner of root kits, rats, malware and viruses, and that he might now be part of some criminal enterprise's botnet. That helped to get his attention as well.

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