My New Apple Hackintosh
No… I didn’t misspell that. I now own a Hackintosh instead of a Macintosh. Since Apple went to the Intel chips a couple of years ago (using commonly found PC parts), there has been a lot of development work around getting the Apple OSX Operating System to work on non-Apple hardware. As a result, they have been able to get OSX working near perfection now with the latest Leopard system.
My new Hackintosh
I still have one final glitch to work out with the motherboard, but other that that, it runs great. I sold my iMac for $1900 and this entire setup cost me under $1400 (and that’s why I had the extra money on hand for the Playstation 3.. not a bad deal if I say so myself). Here’s the kicker… it runs over twice as fast as my iMac did! It’s a QUAD-core 3Ghz (i.e. 12 Ghz!!) machine with 4GB of ram. Sweet. 
So why am I posting this? Because it’s frivolous. 
And also because I’m going to document how I did it so others can benefit from having a blazing fast Mac on a budget. I’ll post pictures of the inside of this bad boy in a few days when I replace the motherboard.A7
February 6th, 2008 at 10:50 pm
Hey Andy,
Great site man! Big improvements! I might have to give you a call to get the specs of your box so I can replicate it exactly because it sounds like a hell of a machine. Hope you don’t mind sharing, i’ve always wanted a quad core mac. Any ways, where you living now? I haven’t talked to you since April/May.
Andre
February 6th, 2008 at 11:14 pm
Hey Andre!
Thanks for the comments. Glad you like the site.
I’m writing the post on how to build your own Hackintosh this weekend, so check back early next week for all the details. I’ll be including all the parts and software you need, so all you would have to do is follow my guide.
I’m still in T.O for a while longer… got a nice full-time job to help pay the bills. We’re aiming for end of March to move to Ottawa. Send me an email and let me know what you’ve been up to lately. I’m gonna need people in April for a music video shoot, and your help would be most welcome.
A7
February 7th, 2008 at 4:23 pm
I’ll me lookingforward to that hickintosh post as well. Of course, I read your initial post days after I got an AMD CPU….Awesome
Nice site by the way Andy! Never cease to amaze 
Take care and have a great day,
Marc
February 7th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
Hey Marc. Glad you found your way to the site. Make sure you are logged in when making comments otherwise I have to approve them before they show on the site. If you’re logged in, your comment will just show up (and you won’t have to fill in any user info to comment).
As for the Hackintosh… it’s not too late to sell your CPU on Craigslist or Kijiji and get 95% of your money back.
That’s what I had to do with a lot of my hardware. Since I was following no guide, I had to test the hardware myself, and if I wasn’t happy, I had to pull it out, sell it, and move on to the next piece.
It’s worth it if you can have a crazy fast Mac for fairly cheap (unless you got the AMD at a real steal). Until I write the final post (which will be several pages long) here’s the quick and dirty bare-minimum parts list: An Intel Core2Duo or Core2Quad CPU, a Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L (which I have a spare for cheap if you need), a GeForce 7600GT or ATI x1900XT graphics card, 2GB of DDR2 800 ram, a SATA DVD drive, a SATA hard drive, a case with 500W SLI-ready power supply, USB keyboard and USB mouse. Any parts that fit those specs will work fine, and you could build a cheap system for under $800. My guide just details the best parts for a fast, stable and quiet Mac… slightly more expensive, but a powerhouse of a system for my video editing needs.
It’s a neat little experiment. I hope you get around to trying it. I just spent the day installing Mac OSX on an IBM T42 laptop here at work.
A7