Rob Griffiths decides to replace his nine-year-old Hackintosh with a new DIY Mac
Fellow Macworld contributor Kirk McElhearn recently built a mini Hackintosh; that is, a generic PC styled like a Mac mini on which he installed and ran macOS. This is a road I’ve gone down myself, way back in 2008, when I built my Frankenmac (go.macworld. com/fr). As Kirk was building a relatively low-end Mac clone, and as Apple has ignored the high-end Mac Pro (go.macworld.com/hemp) for so many years, I thought it'd be interesting to build a new high-end Frankenmac.
WHY BUILD A HACKINTOSH
My current machine is a late 2014 5K iMac, and while it works well for most tasks, it really suffers when I pursue my avocation: Flying the X-Plane flight simulator (go. macworld.com/xpl). Frame rates can vary from decent to slow, and the iMac’s fan ramps up nearly as soon as I launch the simulator. In the end, the simulator is what really drove my desire to build a new Frankenmac: I wanted a machine that could run X-Plane really well, without a screaming loud fan, and hopefully be used as my iMac replacement (at least until the “new new” Mac Pro is released [go.macworld.com/rld]).
The key to this project was Nvidia’s announcement of Pascal drivers for the Mac (go.macworld.com/ pdma). This meant that I could put in a leading-edge video card—one of the GeForce GTX 10 series cards (go.macworld.com/x10). These cards will easily outperform (in games, at least) anything in any Mac that Apple currently ships.
I won’t provide as much detail as did Kirk, but here are the components I used.
MOTHERBOARD
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