My Hackintosh Hardware Spec

Some of you have asked about my exact Hackintosh spec, so here it is.

I built my Hackintosh in March/April 2014, after finally deciding that the Mac Pro was too expensive and didn’t really fit my needs. The spec I was going to go for was an 8-core model, with 32 gigs of RAM, a 1 TB flash drive, additional external storage, two D700s, etc. The price was the deciding factor – at the time I calculated the Mac Pro setup to be around 9000 USD with the display I wanted and all the peripherals I would need. That was much too expensive and I didn’t really need the two GPUs, a Xeon CPU or ECC RAM. I decided to explore the Hackintosh path… I finally decided on a spec. The sum of all of its parts came out to around 4000 USD (SRP), but I managed to buy everything for a little under 3000 USD (though I did get the Eizo later, after finally ditching my 27” Dell).

One of the stages of building my Hackintosh — still missing a few parts.

My Current Hackintosh Spec

Display: Eizo EV3237 4K

Case: SilverStone FT03 (titanium)

Motherboard: Asus Maximus VI Gene

CPU: Intel Core i7 4770K 3.5 GHz Haswell

RAM: Kingston HyperX Beast 4 × 8 GB DDR3 2400 MHz

SSD: Kingston HyperX 3K 480 GB (×2) (Striped)

HDD: Western Digital WD Black 3 TB (×2) (Mirrored)

GPU: Radeon R9 280X

Cooling: Corsair H80i

Fans: Noctua NF-S12A (×2) & Noctua NF-F12 (×2)

Power: Seasonic Platinum-760

Sound: Bowers & Wilkins MM-1

Other: Bluetooth LE & Wi-Fi PCIe Module

The secret sauce is in the PCIe module – its parts come from a 2013 iMac. This means that I have fully functional Handoff, iMessage, and other Continuity features. I imported mine from China, but the one linked above is the exact same model.

I have had no issues with this machine since 2014. Because its spec is carefully based on the 2013 iMac, I need no special kexts or anything else to get it running. So far, I just had to upgrade Clover once a year (EFI emulator), when a new macOS comes out. Other than that, I have no issues. I did choose to Stripe my SSDs, but I advise against that – macOS cannot create a Recovery Partition on a RAID volume, which means Find My Mac or FileVault doesn’t work (this applies to Macs as well, e.g. older Mac Pros). The solution is simple – buy a 1, 2 or 4 TB SSD and use it as a single drive.

Two Striped Kingston HyperX 480 GB SSDs.

As far as I know, it is currently almost impossible to build as clean a Hackintosh as this one. I am currently waiting on the new Mac Pro that Apple has planned and I will adjust my expectations and future plans as needed. Since NVMe support is currently a joke, I would just prefer to get the 2018-2019 Mac Pro, but perhaps it will be possible to build a Hackintosh based on its spec.

In the meantime, I am considering switching out my two SSDs for a single 2 TB drive, as well as selling my Radeon 280X and replacing it with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980Ti or 1080Ti (they are very pricey!). No rush though — this machine is still as fast as when I bought it and it still flies through my tasks.