Semi-Budget Hackintosh Hybrid M1 Build - Thoughts?

garyb

Efficiency Noob
Original poster
New User
May 3, 2020
5
2
Hi all, I would really appreciate any input on this daily driver hackintosh build. I've built several computers in the past and feel like it's time to get back into hackintosh land. I'd like to use this primarily for (in ranked order) web/app dev, gaming, watching movies/some light video editing. I have a budget of around $2300 incl. monitor (but no mouse & keyboard). My current system is a 2014 Retina 5K iMac.

- NCASE M1 case (ordered - May 18th arrival, fingers crossed!)
- ASUS ROG Strix Z390-I Motherboard
- Intel i9-9900K CPU
- Noctua NH-U9S CPU cooler w/ 2x Noctua fans
- Corsair SF600 power supply (Amazon renewed - ordered)
- MSI RX Vega 56 (Amazon renewed)
- Samsung 860 EVO 500GB hdd
- 16GB Crucial Ballistix 2666 MHz DDR4 ram
- Alienware AW2521HF monitor

Ooh and I'd like it to be fairly quiet if possible. Thanks for any input, especially from someone who is currently running something similar!

-Gary
 

garyb

Efficiency Noob
Original poster
New User
May 3, 2020
5
2
One clarification on the vid card (sorry, I can't seem to edit my post) - it's the RX Vega 56 Air Boost 8G OC edition. I mainly selected that for price and smoother compatibility w/ Hackintosh compared to NVIDIA. (Any video card is going to be a gaming improvement over my 6-yr old iMac!)
 

garyb

Efficiency Noob
Original poster
New User
May 3, 2020
5
2
Edit again: (Sorry, wish I could edit my dang posts!) Here's a partpicker list with some included water cooling just in case that would be better(?). Only things I couldn't find were the newer Alienware monitor, (so I threw the older model on there) and the EK-FC Radeon Vega RGB to liquid cool the GPU.
 

bwjohnson0

Chassis Packer
Apr 10, 2020
14
10
Hey man,

I'm in a pretty similar boat as you. Full disclosure, I've never built a PC, so take anything I have to say with the in mind haha. Take a look at this post/video though. I won't even give any advice or make a suggestion. But just wanted to pass this on, and am curious what your take aways are (hint: thermals?).

-bwjohnson0
 

rarskies

Caliper Novice
Apr 12, 2020
33
44
Heya,

Build looks great, I’m currently running a i7 4790k w/Gtx 1080 high sierra/windows 10 build as my daily driver but in the process of swapping out parts with my GFs temporary build which is z390-i/9700k/5700xt.

I test installed Catalina on the GFs comp and it was *fairly* painless, graphics card was natively defected although I had to install initially without GPU and then reinsert it after install. I haven’t used it extensively though so can’t comment on daily performance of 5700xt though there seems to be positive reports on the web. 5700xt could be considered over Vega 56 for increased performance and less heat. Could also consider 9700k if you don’t need all that hyper threading to save some $$

There was a very helpful guide on Tonymac (not sure if ok to link it, will happily remove if this isn’t cool mods) https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/success-i9-9900k-asus-z390-i-gaming-rx-5700-xt-100.289004/

Have you thought about how you are going to get Bluetooth and Wifi functioning on MacOS? I’m running a BCM94360 with mini PCIe adaptor and am going to switch to an m2 adaptor (which I’m pretty sure is necessary for the Asus Z390-I). One difficulty with this Mobo is that the wifi card is hidden under the IO VRM heatsink thing, but what I will do is undo one of the screws toward to top of the mobo on the heatsink and the adaptor cable will be able to thread out there. Let me know if this isn’t clear and I can take a photo for you!
 

ignsvn

By Toutatis!
SFFn Staff
Apr 4, 2016
1,707
1,646
For web/app dev in general, I don't think you need i9-9900K.. However, I don't know what you need in terms of gaming, so yeah :)

For video editing, usually people will go with AMD these days right? But again I'm not familiar with Hackintosh compatibility, so..

The rest look solid.
 

bwjohnson0

Chassis Packer
Apr 10, 2020
14
10
Optimum Tech has a couple hackintosh videos he did recently with an X570 (AMD) board. Main issue was not being able to read the CPU temp, but he had a work around. There may be someone out there that got this working though with OpenCore.

The NVRAM issue with z390 boards has been patched too, so should be good either way. Just depends on your use case.