Building a cheap yet powerful Hackintosh

Bookmark this page! I am currently writing a complete  Snow Leopard version of this guide! Will be published by 20-Sep-2009.

Once upon a time, talking about building a Hackintosh was more or less considered an underground activity. Today, even the most popular mainstream websites and blogs have started publishing articles about building a Hackintosh. There are several reasons why Hackintoshes are becoming popular among the geeks – full control of your hardware configuration at the fraction of the cost of a real Mac, advancements like pc_efi which helps you run OS X with very minimal patching and of course, the satisfaction of building everything from scratch- a stepping stone towards geek nirvana.

My original plan was to buy an iMac in mid-2008. But that shouldn’t stop me from running Leopard till that time. Here is a small run down of how I converted my Media Center PC into a near perfect Macintosh running OS X 10.5.1. Note that you can select the same parts that I have mentioned here and end up building a Hackintosh that is as fast as the current line of iMac.

The Media Center PC that I had was an AMD machine built around a cheap ASUS M2N-MX motherboard. This time around, I wanted to build a Intel based machine as the Hackintosh support for AMD processors are a little on the weaker side. I sold the AMD processor and motherboard to a friend who happily upgraded his ailing 4 year old PC with those components.

For the motherboard, I chose an ASUS P5GC-MX, which is one of the cheapest mobo that can run Core 2 Duo processors at 1333 Mhz FSB. It is also almost 99 % compatible with Leopard. The only quirk is that the onboard LAN does not work, so I added a D-LINK DFE 530TX+ LAN card, which works like a charm. There are expensive choices like Intel Bad Axe 2 etc., but the P5GC-MX is a no non-sense dirt cheap mobo. You can’t beat its price. For the processor, I picked up a C2D E6500, which runs at 2.33 GHz. I added a 320 GB IDE hard drive to the 250 GB SATA that I already had, thus boosting the hard drive capacity to 570 GB total. For the RAM, I reused the transcend 2 x 1 GB 533 MHz memory modules. For the graphics card, I used an NVIDIA 5200 with 128 MB RAM. Though this is a pretty low end card by today’s standards, it is more than enough for all the Coverflow magic in Leopard.

The other parts are standard fare: A Sony DW-G120A DVD RAM drive, a Samsung 940BW widescreen monitor at 1440×900 resolution and a creative 4.1 speaker set.

How I installed the software
This is the tricky part, but it is pretty simple if you know what you are doing. There are patched Leopard DVDs available, which is probably the easiest way to install. But I chose the ‘flat image’ method because the flat image is only about 2.5 GB – which makes it pretty easy to download – considering the kind of broadband access we have in this part of the world. I already had the Tiger 10.4.8 JaS DVD, which made things a little easier. On my 320 GB IDE drive (which is set as the bootable hard drive in the BIOS), I made 3 partitions: A 30 GB partition for Tiger, a 120 GB partition for Leopard and the rest for storing movies, music, photos etc.,

Tiger installed without any problems. Once I booted into Tiger, I extracted the flat image and used the excellent Carbon Copy Cloner tool to expand the Leopard image into the 120GB partition. This is an important step because using the dd method, you will end up with a 16 GB partition. You can probably use the restore image tab from the Disk Utility to do the same, but I didn’t try that. Afterwards, I made the second partition as bootable and rebooted the PC. Leopard booted for the first time without any problems. Next comes the important step: installing pc_efi. I made a backup of the kernel in Leopard in a different name under the root folder and applied the 10.5.1 update. This update overwrites the patched kernel that comes with the flat image – that is why I took the backup earlier.

I rebooted into Tiger and installed pc_efi onto the Leopard partition using the instructions provided with the pc_efi bundle version 8. Once this is done, I rebooted again and had Leopard running – this time with the Vanilla kernel, which makes it possible to pull in all sorts of updates that come from Apple in the future! Voila, I have a perfect custom built Mac Pro running!! I am planning to use this PC till I save enough money to buy the iMac when it is refreshed with the Penryn processors from Intel. Here is a photo of my rig running Leopard. Click to enlarge.

Update- 21 Feb 2008: The 10.5.2 install, even with the Netkas method disabled my PS2 keyboard. The workaround? Make sure that you backup the ACPIPlatform.kext file before you start the update and then restore it. Warning: Do not install the update from the Software Updater, but through the offline updater available from the Apple site.

Update: The 10.5.3 combo update from Apple hosed my install again. But thankfully I have started using Time machine and could do a successful recovery. Needed to use the Netkas method again.

Update- 1 July 2008: 10.5.4 update worked like a charm. Just updated it from Software Updates like a real mac.

I strongly advice you to use time machine as this could be your savior in case any update results in a borked system.

I am now maintaining a Squidoo Lens which features the bill-of-materials for an updated configuration for this Hackintosh. If you are planning to build a similar Hackintosh, head over to this page and you can place an Amazon order for all the components that are required.

Please feel free to post any questions regarding this configuration and I will be glad to help. But please note: You are doing everything at your own risk and I am in no way responsible for any kind of outcomes, good or bad.