The Hackintosh Project, part 3 of 4

The following contains computer hardware talk. You have been warned.

The hackintosh is now up and running. This post, however, isn’t about that. This post is the one that I was supposed to write last weak about the parts I selected.

Why wasn’t it up last week? Because my laptop died, so I had to finish the time-consuming process of making the hackintosh before I could do a new Damage Control entry. I must say, the laptop couldn’t have picked a better time to die; a few months earlier and I would have been properly screwed.

Now that the excuse section of this entry has been completed, let’s move on to the main event.

….and no, I’m not doing a full review on Corpse Party: Book of Shadows, as there’s really nothing new to add I hadn’t written already in my impressions.

All together, now

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UP5 TH
The Gigabyte brand motherboards (at least, the ones using Intel’s 7-series chipset) have become the gold-standard for hackintosh projects. Their new UEFI BIOS seems to have been built from the ground up for hackintosh compatibility. These boards are “designed” for native power management in Mac OS X (allowing sleep, speedstep and other functions to work without further hacking — on other boards these might not ever work). Gigabyte also often selects chips for extra SCSI/USB connections, ethernet and audio that are already recognized by OS X. Some even have on-board FireWire. Although I am not sure I will ever use the Thunderbolt ports, my mission was to build a hackintosh with feature parity with a real Mac, so I grabbed the king of Gygabite’s Thunderbolt-having motherboards.

Processor: Intel Core i5-3570K
I selected this processor instead of higher-end ones for a variety of reasons. There was no socket 2011 board with Thunderbolt; I’m not going to see a consistent 30% performance gain from hyperthreading by to match the 30% extra cost of an i7 3770; and the Intel Integrated HD Graphics 4000 can get me up and running without a discrete graphics card, which is going to be the very last thing I buy.

Case: Cooler Master HAF XM RC-922XM-KKN1 ATX Mid Tower
A friend recommended this brand to me. The built-in fans ought to provide me more than enough cooling without the need to mess with additional fan installation. I switched to this tower from the Rosewell Blackhawk because it offered a second hard drive hot-swap bay (so I didn’t have to buy an extra one as I plan to use hot swap madness instead of bothering with meticulous bootloader setups), and the extra headroom for the case’s I/O cables allows full use of the top 5.25″ bay.

Monitor: Acer G226HQLBbd Black 21.5″ 5ms Widescreen LED
I always preferred the 21.5″ screens on an iMac, as I find the 27″ screens to be ridiculously large. Like many items on this list, the ultimate decision came down to something being on sale. This is a capable monitor with VGA and DVI inputs and a maximum resolution of 1920×1080. The color is certainly better than a 6-year-old laptop screen, to be sure.

Power supply: SeaSonic X750 Gold 750W ATX12V/EPS 12V 80 PLUS GOLD Certified Full Modular Active PFC
I bought this brand because it was the one on sale. While I’ll only need two PCIe power connecters (one for the motherboard, one for the GTX 660), having the extra two will allow me room to upgrade down the road. I very (VERY) highly doubt I’ll need 750w to power the hackintosh. That being said, some overhead is nice; power supplies are at their most efficient when operating at half of their maximum load.

RAM: G.SKILL Sniper 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600
There’s plenty of fine RAM out there, so it came down to what I found a good deal on first. Further, as the new case decision lacks a window (though there is a windowed version of the side cover sole separately), these didn’t need to be match any particular aesthetic. When NewEgg offered me a bundle deal with the aforementioned case, I said “yes” to these sticks for half-price.

Wi-fi expansion card: TP-LINK TL-WDN4800 Wireless N Dual Band Adapter
Sadly, the combination wi-fi/bluetooth PCIe card included with the motherboard is not supported under OS X. I was considering a USB solution, but decided I’d be better off with this, which the Mac OS recognizes as a bone-fide AirPort card.

Bluetooth: AZiO BTD-V201 Micro Bluetooth Adapter
Plugged into one of the the case’s rear-facing USB 2.0 ports, it provides enough range to do the only thing I ever use bluetooth for: adding self-edited ringtones to my dumbphone.

SuperDrive: Sony Optiarc 24X DVD Burner, Bulk Package Model AD-7280S-0B – OEM
In Hackintoshes, some optical drives can cause issues with sleep, or may be constant running and blinking lights, even with no disc inserted. The Optiarc is a brand known to just plain work. Sadly, Sony announced it was ending production of them right when my project started. Aslso sadly, I was not able to snag one of the Blu-Ray Optiarcs, so I had to take a gamble with the following part:

Blu-Ray drive: LG Black 10X BD-ROM Model CH10LS28
This drive does indeed periodically check for a disc when empty, blinking its blue light at me. However, it doesn’t break sleep, so it’s fine by me!

Hard Drive: Western Digital WD Blue WD10EZEX 1TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5″
This drive will be my “stuff” drive, primarily used while in OS X. If I find I need some spillover for the other OS, I’ll just partition off a slice.

SSD drive: SAMSUNG 830 Series 2.5″ 256GB SATA III MLC
Part of my fake “fusion drive.” I’ll load ML and all my OS Xly programs onto it, and redirect my user folder on onto the HDD below. This drive is a model used in actual Apple laptops, and enabling TRIM is more workable than on other SSDs. There was a breif fire sale on these right before Samsung launched it’s 840/840 Pro models. Speaking of which,

Second SSD: SAMSUNG 840 Series 2.5″ 250GB SATA III
For windows, I was a-ok with most any drive. Since I would be doing all video editing on the Mac side, I had the freedom to even pick a SandForce-based SSD. As it so happens, the low-end new Samsung model was cheap first, so I didn’t go SandForce anyway. 250 GB should be plenty to store Windows and a bevy of Steam games, so no spare hard drive needed.

Firewire 800/400 card: SYBA Low Profile PCI-Express 1394B/A Firewire Card
This isn’t the absolutely perfect FireWire card to use in a hackintosh, but it’s VERY close and a quarter the price. Since I don’t use FireWire for audio equipment, I won’t notice the ever-so-slight latency this setup may or may not have.

Card reader: Koutech IO-RCM621 All-in-one USB 2.0 3.5″ USB 2.0 Front Panel Multi-format Card Reader
It doesn’t read everything (“all-in-one” non withstanding), but it does read everything I actually use. I paired this with a StarTech 3.5-Inch to 5.25-Inch Floppy Mounting Kit Bracket to fit in the bottom expansion bay.

Graphics card: GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 660 2GB
I thought about the 660 Ti, but the feature creep this build already has going for it is making me rather budget-conscious here. It’ll still be better than the stock 650M in the high-end 21.5″ iMac (or even the 675MX in the high-end 27″), and if I STILL want more I can SLI a second 660 later.

So here are the players. The stage has been set. Next week, you’ll read all about how it came together. Nevermind the spoiler at the top that said the hackintosh is working. It was a multi-day process interrupted only by work and sleep, though with my records you could build yours faster by avoiding some of my boneheaded delays.