I’ve assembled my first ever Hackintosh, following a variant of this ‘recipe’. I’m rather pleased that it booted first time. Now I need to think of a name for it. (At the moment, it’s named after its case: Phenom.)

For several reasons, I used the cheapest (and slowest) variants:

• i3 CPU
• 250GB hard disk
• 8GB RAM

The motherboard can take up to an i7 CPU, up to 64GB of RAM and lots more storage (five 3·5 devices, two 2·5 inch devices and an M2 SSD).

At the moment it’s running a fairly up-to-date version of Linux Mint which I had on an old 2·5 inch old HD that I’d been using to experiment with Hackintoshing an old laptop. It feels a bit sluggish, but should speed up when I can afford to replace the HDs with SSDs, install more RAM and throw in a faster processor.

What are the learning points?

• I can follow a recipe, even when it doesn’t have all the essential fine details.
  • But things take far longer than estimated.
• Connect as much as possible to the motherboard before putting it into the case – it’s a real pain trying to fit cables into edge connectors in a tiny black hole.
• The CPU came with its own cooling fan. I’ve not yet fitted the Corsair H₂O CPU cooler. To do that, I’ll need to
  • open the case
  • disconnect all the side-panel connectors
  • extract the hard disk tray
  • disconnect everything else from the motherboard
  • remove the rear fan
  • dismount and extract the motherboard
  • remove the Intel CPU fan.

  Then I’d need to reassemble the beast. I’ll wait until the skin has gown back on my fingers before doing that.

• Buy enough SATA cables first time round!

What’s not yet working?

• The side-panel USB ports.
• The motherboard VGA port (Perhaps it switches off if the motherboard detects a graphics card, or perhaps Linux only works with graphics cards rather than built-in graphics.)

What remains to be tested?

• all the other graphics ports
• audio ports

What remains to be done?

• first and foremost, installing MacOS of course!
• buying more SATA cables, so I can boot MacOS, Linux or Windows as needed. (There’s an empty HD in the machine just begging to to have MacOS installed. I know that the machine will boot Windows 7 – I have that on another spare HD.)