This $2,000 Hackintosh SMASHES the $4,000 Mac Studio

The Mac Studio is an impressive computer—but is it still the fastest Mac in 2023?

*Our Build:*

[paulandpedro]

Mentioning you used to be able to “create a hackintosh in minutes” lol. I’ve lost days of my time to debugging my hackintoshes over the years even with those “easy” tools. Appreciate the video, I’ve given up on the hackintosh dream and have been living the m1 life for a while now. I do miss the performance more often than I thought I would.

[StormXF]

If you optimize the 13700K just right, you can get respectable efficiency! Mine gets a Cinebench score of 28000 with a power draw of just 165W. That's just a 7% loss of performance with a massive drop in power draw.

[dog_knight]

The Open Core team have done some great work. I just recently used the Open Core Legacy Patcher to install Monterey on a Mid 2011 iMac that I upgraded the GPU on. Full metal support and everything works brilliantly. Next step is to upgrade the BT / WIFI adapter to allow support for Handoff / Airplay / etc.

[tonelab]

I planned on buying parts (today) for a 10th gen build, because I believed it was the last officially supported generation of Intel CPUs, but after seeing this, I may have to change that up. Thanks for the excellent video.

[obyrnedd]

Oh man you brought back memories of using a Hackintosh. I do not miss messing around with custom config files. Excellent work!

[julian.morgan]

Just about finished upgrading my whole family's old Haswell based hackintoshes to 10th gen Intel and Big Sur - five PCs with my own PC triple booting. There's almost zero point (unless you really need it) bothering with Monterey or Ventura as Apple have been stripping out hardware driver support with each more recent version, with all the focus understandably being on M1 development - this can make things like bluetooth, wifi and even ethernet trickier to get working and less stable generally for no appreciable benefit since BIg Sur still got a recent security update. Also of course as Apple deprecate older hardware there's no point them including drivers for that hardware in a current OS - but from a hackintoshing point of view this limits your options. For me 10th gen Intel with Big Sur is the sweet spot.

Also Quinn I'm not sure if you just lucked out or maybe you missed explaining that you can no longer fix your USB port limit issues AFTER installation with USB mapping - this needs to be done before you create the installer so you have your USBToolBox.kext and UTBMap.kext )or equivalent) - specific to the hardware you intend to install on - before you attempt to install.

Far and away the easiest way of doing this is with USBToolbox - created by dhinakg of Opencore dev fame - on Windows. This is actually the biggest headache in the process IME, because you have to figure out which of your allowed 15 ports you're going to keep. Mind you its not that tricky as the 15 port limit is per controller and your higher end motherboards tend to have two or three controllers. Also it's pretty simple to sacrifice unused internal USB headers and also switch off the USB 3.0 port where you know you're only going to connect USB 2.0 or 1.1 devices or vice versa. Anyone interested should search for "chriswayg" on gitbook and "USB Mapping on Windows" - his Opencore Visual Guide is generally very good and highly recommended in conjunction with the Dortania guide.

[itstheterranaut]

I used to build many a Hackintosh bitd on generic stuff using Clover Configurator etc. They all worked, sometimes quite well. And then I switched to cMP 5, 1's for 6 or so years, all good, all supported with some tweaks.

However, for the first time ever I've picked up some second hand PC stuff thats fairly supported, studied the Dortania guides and spent a week building a new Hack. And it just works, the guides are fantastic documents on how Macs work- some of the best written technical docs I've ever encountered.

[BrianJones-wkcx]

Fun little experiment—thought about doing this many times. May still do it. That thermal difference is a huge difference in limited spaces. My 12700K/RTX 3080 rig heats up my space during the summer likes like a sauna. Not necessarily a reason to pick your platform, mind you, but a bit of a decision maker as to what device I boot up on any given day.

[lzpwrir]

I built an 8th Gen HackMac using an i5-8600K on an MSI board with an RX Vega 56 GPU which worked great and was strangely easy to get working using OpenCore. Recently upgraded to an i9-9900K (2nd hand from ebay) for seriously improved performance. But, seeing your successful 13th Gen build has given me hope.... Sadly, I cannot afford Apple silicon just yet so I guess its time for another upgrade...

[MadenEarth]

I LOVE THIS KIND OF CONTENT!!! i build my first Hackintosh in 2008, and all this talk is nostalgic, i hope everybody keeps all this Hackintosh topic alive!

[bsenka]

I WASN'T planing to do a Hackintosh... until I watched this video! Now I'm seriously contemplating it!
I honestly could not care less if it continues to support the latest MacOS. For stability and compatibility with software and peripherals, I always stay a minimum of 2 full versions behind current version anyway. The machine that I pay the bills with is still using Mojave, and I have no intention of updating that any time soon!

[shieldstv]

I just built almost EXACTLY this machine. The 13700k is a beast.

[mrveink]

I bought a Mac Mini with a 10-core M2 Pro and I've been more than happy with it. I'm mainly a Linux user, but Asahi Linux drivers are in the works so I'll get back to Linux in a while.
One of the major factors for getting this machine was the power efficiency, as here in the Nordic countries, electric costs have sky rocketed. I used to have an FX 8350 and an R9 390 and it drew so much power when just doing pretty lightweight tasks.
My daily driver before the Mac Mini was an ASUS laptop with a Ryzen 7 3700U and the Mac crushes it. In a DIY xz compression tests the ASUS took 1758s to compress it when the Mac Mini did it in 864s, less than half the time. Decompressing that took 80s for the ASUS laptop and 32s for the Mac Mini. Yeah, not really saving that much in decompression, but as I have to compress software packages using `XZ_OPT=-e9` daily, it will save alot of time.
When compiling LLVM using a custom build script, it took the ASUS laptop 82min when the Mac Mini did it in 9min. That's 11% of the time the ASUS laptop took do compiling it. The ASUS laptop was 800€ new and the Mac Mini 1480€ with a student discount, but that's still worth the money for me as I'm saving alot of time without having a bulky desktop (my room is under 9m^2 so space is limited) and having way lower power draw than my old desktop.

[kainushia]

built a hackintosh ventura last week for my old pc. 8th gen 8600k. i was surprised with the performance with the iGpu. Windows 11 22h2 was lagging in some apps but the same apps running smooth in the hackintosh.

[josephizang]

It would be great to get a detailed guide on how to build a hackintosh. Really enjoy your format of content. I always learn something.

[yesiam]

Hey! If anyone is having trouble editing their plist files, you can always use the easy method (which is not mentioned in the OC documentation probably because they want you to know how all this works + easier to trouble shoot) is to use OC Auxillary tools. It basically does it all automatically for you + easy updates once you are set up too

[BNGamesYT]

Bought the MBP16 M2 Pro a ew months ago, likely will stay on this for the time being. The lack of future support kills my interest in building one of these.

[davidecava]

Great video, Quinn. I just sold my old Ryzen 3900X/5700XT hackintosh rig and assembled an all white NZXT build, same i7 13700K as yours and a reference black 6950XT. It looks clean and has phenomenal performance for the price.
Was going to install Ventura today on one of the NVMEs and your video just came out at perfect timing.

I totally agree on your vision about the future of Hackintosh. This may actually be my last one as well; can’t beat an M1 Ultra killer at half price.

[dashbrj]

I have a hackintosh using opencore and an AMD 5900X processor, 6900XT GPU and 64 gig ram. The thing flies. Cooling is a custom loop with mostly EK gear so it also runs pretty silen. But its huge, compared to a mac studio anyway (Fractal Design Define 7 chassis).

[TimeNaio]

I have a i3-12100f and a RX 5500 XT running MacOS Sonoma. But the HDMI audio is not working. My monitor has built-in speakers so I want them to be used. My motherboard's audio jack is working but HDMI audio isn't working. How can I fix this??