A week ago I wrote about my. At first I was very enthusiastic about building my own computer. Everything looked good on paper. I did a lot of research on the interwebs and watched a lot of YouTube videos.

Everybody was always bragging about performance and the low cost, but nobody was telling the whole story. This is my attempt to do just that. Price It's correct that on paper the sum of all components do cost less than a comparable Macintosh, but this does not account for the hours you have to invest in building the thing.

It's not just skrewing all the hardware components together, it's also the installation of macOS and especially getting all the hardware components to work correctly. The whole build took me at least a full work-week. You do the math. If I would have worked for a client in that time, invested the income in Apple and substracted the rest value of my current iMac, I could have bought a new low-end iMac Pro.

Display Another big price component that is never mentioned is a decent screen. There is really no good alternative to a 5K LG dispay at the moment. And a normal hackintosh is not able to run a display with 5K resolution. That has something to do with the Displayport spec and how 2 streams are multiplexed for 5K.

It is theoretically possible to build it with a GC Alpine Bridge, a thunderbold PCI card that takes 2 displayport streams and multiplexes them into a thunderbold output stream. But judging from the forums, nobody has ever tried it before and the hardware is not easy to get. That means you are stuck with a 4K display and 4K displays for PCs do not have the 5K LG display's high resolution.

I ran with the Dell UP2718Q UltraSharp 27 4K HDR Monitor, which costs around $1500. In terms of colorspace and brightness it's competitive to the LG Ultrafine displays, but it's expensive of course. Graphics One of the reasons for building a hackintosh for me was using a beefy graphics card. There are multiple options. You can go with Nvidia and need to install drivers and don't get good OpenCL performance (Final Cut Pro) or you go with AMD.

I decided for AMD, because I thought that I don't need to fiddle around with drivers. In reality that's not true.

Only a hand full of AMD graphics cards seem to work in High Sierra. The AMD Vega 64 works well, but runs the fans at light speed. In the end, I settled with a AMD RX 580 for now, which is the same graphics card that is running in a new high-end iMac. So that's that. I hope to upgrade to Vega 64 sometime in the future. I wasn't able to get the internal Intel GPU running.

Tonymacx86 Blog: Updated Nvidia Drivers For Mac Windows 10

This process is really to cumbersome and involves a lot of kernel panics. No time for that. Audio Depending on what motherboard you use, you need to inject different kext modules. It's amazing that there are people who care enough to make this work. High Sierra however broke the support of a lot of audio drivers. I really couldn't get it to work after 8 hours of trying different drivers, version, etc. I ended up with attaching an M-Audio USB interface to the USB port.

USB Talking about USB. It mostly works for me, but reading through the forums, I get the impression that USB can also be a major source of headache. Cable-bound keyboards and mice do work, audio as well, but at first I wasn't able to mount external hard drives. There was a solution for that however and it took me a while to make it work, but external disks do mount now. However I can't keep them connected to the PC at all time, because at some point the machine just freezes, which is not the case when the external drives are not connected. Bluetooth Bluetooth also mostly works. I purchased the IOGEAR Bluetooth 4.0 USB Micro Adapter, because I read that this is the best solution.

And yes, Magic Keyboard and Magic Mouse do work, also AirPods, however running external hard drives on the same USB bus can cut bandwidth from the bluetooth adapter and the mouse gets a noticable lag. This can go so far as a total shutdown of the bluetooth adapter.

Disconnecting and reconnecting it again mostly workarounds that issue. Hard drives Disk space is a big upside and I can't really complain about that. I am using a Samsung 960 Pro on the M2 slot and 5 hard drives that are connected over SATA. And I love it.

It's really nice to have a lot of disk space and not have a loud RAID on the desk. SATA is also working very reliably so far. Conclusion In summary, I would never recommend to anybody to build a hackintosh unless he has the time and energy to make it work. I can say, a hackintosh is not about the money, it's about the challange to make it work. If you need a machine for your professional work, get an iMac or an iMac Pro.

Personally, I love to have a lot of disk space inside the machine. My hope is that Apple comes out with a new modular and upgradable Mac Pro in 2018 which makes me want to demote the hackintosh to run it Windows only.

Installing Nvidia Web Drivers on High Sierra can be a nightmare for those using Nvidia graphics cards by being greeted by a black screen on boot or automatic restarting. This guide will show you the steps I go through everytime I do a fresh install of macOS High Sierra with an Nvidia Graphics Card.

The black screen problem is an issue that first appeared on High Sierra build (17A405) and is caused by the drivers not installing correctly because of the SIP setting and the instant reboot issue is caused by not having NVRAM detection. To solve this the Nvidia drivers need to be installed with SIP enabled and the EFI partition needs to be configured in a way that is High Sierra/Nvidia compliant. Nvidia Black Screen Hackintosh – Regaining Access If you are locked out of your hackintosh after installing Nvidia Drivers you need to first regain access. If you already have access you can move on to the install steps below. To regain access we need to prevent the Nvidia drivers from starting up on boot to do that enter your recovery partiton:.

Boot Recovery Partition In the Clover Boot Menu. Open Terminal. Replace diskname what you named your hackintosh boot drive as you type the following into Terminal:.

rm -R /Volumes/diskname/Library/Extensions/NVDAStartupWeb.kext. touch /Volumes/diskname/Library/Extensions/. reboot Installing Nvidia Drivers on 10.13 High Sierra Hackintosh These steps should get your Nvidia GPU working in High Sierra 10.13 if not leave a comment. Set config.plist for Nvidia Mount your EFI partition using to begin the changes necessary changes to enable Nvidia cards in High Sierra. Here we just need to verify the proper checkboxes are set.

Open Config.Plist using Clover Configurator. In Clover Select Boot under SECTIONS. Uncheck nvdisable=1. Select Graphics under SECTIONS.

Uncheck Inject Intel. Select System Parameters under SECTIONS. Check Inject NvidiaWeb. Save config.plist. Exit Clover Configurator 2.

Enable SIP If an attempt is made to install the web drivers in High Sierra 10.13 without SIP enabled a warning will popup that the drivers may not install correctly. To prevent that warning from showing and ensuring the web drivers are installed properly we need to enable SIP temporarily.

Open config.plist in. Navigate RT Variables CsrActivateConfig. Change CsrActivateConfig to 0x00. Restart Hackintosh. NVRAM Detection (Optional) Clover recently included built in NVRAM detection in the form of OsxAptioFix3Drv-64.efi. If you are using OsxAptioFix2Drv-64.efi or OsxAptioFix2Drv-free2000.efi you will need to use a file called EmuVariableUefi-64.efi to get your graphics card accelerated.

You can check which one you are using by navigating to /Volumes/EFI/ EFI/Clover/Drivers64UEFI/ of your mounted EFI partition. To add EmuVariableUefi-64.efi:. Open Clover Configurator. Mount your EFI Partition. Open config.plist using Clover Configurator. Click Install Drivers on left column of Clover Configurator.

Click EmuVariableUefi in bottom left box. Verify EmuVariableUefi-64.efi exists in /Volumes/EFI/EFI/Clover/Drivers64UEFI/ 4. GPU Kexts To get proper support for High Sierra it’s recommended you use the version 1.2+ of Lilu.kext and NvidiaGraphicsFixup.kext to your EFI folder EFI/Clover/kexts/Other. If using High Sierra 10.13.3-10.13.4 you should use a version of NvidiaGraphicsFixup.kext with a fix for the lag issue that can happen as a result of faulty/incompatible drivers that Nvidia has released. Install the Drivers In order to install the proper version of the Web Drivers you need to know what version of High Sierra 10.13.x you are using and the (Build Number) If you are not sure which build of 10.13.X you are using then open About this Mac and click on the text “Version: 10.13” to reveal the number. See: Nvidia Web Drivers: Below is a link with a list of available Nvidia Web Drivers for High Sierra.

Note: High Sierra 10.13.3 the Web Drivers are currently causing all sorts of issues. For an alternative solution to install working drivers see: For a full list of available High Sierra Nvidia drivers see: 6. BIOS Setting It’s important to set your dedicated graphics card is set as the primary GPU setting in BIOS. Leaving it on auto with an Nvidia graphics card can cause graphical issues on some motherboards. Graphics: PEG/PCIe Slot 1. Initial Display Output: PCIe 1 Slot Other BIOS settings. If using HDMI as your output Compatibility Support Module ( CSM) may need to be disabled BIOS to prevent a black screen on boot, especially with a 4 display.

Re-disable SIP At this point when you boot into macOS there should be graphical support and no rebooting. If you enabled SIP in config.plist you need to disable it again. Open config.plist in Clover Configurator and change CsrActivateConfig to 0x67 8. Proper ig-platform-id Coffee & Kaby Lake: If you are using a Coffee Lake or Kaby Lake processor and using High Sierra or Sierra 10.12.4 you should change the ig-platform-id to prevent crashing when using programs like FCPX. Open config.plist in. Click Graphics on the left-side Column.

Type 0x59120003 for the ig-platform-id box. Save config.plist. Restart. Does not work here. I followed the instructions above (Bios and Config.plist) As soon as i enable InjectNividia, i got a blackscreen. If i disable it including webdrivers, all Graphic-Injections and set AllowConfiguration, i get 50 trys for GFX and so on I was able to install macosx by disabling all this graphic-stuff, but cant get my Graphiccard to work propely.

(GTX 1050 TI G1 Gaming 4G, I7-7700 3.6Ghz/8MB, Asus Prime Z270-K) Somehow i have to start from scratch again. Is it better to start install with the Onboard Intel -Graphics and then move to Nvidia? Or Use Nvidia from start without Webdrivers and no injections? The only way i could install OSX was disable all Graphic-injections and enabled allowconfiguration.

Hello, Amazing post, thanks again Hackintosher. I installed on this machine Gigabyte GA-Z170MX-Gaming 5 Kabylake i5-7600K Balystic 8×2 DDR4 2666mhz Gygabyte GTX 1060 3GDDR5 Everything works I miss more than install the GTX. I’m afraid of having a crash if I can not, because apparently it’s special for everyone. Can I boot at that moment on my macos key if I plant my SSD with macos on it to come reconfigure on the desktop? Thanks again for your tutorials because thanks to you I managed to install everything 🙂.

I am still having problems with my 10.13.1 install. I have copied your EFI and followed the other settings you have provided. I am able to install 10.13.1 on a newly formatted APFS drive. After I finished the install and set up my account I installed the WebDriver-378.10.10.10.20.107 and after the reboot, I get a black screen with IOConsoleUsers: time (0) 0-0, Lin 0,llk 1, IOConsoleUsers: qIOScreenLockState 3, hs 0, bs 0 now 0 sn 0x0 and it freezes there, I do a reboot to try the recovery you advised after a black screen after reboot and I get this a boot then a blank screen with this reflashing every 10 seconds. Date time Imac.com.apple.XPC launched1 (com.,apple.windowsserver): Service only ran for 0 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 10 seconds. I never get to the recovery screen.

Gigabyte GA-H97M-D3H NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti 2047 MB Intel Core i5-4690K Processor 3.5 GHz LGA 1150 BX0K WebDriver-378.10.10.10.20.107. I need some Help getting 1050ti working on 10.13.2 (same issue in 13.1 too before i updated) The issue: Black screen when trying to boot with the 1050ti. I can still boot with Nvidia drivers disabled I have tried everything in this guide.

Installed updated Nvidia Web drivers (17C88), Updated Lilu Kext (in system/extensions folder with NvidiaGraphicsFixup.kext). Tried SIP enabled and disabled. Disabled Intel Graphics in Bios. Install RC script. Tried various SMBIOS. Specs: Gigabyte Z270XUD3, i7-7700, 16gb, 1050ti Any help would be appreciated. This black screen issue has been haunting my dreams for 2 nights now.

After several days of head-scratching and a lot of fresh installs, I figured out something I missed: if you install using Tonymacx86 tools and later upgrade your Clover to the latest version, you’ll have to copy FakeSMC.kext to your bootloader. I just copied mine from /Library/Extensions/FakeSMC.kext to /Volumes/EFI/CLOVER/kext/others after mounting the EFI partition with Clover Configurator. Not doing this was getting me stuck on a “AppleACPICPU busy timeout” error, which gave me the illusion that macOS was trying to boot up the NvidiaWeb drivers and failing. Another thing I noticed: make sure to re-disable SIP (CsrActivateConfig to 0x67); the Nvidia web drivers will NOT get loaded if SIP is enabled.

Might be a good idea to do a full restart after installing the drivers BEFORE disabling SIP again and asking the Nvidia preference pane to switch to Web drivers. Hope this helps someone stuck like I was 😀. Hi and thanks for all the tuts here. So far I can’t install my GTX970 on a freshly installed High Sierra. Whatever I do I’m still crashing,id boot with the infamous glScreenLock of the death. Mobo is an MSI Z270 Gaming M5, Webdriver is 10.10.10.25.102 Clover updated to 4318 Vram simulation checked and functional. Proc is a 67 skylake and the system is detected as imac 17,1 The tuto and Plist came from that site with the proper modification for the MSI board.

Sound,network are functional. I tried all the magic tricks on differents forums without sucess and i’m running out of ideas tbh. Any suggestions will be nice! Thanks a lot. I’m running HS 10.13.2.

From an SSD with an Dell i5 12gb ram. Nvidia 650 ti boost. I basically made this hackintosh to run FCPX. VMware doesn’t support accelerated graphics with macOS as the guest. The whole system runs perfectly fine UNTIL I add an add-in to a video in FCPX such as a title or effect, then I get big square-like pixels all over the screen and preview window. I’ve installed and uninstalled everything I can think of. This is with the FCPX Trial software from apple.

Anyone have any idea what could be wrong? I can not get my GTX 960 to work on High Sierra 10.13.2 clean install. I give it up with 10.13 it is just that hard never had more problems then with HS it its a hell My other system with AMD RX580 is working well (only won’t update to 10.13.2 keeps staying on 10.13.1 don’t know why.

But my machine with GTX960 is a terrible thing 🙁 with SIerra no problem but to get the graphics work i tried all thing written here above. With SIP enabled en disabled, with Lilu.kext (latest) and without, checked all the settings in config.plist and installed EmuVariableUEFI but still no luck.

Don’t know what is going wrong i have a black screen but the machine works because i see it on Apple Remote Desktop please help. Hi, I’m building a new hackintosh machine with the purpose of having a quite good and reliable High Sierra for work with a Windows partition for gaming not too much game for the time a have, but however good with latest game. The specs I choose are: GA-H270M-DS3H i5 7400 Crucial Mx300 SSD 256Gb + a HDD WD 2Tb Crucial Ram 8Gb and I’m in doubt on Video card: Sapphire RX560 2Gb (I read now more compatible for Mac) KFA2 GTX1050 2Gb (maybe more powerful than RX but related to Nvidea Web Driver that I read could have sometime problematic) Definitely what is your suggestion on video cards? Hi, First of all, I would like to thank Hackintosher for all the Guides and Instructions!

I was able to build my first ever Hackintosh and it was super easy thanks to the very clear instructions! Here are my specs: Intel Core i7 8700K Gigabyte Z370 AORUS Gaming 7 Samsung 960 Pro M.2 512GB Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4-3000, DIMM 288, 64 GB (4 x 16) Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Gaming OC 11G I was able to install High Sierra 10.13.2 with my GTX 1080 TI installed from the beginning (no use of iGPU). However, I ran into some troubles when installing the Nvidia Web Drivers. I followed this guide step by step and although the web driver was installed successfully, there was no acceleration. I had still the crappy 1280 x 720 resolution and in “About this Mac” my card wasn’t displayed correctly. I then read the comment from user SSR who mentioned, to copy Lilu.kext and NvidiaGraphicsFixup.kext into /Library/Extensions on the main harddrive.

I tried it and it worked! The card is now fully recognized. So a question for Hackintosher: Is this the correct way to make it work and if so, maybe it would be a good idea to mention this in your guide at step 4. Oh yes, praise @ssr and you guys who tested it and pointed out that it works!

Copying Lilu.kext and WhateverGreen.kext (former NvidiaGraphicsFixup.kext) to /Library/Extensions made my Hackintosh working after an evening spent in enabling/disabling SIP, installing and reinstalling NVIDIA drivers and scratching my head in searching for what could go wrong as I’ve already got working Hackintosh one day before! Setup: High Sierra 10.13.6 GeForce GTX 1060 from Gigabyte @Hackintosher would you mind emphasizing that those kexts must go into /Library/Extensions eventually as it looks like they are not copied there sometimes? Also, I am pretty sure that on my first attempt I got working NVIDIA drivers with SIP disabled (0x67) as it did not work with enabled SIP (0x00). Could it get fixed in the latest web driver version probably? This step may need to be reevaluated. One more thing.

In the current version of Clover it is possible to open Options - Graphics Injector in Clover menu and uncheck Use NVIDIA Web there. It enables getting control over your Hackintosh without removing the NVDAStartupWeb.kext. I think I could not follow that recommendation, to be honest, as I either did not find the recovery option in Clover menu or could not boot from it (I don’t remember now), but this setting saved me from complete reinstall in my attempts to get NVIDIA card working.

Of course, thanks for your guides @Hackintosher! Thanks your guide is freaking awesome. At first I thought this a long and tedious process but it worked out. Appently the lilu.kext and nvidiafix kext files were version 1 and sip wasn’t enabled which cause the issue. After installing the drivers you have restart and redisable sip and then restart again with nvda=1(something like that just enable that in clover boot options) and then it’s done. I have reinstalled the os 4times because the terminal method didn’t work for me as I didn’t have recovery hd(it didn’t work in short) and in the fifth time I followed this one step by step and it worked.

Why do you disable the critical onboard UHD630?!?! This will destroy computation speed of OpenCL benchmarks like LuxMark. LuxMark will locate and use the i7 8700K CPUs OpenCL via UHD630, and on my computer, I get a LOT of extra speed added to my MSI Z370 Gaming Pro Carbon AC and its NVidia 1080 TI. In fact, the onboard increases the benchmark speed of LuxMark over 11.4% faster. You want LuxMark to run SLOWER on high end Hackintoshes? My solution is elegant and SIMPLE. I use the onboard video for boot and bios manipulation, and monitors on Nvidia show black, and after boot is over, the drivers cleanly load for NVidia and hassle free i have a spare monitor on the UHD630 onboard, alonside the other monitors.

You can option drag the titlebar and drop in Display on “System Preferences” on mac to set preferred system monitor to the NVIdia 1080 TI. A 1080 TI has only 28 compute units and 1316 Mhz a UHD630 on a i7 8700k has 24 compute units and 1200 Mhz luxball on UHD630 with no NVidia gets 2609 on my machine. With both gpus active, not disabled like your guide dictates, the OpenCL benchmark LuxMark 3.1 yields 25378, thats 2626 faster than the normal result of 22752 of the Nvidia 1080 TI.

11.4% faster if you do not disable onboard GPU UHD630. The whole point of buying the new 12 core CPUS from intel is to enjoy the speedboost in OpenCL power. Even if i disconnect the 4K monitor completely off the UHD630 ports, the mac will autoboot eventually to the nvidia. Too many guides (all of them) suggest disabling the UHD630 on a MSI and there is NO REASON TO at all, except to slow down your mac in benchmarks that use OpenCL and more and more products use OpenCL every month.

Note to others, you CAN have glitch-free UHD630 alongside NVidia 1080 TI on a MSI z370 using a i7 if you eliminate a lot of the hacks that assume you want to see clover on the other monitors attached to your Nvidia at mid boot time, and just go “clean”. Please figure out your issues and bugs preventing you from using the onboard GPU because I had no hassles by avoiding most of the voodoo steps these various posted MSI guides show on my MSI overclocked to 4.5Ghz (a person can get 5.3GHz stable if delidded and cherry picked from siliconlottery dot com) thanks. Thanks for awesome web site. My own note: try 0x03 for csr-active-config, not 0x00? SIP has various settings, other than the two shown in most guides, and 0x03 is a setting that enables some of SIP that can be used. I think SIP has 4 or 5 components in total, I do not know what 0x03 offers other than for certain allowing UNSIGNED kexts to load, but there is a terminal command to list status of of the 4 or 5 SIP components.

I can’t program on my Mac without SIP mostly off anyway because DTRACE, a critical tool for debugging entry-points into libraries and kernel calls, does not work in modern macs with all of SIP enabled even from root. As for letting unsigned kexts to load you probably want that for some of the more exotic hackintosh kexts. Others here will have far better answers. Also the words “click on anything” are vague.

Did you try different USB 2.0 properly mapped ports? Especially ports in the back like a usb 2.0 port? Can you type? Is the machine crashed? For example a Mac Pro laptop early 2008 in Mavericks OS X a minute after boot will freeze and not appear to respond to mice and keyboard if WIFI is not enabled on the laptop as an active antennae. Its a race to get it enabled, once ever enabled, the machine works again forever until accidentally forgetting and disabling wifi before shutdown, or in many deliberate regression tests. (I tested myself).

According to logs, the machine was actually merely crashed, but screen looked normal, and therefore “could not type or click”. So is your menu clock updating if you wait long enough? You need to give more info regarding “unable to click on anything”. Thanks for the tutorial!

However this didn’t work for me at. I’ve been busy for 4 night installing High Sierra 10.13.1. For the zillionth time. The reason why I do not use 10.13.4 is: I already have one hack with nvidia fully working which is on 10.13.1. So in the end I cloned that HDD added EFI and mounted that HDD onto another hakintosh.

So, the problem I have is with enabling nvidia drivers. NVIDIA web driver is properly installed and seen in the upper corner but when selected and after reboot nothing happens. The screen is still flickering and system recognizes graphics display 7 mb. Not to mention that I read and tried EVERYTHING!

From lilu, nvidiafix, emu64driver etc. Nothing works. This is my specification: Gigabyte GA-H270-Gaming 3 Corsair RM Series ATX/EPS Fully Modular 80 PLUS Core i7-7700K Crucial Ballistix Sport LT Single DDR4 Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1050 G1 Gaming 2GB GDDR5 3xHDMI I know that GPU is working and it’s compatible cause I used it on another hackintosh that’s running properly. I compared clover, bios from that machine and set the other (same config) but it won’t work. However, I managed to enable nvidia drivers when I switched GPU’s but since I didn’t have WIFE, kextbeast messed up the entire setup after extracting some kexts into sys/lib/ext. Stupidly, I did not write down what I did when I fixed the problem. I know that I freshly installed High Sierra and that I did post installation with multibeast according to this video: Later on I repeated the same process (as much as I could remember) but I failed over and over again.

I am able to install and run high sierra but GPU won’t work. Does anyone know how to fix this? After Step 2 Endless boot mode.

My setup was running fine using Intel onboard graphics, but I wanted to get the EVGA GT-740 working, it was black. Followed your instructions up to step 2, plugged-in to graphics card, restarted, monitor working YES! But then it hung on endless boot mode. It won’t boot from recovery mode either. I am able to view Clover boot loader but don’t know what to do at this point.

My set up; GA – Z77 – DS3H motherboard I7 2600 K EVGA GT–740 High Sierra 10.13.6. This guide was perfect, as are most of the guides I’ve used on this website. GPU/ drivers are installed and working well and I no longer have to hot plug my dual monitors, which was a major annoyance with the iGPU. Quick question: when using the integrated graphics, my boot time on the Apple loading screen was very short (probably around 5 seconds, definitely less than 15 seconds). Since I installed the GPU and the drivers, the Apple loading screen is usually up for over a minute. Is this common or does it point to something being wrong with the setup?

In case this is necessary, my build is: Mobo: Asus Prime Z370A LGA1151 CPU: Intel i7 8700K (6 cores) 32GB RAM DDR4 1TB SSD PSU: 650W GPU (newly installed): Gigabyte GeForce GT 1030 OS: High Sierra (13.6). Hi, I followed all of your steps but ran into an issue. After getting everything installed and configured but I ran into a black screen boot loop. I attempted to use your method of removing the NVDIA drivers from the clover boot terminal but I could find the file (I probably entered the wrong path). So I didn’t get it removed properly and after a reboot I can’t even enter my BIOS.

I’m getting a couple numbers in the corner, when I hit DEL I get “entering setup” but then it hangs and I can’t see anything. Frustrating and I really don’t know where to go from here if I can’t even enter the BIOS. I definitely can’t get to the clover boot loader.

Reset BIOS manually? Thanks, Adam.