A GUIDE TO A VANILLA HACKINTOSH FROM SCRATCH

This build includes:

Intel i7-8700k
Gigabyte Z370 Aorus Gaming 5 Motherboard
AMD RX Vega 64 Frontier Edition GPU
64 GB RAM

This guide was something I put together as I was trying to build a fully functional hackintosh for 4k Video editing. I am primarilyy Final Cut Pro X user, and my 2013-late Macbook Pro was beginning to show its age with rendering, timeline scrubbing so I thought it was time to upgrade to an iMac Pro until I was horrified when I found the prices I would be forced to pay.

So I thought I would go the hackintosh route. I used the famous vanilla hackintosh subreddit r/hackintosh on Reddit to get my feet wet and over the course of two weeks read pretty much every article I could find on the subject. After a lot of searching I managed to have a good understanding of how hackintoshes (and MacOS) work and started writing my thoughts, notes, and install logs down. After a lot of time (close to a month of tinkering) I managed to complete this project with a fully functional hackintosh that cuts through 4K footage like butter. Quite literally everything is working perfectly.

This information did not come out of thin air. I am very grateful to the wonderful folks on Reddit's r/hackintosh subreddit as well as the good contributors at TonyMacx86.com, and the users at InsanelyMac.com all of whom were tremendously helpful. At the end of it all, I wanted to publish my guide, both as a template of how to build a hackintosh and also so that it provides an all-in-one education to anyone who wants to learn the vanilla method.

DISCLAIMER : I will begin by saying that while I wrote this piece from start to finish, there are segments that I directly copied (for my convenience) off other people’s work and annotated with my own thoughts. This is by no means intended to stand alone as my own work, and I have credited and linked every one of those posts when I have borrowed segments from the work of others. I only provide this as a public service.

This guide has been divided into sections which include a tutorial on how to install MacOS on a PC as well as some educational content associated with the process. Your mileage may vary.

Table of Contents

1. The Basics of the Vanilla Method
2. My System Components
3. External Guides and Resources Used (Includes download links)
4. What Works and Doesn't Work in my Build
5. BIOS Settings
6. Creating a USB Installer with MacOS
7. Clover Builder and Configurator
8. Booting into MacOS for the First Time
9. Troubleshooting
10. A Walkthrough of Clover Configurator
11. Cosmetic Changes on your new Hackintosh
12. My Personal Benchmarks
13. Final Thoughts and Updates