Tuesday, November 9, 2010

The Perfect Motherboards For Your Hackintosh

We keep getting asked, which motherboard to start with for a fully working hackintosh? Start with the letter "G."
 So you're going to "hackintosh." Well, you might as well start off properly.
After scouring around countless forums, the most popular boards people are using to setup their systems are boards made by Gigabyte. Digging deeper, the reason is clear: almost complete driver compatibility with Apple's OS X Snow Leopard (save for SATA 6gbps at the moment). The specific features and hardware components that Gigabyte uses for its motherboards in the last few years, are either the same, or natively supported by Apple.
Some other boards people are using belong to Asus, but there are far more compatibility issues here as far as hackintoshes go.

Motherboard support in OS X is the biggest hurdle in setting up your system. If you're going with Core i5 and Core i7, Gigabyte's recent X58A line of boards like the X58A-UD5, have complete compatibility with OS X.
Those interested, can look for driver support on kexts.com. The site also hosts full boot images that have already been customized to work with various boards (mainly Gigabyte boards).
Taking a quick look at the osx86project wiki, we can see a quick run down of which boards have the most compatible. For the latest version, check the OS X 10.6.4 list. Here is a list on OS X 10.6.3, and this one is for 10.6.2. If you want the best shot at a fully working and stable system. Start off with one of the popular Gigabyte boards listed.
On forums such as efixusers.com as well as insanelymac.com, there are plenty of guides on how to setup your own system with driver support as well.
What things do you need to look out for?
- Ethernet support
- SATA support
- The correct DSDT (or how to edit one)
If you want us to write a DSDT guide, let us know!

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