The Perfect Motherboards For Your Hackintosh

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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!

Thanks to John Pals!

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Tuan An Nguyen
53 Comments Comment from the forums
  • rohitbaran
    Mmmmmm. Windows or Mac, that motherboard looks really feature rich! :)
    Reply
  • Darkerson
    I guess if I ever was gonna play around with Mac OS X, this would be the way to go. At least It wouldnt completely cost an arm and leg to do so. But I tried the whole hackintosh thing a couple years ago, and while it was kinda cool getting to play around with a different OS other then Windows and Linux, it wasnt all that practical in use. But Im sure there will be plenty of people that find this information useful.
    Reply
  • Gigabyte makes the motherboards for macs. Except since it has an apple on it, it's worth more.
    Reply
  • mister g
    Good way to dual boot from Windows to Mac, though if you usually play Steam games then you could theoretically stick with the Mac and use Mac drivers for the GPU.
    Reply
  • exodite
    I admit I haven't used OSX much but I can't really see anything that special about the OS that I'd want experiment with getting it running on non-Apple hardware.

    It's not bad, it's just not offering anything that Windows or your general Linux distro can't do.

    *shrug* My .02 I suppose.
    Reply
  • teodoreh
    I would love to install MacOS so as to use the millions of programs that I can't find on PC.
    Reply
  • teodoreh
    ...Windows I meant ;D
    Reply
  • IzzyCraft
    Is this suppose to encourage or discourage me into buying gigabyte
    Reply
  • "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."

    But Core i5 compatibility, not so much.
    Reply
  • nukemaster
    YAY my board(X58A-UD5) can be a hackintosh. crap, i still don't feel like doing it. But this is good to know for testing purposes.
    Reply