My First Hackintosh Video – Dell Optiplex 9010 Running MacOS High Sierra 10.13.6 (17G66)

#Hackintosh #DellOptiplex #HighSierra

I turned a Dell Optiplex 9010 into a Hackintosh – to just have it running Windows or Linux would be a waste in my home as I have enough systems doing that as it is. It would be awesome to have a video editing/grabbing Mac in my gamesroom.

My MacBook Pro from 2012 is ageing and the other Macs I have are all G4, G5 and older so they’re getting a little long in the tooth. As I am not going to buy a new Mac anytime soon – the infamous new MacPro still is missing in action – I thought I’d try my hand at building a Hackintosh. Now this Dell Optiplex 9010 is just about the easiest computer to turn into a Hackintosh as most of the hardware actually is almost the same as that in my Laptop and MacMini 6,1. The cool part is that I can stick a graphicscard, more ram and more storage in the Dell machine which I can’t really on the MacBook Pro. My old Acer Travelmate 292LMi PentiumM Radeon9600 was the first Hackintosh I built running 10.4.11 Tiger with Rosetta enabled. All hardware was working, even wireless. Didn’t tinker with Hackintosh since – I got a MacBook 5.1 with my first real grown up salary and later a MacBook Pro 9,2. But decided to do Hackintosh again.

So the hardware of the Dell is so similar to my MacBook Pro 9,2 and a MacMini 6.1 that only minor alterations and patches are needed to get High Sierra up and running on this PC.

Problems I encountered: The CPU is an Intel Core i5 CPU 3570, which has Intel HD Graphics 2500 which aren’t supported in newer versions of MacOS. As I wanted to use EFI booting I needed a compatible EFI GPU and that turned out to be my Nvidia GT1030. Problem is that this isn’t natively supported and needs web drivers. The highest MacOS version supporting these Nvidia webdrivers is High Sierra. The version I used to install is 10.13.6 (17G66) which turned out to be not compatible with the standard drivers so I had to install webdrivers patched to work on this particular version of High Sierra. I got it to work and apart from HDMI audio through Voodoo being a bit cumbersome it all works well.

I thought I’d shoot a video on it using a webcam and edit the whole thing in Final Cut Pro – like I do on the MacBook Pro. It’s a bit faster than the MacBook Pro I use. The MacBook Pro only has a two core i5 with 4 threads. This system has 4 cores and 4 threads. I might op to switch out the i5 with a mobile version sporting an Intel HD4000 GPU that allows me to get the MoJave up and running without issues. But I might stick to this one. Could even stick a low profile (the Dell has a low desktop case) GTX 1050 in it, although that makes the machine a little too toasty to my liking.

Well here it is. Me demoing the machine, playing some retrogames and editing the video 🙂

I really would like a MacPro for my video editing and recording. But as it is still missing in action/rather expensive I might even consider turning a high end new system into a Hackintosh instead. Even Ryzen systems work these days.

This video is no tutorial, I don’t condone piracy. This video is for educational purposes.