Cheap $63 MacOS Sonoma Hackintosh with Dedicated GPU

in this video I'm going to be showing you a lowcost Hackintosh with a dedicated graphics card nvme SSD and running the latest Macos Sonoma that cost me less than €60 or around [Music] $63 this Hackintosh is based around a Fujitsu p420 with a quadcore Intel Core i5 4570 CPU 240 GB Kingston SSD and 8 GB of DDR3 RAM I put this together in a previous video for a total cost of €6 and it runs ma venturer perfectly well with performance comparable to a 2020 Intel MacBook but I wanted to run Mac Osos Sona and improve the performance in 4K video editing which was slow due to the integrated HD 4600 Graphics first I wanted to add an nvme SSD that could be used as a second drive for boting windows or as an editing Drive since this PC has no nvme slots I needed to buy an M2 to P Express adapter I picked this one up on Amazon for €10 for the SSD I went with a patriot p300 I've used this drive before in a previous Hackintosh build so I know that it works well in Mac OS and it's also one of the best value NVM ssds out there at just €19 for the 256 GB version after installing the SSD onto the PCI Express card it can be installed into one of the two single Lane PCI Express slots on the motherboard next I needed to buy a GPU mquest Sonoma is compatible with Polaris and Navi cards the cheapest car that's still natively supported is the radon rx460 with the end of ethereum GPU mining older cards like the rx460 are now very cheap often selling for between 20 to €30 for a working used card but while browsing eBay I came across someone selling 6 4 GB XFX rx460 cards as a single lot and I won the auction with a bit of €54 this worked out at €9 per card they all had to be stripped down cleaned and new thermal paste applied and a couple of them also had dodgy fans but they did all work I kept two cards for myself gave one to a friend and resold the other three making back the money I'd spent but before I could use the GPU in my Hackintosh there were a couple of problems first the XFX rx460 is one of the only RX 460s made that needs six pin power almost every other rx460 takes all the power it needs from the PCI Express slot my Fujitsu p420 comes with a proprietary power supply and no six pin power connectors but what I I did have was SATA power connectors so I picked up a SATA to six pin power adapter from Amazon for just over5 I wouldn't recommend using these with more power hungry cards since the SATA connector is only designed to handle 54 wats maximum but since the rx460 TDP is only 75 wats and it's going to be getting nearly all of that from the PCI Express slot anyway this is actually the ideal use case scenario for one of these adapters after plugging one end of the adapter into the SATA power connector from the PSU and the other end into the card it worked perfectly now the second problem is that the XFX rx460 cards don't actually work in Mac OS a biased communication issue prevents Mac OS from even booting it just stalls halfway I was able to solve this by booting into windows and force flashing the bias on the card with a bias from a gigabyte rx460 after after flashing the card the problem was fixed and Mac OS was able to boot this brought the total cost of this system to 59 e which is about $63 or 51 UK with all the parts installed it was time to prepare the USB drive that will be used to install Mac OS Sonoma the first step is to download the Mac OS Sonoma installer from Apple's content delivery Network I posted a video a couple of weeks ago that goes through all of the steps needed to create a bootable USB to install micos ventur on the Fujitsu p420 the only differences in this case are obviously downloading Mac OS Sonoma instead of Ventura and using the iMac Pro SM bios definition instead of the iMac the reason for this is that the iMac Pro has no integrated GPU and since I'll be disabling the integrated GPU in the Bios it's important that Mac OS doesn't expect it to be there install ation was very straightforward and after about 20 minutes I was into a freshly installed Mac OS Sonoma now let's take a look at the performance and see how it compares to some real Maxs that are still selling for hundreds of dollars on the used Market first in geekbench 6 this computer scores 1,143 for single core and 3,461 for multicore this is about 10% faster than the early 2020 MacBook a with a i7 around the same speed as the entry level early 2019 iMac with a core I3 and only slightly behind the 2018 Mac Mini with a core I3 even the cheapest of these three Macs the Mac Mini still sells used for between 300 to 400 about five times the cost of this Hackintosh next the geekbench metal score was 2,668 this is actually quite a bit lower than what the s GPU scores in my 10th gen build since its bandwidth limited here by the PCI Express 2.0 slot but it is still enough to be over double the speed of the 2020 MacBook a 15% faster than the 2019 iMac and four times the speed of the Mac Mini next in Final Cut Pro running the Bruce x5k Benchmark this Hackintosh exported the project in 37 seconds this is nearly four times faster than the ma PUK three times faster than the Mac Mini and slightly beats the iMac with its dedicated radon Pro 555x in the unigan valley Benchmark using the extreme HD preset this Hackintosh managed 19 frames per second this compares to 8 frames per second for the MacBook a 16 for the iMac and 6 frames per second on the Mac Mini finally for a gaming comparison I tried rise of the Tomb rated in the medium preset at 12 80x 800 resolution this Hackintosh scor 50.96 frames per second this was 3 and 1/2 times faster than the MacBook Air i7 15% faster than the iMac I3 and five times faster than the Mac Mini in this test for comparison I've also added my M1 Mac bouquet which managed 61.3 to come within 10 frames per second of the M1 on a computer that cost less than €60 is pretty impressive iive of course the main reason for doing these upgrades was to improve the 4K video editing performance and this is where this Hackintosh really excelled editing 4K video was now silky smooth with no dropped frames during playback and skimming was perfectly smooth too without the stuttering I'd seen when using the integrated Graphics exports were very fast as well using the hardware h264 and hvc encoders on the rx460 definitely faster than any intel Mac I've used not as fast as my M1 obviously but really not that far behind Apple recommends at least 1 gab of vram for editing 4K video in Final Cut Pro so the 4 gigabytes of dedicated gddr5 on this card really helps a lot even playing with effects in real time while the 4K video played back didn't produce any noticeable lag if you're looking for a cheap Hackintosh can run the latest version of Mac OS for everyday tasks as well as being a very capable 1080P and 4K video editing machine then this really is phenomenal price to Performance one final thing I did was to install Windows system open core automatically detects the Windows installation on the second SSD and allows you to choose between operating systems at boot time one change I would probably have made if I didn't need the second drive for Windows would be to use the 20 9 I spent on the nvme SSD and the adapter and spend it instead on upgrading to 16 GB of RAM you can pick up 16 GB of DDR3 these days for around €9 and it makes a lot of difference to overall performance in Mac OS especially in memory intensive apps like Final Cut and Lightroom so that's it for this video if you have any questions put them down in the comments below and I'll do my best to answer them that's it for now thanks for [Music] watching

Channel: BarTech TV

Views: 95,975

Keywords: macos, sonoma, cheap, hackintosh, 4k, video editing, macos 14, low cost

Id: klixuLxeiwY

Length: 9min 49sec (589 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 23 2023