The Last Hackintosh?

well it's done never doing this again [Music] apple has been receiving praise from well just about everyone for their new apple silicon max from the imac to macbook pro however this approval it's newfound unless you forget just a few years ago apple was plagued with hardware reliability issues on the macbook pro there were tons of form over function design failures on both their laptops and desktop thermals give me a break and there was just a convoluted confusing lineup many products that stepped on each other it was a mess and apple was receiving average reviews from publications that typically are very in favor of their products the mac was not in a good place and many people myself included we had to turn to other solutions because apple's offerings they just weren't sufficiently compelling a large number of defectors turned to the hackintosh a bog standard pc with a custom uefi boot loader that would allow the machine to run or boot into mac os now working with them was a bit of a nightmare initially but it quickly turned into a community with extensive support for a wide range of hardware including heavily modified kernels to support platforms unsupported by apple like amd ryzen in fact the hackintosh community was so thriving that i attribute much of my own channel's growth snazzy labs to the large number of hackintosh builds that i did they still remain some of my most viewed videos to date but apple silicon it is a true it's a paradigm shift i mean not only has it marked the beginning of the end for x86 mac os support and subsequently the hackintosh but it raises a really important question and it's one that hasn't been asked in nearly 20 years are apple computers more performant than pcs of equivalent price now that's a pretty loaded question but i'm going to try to answer it which necessitates the building of a hackintosh what is likely my last hackintosh look given that laptops are notoriously difficult to hackintosh successfully and apple's new m1 pro and m1 max have yet to make it into desktop computers allowing for a truly fair fight we're sticking to the nearly one year old m1 system on chip more specifically i've selected the m1 mac mini as it's the closest apples to apples headless desktop competitor now the mac mini starts at a shockingly low 699 dollars and can often be found for a hundred dollars less than that however that comes with a paltry 256 gig ssd that's hardly usable for normal people and apple charges through the nose for more storage capacity so we have selected to use the one terabyte model that pushes our price point on the mac mini to just over a thousand dollars this serves as both an actually practical mac mini configuration but it also provides a reasonably equivalent budget to build our pc now the hackintosh landscape is kind of weird at the moment given that apple is rapidly abandoning newer generation intel chips the only recent hackintosh-supported igpus are found on the 10th generation intel chips which are now nearing a year and a half on the market now newer amd ryzen chips those do work however amd hackintoshes tend to have a number of issues out of the box that are conveniently left out when pitching benchmark scores on youtube videos like this one some of these issues like adobe app support which most people want can be ironed out but there are a lot of other issues that just basically can be fixed support for hardly any vm is a no-go and pro audio tools are also not really going to work so we've decided to stick to intel more specifically the intel i9 10 850 k why this chip well because it's actually still quite excellent but also because it's one of the most recent chips officially supported in mac os and the internal graphics work which allow us to forego a dedicated gpu which are even more stupidly expensive than they were just a few months ago when we thought they couldn't get even pricier for example i bought two amd vega 64s on ebay exactly two years ago for 230 each today those same cards are going for more than five hundred dollars a piece it's insanity now that cpu is going into a gigabyte auris z590i mini itx motherboard and for the rest of the parts we kind of just used what we had laying around the office money's really tightly mac os macos doesn't really play nicely with the network card on this motherboard or in hardly any modern modern motherboards so i've swapped it out with a broadcom chip that was actually used in older macbook pro models which allows for airdrop handoff sidecar and all the other niceties that you really come to expect from a mac can i just say with these newer motherboards that have heat sinks and fascias and a bunch of other crap strapped to them they are so much harder to take apart why most of this isn't even functional it's just aesthetic but that's neither here nor there for the ssd i used a one terabyte samsung 980 pro now this is a pcie 4 drive i'm just running it at pci 3 speeds this is a drive that's only partially supported in mac os trim is not supported which is kind of less than ideal for long-term usage but for the purposes of this video it's more than fine i also used a low profile noctua nhl9 cpu cooler that's right brown thunder baby and last we've got ram uh boring i got 32 gigs of high speed ddr4 memory clocked at 3 600 megahertz and then we've got a 450 watt power supply here is a very similar build weighing in just below our 1 100 build price target now you'll know that i haven't accommodated for a case and that's because well you should buy a practical case but i have one that i wanted to build in that's not practical because it's too expensive and it's ridiculous but i cannot show it to you it's here it's in this box i know that doesn't really sound possible but it's true this is the teenage engineering computer one now i'm sure you've seen teenage engineering stuff they started making synthesizers and now they're kind of like this hot design firm that everyone wants to work with they uh they helped design the playdate handheld game console and they've even worked with ikea this case is crazy it comes as flat pack powder coated aluminum sheets and following a manual you actually bend the case to form now in theory this actually sounds like a really cute idea in practice it's a hellish nightmare you see the sheet metal is just really thin and i'm sure they do that to make it easy to bend but it's subsequently just not very sturdy and many of the panels came completely warped out of the box and it's hard to get them back to shape now slowly but surely the case did start to come together and the instructions were easy enough to follow but they did leave out a fair bit of information for example the case supports an intake fan on the side but nowhere on the website or in the manual does it specify the size of that fan it's 80 millimeters by the way but it also they don't give you any mounting screws for the fans and the pre-drilled holes that are there are hilariously small for any fan screw that i've ever heard of which forced me to bore uh basically holes out of them with a drill and then use noctwa's little rubbery isolation standoff things but that's not even half of it because other design choices seem confusing at best there is just one front panel usb type-c connector but teenage engineering opted to use the slow old bulky usb 3.0 motherboard header i don't know why they should have used the newer better faster more commonplace now usb 3.1 header they didn't additionally the wiring that they used for the front switch which i must admit is actually very cute and better than a power button you've convinced me as well as the wiring for the headphone jack it's just downright silly so on the headphone jack pretty much every case in the last freaking million years not that long but a long time have used hd audio connectors that plug right into your motherboard well on this case they just use three headers labeled t r and s i found after a while that there is tiny tiny printing on the pcb itself that those pins are for right channel left channel and ground then you have to consult your motherboard manual in hopes that they actually list what each pin out does and once you've figured it out then you can wire it up to the trs connectors which are actually in a different order rts cool but look none of that is as bad as the worst part of this and that is well freaking putting the case together because none of the panels are tapped to accept screws yes that's right it's just a hole with spray paint in it and they don't even include a tap in the box so begins the process of painstakingly shaving metal off of every single hole with one of the included screws a screwdriver and a lot of arm strength now when the case is finally together it's actually pretty cool looking but at 200 it is outlandishly expensive and the size of the case while cute is stupid because it's way too big for a case without a gpu but the gpu size that it accommodates is ridiculous you will not fit any modern small form factor gpu in here and so yeah i don't really know what this was designed for it could be great if they accommodated for a larger gpu or made the case physically smaller if they had pre-tapped holes what an innovation slightly heavier gauge metal so that i couldn't do this should probably put that back the thing just bends it's it's just no resistance whatsoever uh and then you know if they shaved i don't know 130 off the price tag 70 discount i like teenage engineering i like the idea of this don't buy it it's bad but this was hardly the difficult part the hackintosh was the part that sucked and the hackintosh scene has changed a lot over the last couple years clover which was the bootloader i've used in most of my videos that saw usage really during the hackintosh boom it's now passe and open core has taken its spot now the theoretical benefits to open core are actually quite massive and quite numerous for example you can use system integrity protection and file vault it boots the machine much faster it loads kecks more reliably it plays much more nicely with windows partitions if you're hoping to dual boot the list goes on while i've talked about open core in the past it's been in the creation of amd hackintosh's this was my first intel build on opencorp and holy freaking crap it was a nightmare now i must give props to the open core install guide it is very good it explains what stuff does and what you need to do which is way better than clover's documentation ever was which is great because it arms you with the knowledge to figure out what went wrong when something goes wrong but a lot of stuff went wrong and i spent like two days straight maybe three trying to get this stupid machine to work from forums to discord chats and more now i did eventually get it figured out and i must say that the install now is pretty much perfect way better than your average clover install which had a bunch of weird little quirks and things that could never really seem to be ironed out but it was hardly a piece of cake and not for the faint of heart oh yeah so this entire process from the case to the os was kind of a nightmare and i said my fair share of naughty words so i dubbed this machine obscene tangerine do you know where i don't say naughty words though at least not out loud only in my head meetings uh meetings are usually boring and they take forever but today's sponsor kandao makes them way better and it propels virtual work forward with their new lineup of beating cameras many of us have been in meetings with lousy conference cameras where it's hard to see and hear everyone now the kandao medium pro it's a standalone android device which is cool because it doesn't require a connected pc and though you can interface with it with a mouse and keyboard you don't have to because their excellent remote has gyroscopic cursor support which is pretty cool installing and starting conference 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out the kandao medium pro and kandao's other cameras at the links in the video description now that the machine is up and running we return to the question originally proposed at the beginning of the video are apple computers now more performant than pcs of equivalent price well there's no better way to check that than by running benchmarks and real world tests and what should be a surprise to no one that knows the m1 single core performance on the mac mini is off the charts and beats the x86 processor in pretty much any single core workload now while the 8 core chip does put up impressive numbers relative to its power draw multi-core tasks well that's really where the m1 is going to hit its limitations the chip only has four performance scores and when stacked up against intel's 10 core desktop cpu it's quite literally no match furthermore this also ignores the very easy overclock that we could apply to the hackintosh system to push those numbers even further so we did and these are the results now a couple of you are going to be rotating your phones getting ready to type out an angry comment saying this is unfairly slighted against the m1 because now the m1 pro and the m1 max exist and i would say price tag those machines are much more expensive than this little hackintosh but fine i will include them in the benchmarks as well and you can see that yeah while they close the divide significantly they too come up short so then what the heck have youtube reviewers been lying to you about how insane apple silicon chips are this whole time well no because when utilized properly in specific workloads they actually are quite a feat to behold in davinci resolve 17 an apple silicon specific processing engine gives the m1 the leg up in a number of scenarios amongst which h.265 hardware encoding which puts intel's quick sync engine pretty much to rest and in final cut pro working with prores yields significantly closer results than those initial benchmarks would lead you to believe the way the m1 really shines at least relative to the intel machine is well pretty much any workload involving graphical compute because while not impressive relative to a dedicated gpu for an integrated gpu it is mighty good looking at the unigine heaven benchmark you might be thinking holy crap that's not that much better than i thought it was going to be not only is it using opengl as a layer built on top of metal but it's also not a native binary and it's using rosetta for translation in a native application affinity photo the m1 gpu's unified memory architecture and on-chip bandwidth puts the intel cpu to shame and while you might say put any modern gpu inside the pc and the story changes i'm not so as affinity developers have stated that for example the m1 max outperforms a significantly more expensive power hungry w6900x gpu in the same benchmark these types of scenarios are where apple silicon really excels another one machine learning the object detection model benchmark that we made in create ml to see if people were wearing masks used 100 images in the training model at 5000 epics and a 32 item batch size and while the results are holy freaking crap it puts the intel to shame with nearly double the performance now look i don't want to continue to harp on that which has probably already been preached by most tech reviewers ad nauseam but it is absolutely impressive how quietly the magmini handles all of these tasks and that is in part to total power drop power draw from the wall when running these tests is bananas i mean the m1 is substantially lower than the i9 and the performance delta when the i9 has the leg up which not every case as we just mentioned is almost always smaller than the delta in power draw differences it really is impressive how efficient these machines are so now we yet again return to the question that i have not answered but now asked three times are apple computers more performant than pcs of the equivalent price well the answer is no but it's also yes as you might have expected people's workloads they're not all the same go figure and different hardware excels at different tasks differently but the fact that a modern budget mac a mac mini can outperform a recent near flagship desktop consumer cpu at anything is noteworthy and knowing m1 frequently outperforms this modern desktop cpu is praiseworthy i'm not here to claim that modern macs are the end-all be-all of computing they aren't however they are at minimum competent at just about everything and they excel at many things that's something that couldn't have been said a couple of years ago and and they're price to performance ratio is now competitive enough that in no way shape or form can i recommend making a hackathon they just don't make sense anymore and the minor performance improvements here and there that you might get are not worth the litany of downside and hours that you're going to spend getting one close to stable obscene tangerine it's my last hackintosh but this isn't my last video if you like that transition so you should get subscribed and if you enjoyed this video give it a like if you didn't sure hit the button that you don't know how many dislikes there i know because youtube's trying to protect creators i'm not getting into that right now the video's over thank you for watching merry christmas happy holidays see you next year and i'll be back next week stay snatched [Music]

Channel: Snazzy Labs

Views: 202,235

Keywords: snazzy labs, quinn nelson, snazzyq, mac mini, m1, m1 pro, m1 max, mac vs pc, hackintosh, hackintosh build, hackintosh 2021, hackintosh vs m1, apple silicon vs intel, intel vs mac, amd vs m1, m1 vs amd, m1 pro vs m1, m1 pro vs m1 max, benchmarking, testing, value, build, pc, gaming, pc vs mac, hack mac, mod, build guide, diy

Id: WOMeETfRQkE

Length: 21min 8sec (1268 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 11 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Thecrawsome]

About 11 min in he says "Do not buy this case".

I agree. It looks flimsy af

[u/jblakeharris]

As both a Mac and TE fan, I respectfully don't understand the point of this video. Why the benchmark tests when you can put any number of configurations inside the TE case? It's a novelty case, as advertised. If the instructions require bending it to house the computer, why fault it for being bendable? It's not for everyone. Destroying it in a benchmarking video doesn't really make sense.