Using a $17 Hackintosh in 2023

you don't have to spend hundreds of Euros or dollars to build a Hackintosh capable of most day-to-day tasks in this video I'm going to be showing you a Hackintosh running the latest Mac OS Ventura that can handle all of the tasks that the average user needs on a day-to-day basis and costs just 16 euros that's around 17 US dollars or 14 UK pounds [Music] this Hackintosh is running the latest Mac OS Ventura 13.5 and costs less than a family-sized pizza it's based around the Fujitsu p420 E85 plus this is a desktop PC that originally came out back in 2013 and was targeted at the office Market these PCS are so common that there's always hundreds of them on eBay as offices offload their old PCS so you can often pick them up for next to nothing I've seen them go for as low as 10 euros for just the PC or 23 euros and 50 including a monitored keyboard and mouse I picked this one up on eBay Germany for 21 euros it came with an Intel Core A3 4150 CPU 8 gigabytes of DDR3 RAM a one terabyte hard drive and a Radeon HD 7350 GPU but I made a few changes to this spec before installing Mac OS first goal was the Radeon 7350 this is arguably one of the worst gpus AMT have ever produced and it's not supported by Mac OS anyway so it was basically useless next I took out the core A3 this is only a dual core CPU and it's just not going to be up to the task in 2023 I replaced it with Core i5 4570 running at 3.2 gigahertz this is a much more capable CPU with twice as many cores as the I3 and it cost me just 13 euros finally the old rotational hard drive had to go it turned out to be a Western Digital Caviar Green one terabyte drive it's not a bad drive as far as 10 year old mechanical drives go but for running Mac OS in 2023 an SSD is essential so I replaced it with a 240 gigabyte Kingston a400 this drive cost me just 10 euros brand new and although there are better performing SATA drives out there there are none that come close in terms of value for money after buying the new CPU and SSD and then selling the hard drive for 14 euros the core I3 for 10 euros and the Radeon 7350 for 4 Euros it left a total cost of this computer at 16 euros which is around 17 US dollars or just under 14 UK pounds with the new processor and SSD installed it was time to prepare the USB stick that will be used to install Mac OS Ventura the installation was very straightforward the first step is to download the Mac OS Ventura installer image from Apple and then create the bootable USB using the create install media command after that I used open core auxiliary tools or ocat to prepare my Fe folder the Fe folder is where the open core bootloader along with all of the files and drivers needed to boot Mac OS are stored allcad comes with a link to predefined config files for various Hardware setups since I'm using a 4th Gen CPU I chose the file for Haswell iMac 15 comma 1. after opening the config file in all carts I chose generate Fe folder on the desktop to create the folder then I needed to change the SM bios definition from iMac 15 comma 1 to 18 comma 1. since Ventura only runs on Max from 2017 or newer then I added the drivers for ethernet and USB and copied the Fe folder over to my USB drive if you want more details on the installation I'll be creating a full step-by-step guide in another video which I'll link to down below I also copied ocat and open core Legacy Patcher to the USB before finishing since I needed to apply a patch for the integrated HD 4600 Graphics to get full acceleration in Mac OS now I was ready to insert the USB stick and install Mac OS Ventura first though I needed to make a couple of changes in the Bios on the SATA configuration SATA mode should be set to ahci next under Graphics configuration make sure that the primary display is set to Auto internal Graphics should be set to enabled igd should be 64 megabytes and dvmt memory should be set to Max finally under the security tab secure boot should be set to disabled when the computer reboots hit F2 to bring up the boot selection menu and choose USB in the list this brings you to the open core woodpecker now select install Mac OS Ventura and hit enter and the install process is just as it would be on a real Mac the computer reboots a couple of times during the installation process but open core automatically selects the right partition to continue the install after a few minutes I was presented with the country selection screen and went through the account creation setups to create my Mac OS user account once into Mac OS I run opencorpatia from the USB which automatically recognized the Haswell GPU and install the necessary patches to get it working in Mac OS a quick reboot later and I was into a fully working Mac OS Ventura with Graphics acceleration and Hardware video coding enabled the last thing to do is to mount the Fe partitions for both the internal SSD and the USB flash drive and copy the Fe folder from the flash drive onto the SSD now let's take a look at what this Hackintosh is capable of to begin with let's look at some synthetic benchmarks and see how they compare to some Intel Max released in the last five years in geekbench 6 this Hackintosh managed 1143 single core and 3461 multi-core to put this into perspective it's about 15 faster than the early 2020 Intel MacBook Air with the core i7 it's about the same as an early 2019 21.5 inch iMac with a core I3 and it's only slightly slower than the 2018 Mac Mini with a core I3 a computer that still sells on eBay today for between 200 and 300 Euros that's about 15 times more than the cost of this Hackintosh the weak point of this machine is definitely the integrated GPU the HD 4600 only scores about 3 100 on the opencl test and the metal test won't even run this is almost exactly the same score as the HD 615 Graphics in my 2016 12-inch MacBook so how does it perform in actual use considering how much this computer cost I was shocked at just how well it performed for everyday tasks like web browsing and Safari or Chrome editing documents in Pages email using Apple mail or watching YouTube videos it's basically indistinguishable from any real Mac 4K YouTube videos play back smoothly and without any skipping with CPU usage hovering around 30 percent editing 1080p video and Final Cut Pro was smooth and responsive too in fact this video that you're watching now was edited entirely on this Hackintosh I wasn't too surprised by this since I've edited hundreds of videos in Final Cut Pro over the years on Deal call MacBooks that were much slower than this Hackintosh editing 4K video proved a bit more challenging skimming through the timeline is fairly jerky and there were some dropped frames during playback until the machine had finished rendering but it's definitely possible one way to speed it up is by creating proxy media for editing but this takes up a lot of storage space and the SSD is only 256 gigabytes editing photos in Lightroom was probably what surprised me the most Lightroom along with most other Adobe apps is notorious for being poorly optimized so I wasn't expecting this to run very well at all but I actually had no problems using this Hackintosh to edit 26 megapixel Raw photos from my Fujifilm xt30 so that's my 16 euros Hackintosh it's not the fastest or the most powerful but it's definitely the best bang for the book that you can get if you're just looking for a cost-effective way to try out Mac OS or if you just need something to do basic everyday tasks like web browsing media consumption emails and word processing then you won't find better value than this it's let down slightly by the underpowered graphics but we have a PCI Express slot which is just begging for a cheap graphics card which brings us onto another massive benefit of this machine it's expandable and upgradeable you can increase the ram add extra drives install a graphics card and a Wi-Fi card and you can upgrade the CPU to a faster Core I5 or core i7 in the next video then I'll be showing you how I upgraded this Hackintosh for better performance in 4K video editing with an nvme SSD and a dedicated graphics card and installed Mac OS Sonoma while still keeping the total cost at under 60 Euros I hope you enjoyed 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 watching [Music] thank you

Channel: BarTech TV

Views: 324,259

Keywords: hackintosh, ventura, 2023, cheap, budget, crapintosh, ultra cheap, low cost

Id: 2l0UI05RL8I

Length: 10min 32sec (632 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 01 2023