It has been many years since I got some free time to tinker around with hardware outside of work and I had been looking to catch up with the Hackintosh scene. I got a week off at the beginning of the year and I finally got around to doing a new build.
The community has come a long way, thanks to some great work by the hardware/software vendors and the tinkerers all around. It seems the Mac Pro project helped the community with a bunch of compatibility issues. Even considered building a Ryzentosh with an AMD CPU and a Radeon GPU with Opencore or Clover using the Vanilla guide.
However, after looking around for a while I found a really well done-project – Hac-Mini by osy86. He took the Intel Hades Canyon NUC8i7HVK and built a super simple plug-n-play Hackintosh release. A 3.1 GHz i7 8th generation quad-core CPU + 4gb Radeon Vega M GPU in a really tiny package, with consistent software patches and an active community behind it – sold!
Steps
- Get the NUC8i7HVK
- Get an used DW1820A wifi/bluetooth card (8PKF4 model)
- RAM (16gb x 2 )
- M.2 NVME (Intel 660p 1tb 80mm and another 512gb 42mm)
- Install the RAM/M2/Wifi card in the NUC
- Download macOS Catalina
- Create Catalina USB installer on a 16gb usb drive
- Download the latest Hac-Mini package (v.2.5 at this time)
- Run Hac-Mini package on the USB installer
- Select ‘Patch OSX Installer’ and ‘DW1820A driver’ in ‘Customize’
- Complete the USB installer creation
- Boot up the NUC
- Customise BIOS settings
- Reboot the NUC from the USB drive
- Finish macOS Catalina installation
- Reboot automatically and almost all the drivers will be patched automagically
- Boot into a fresh install of macOS Catalina
- Run the ‘Thunderbolt patcher’ app
- Done.
Bonus
- Use the Thunderbolt 3 port with an external GPU enclosure + latest Radeon graphics card to improve your gameplay or photo/video apps render time
- Razer Core X Chroma egpu enclosure with Thunderbolt 3
- AMD Radeon Pulse RX 5700 XT 8gb GDDR6 PCIe graphics card
- Patch with ‘Thunderbolt patcher’ app if you want Mac support for plug-n-play Thunderbolt 3 support (don’t patch if you want to use the TB3 enclosure in Windows)
Working
- Everything works!
- GPU acceleration
- Multiple displays (six 4K displays max)
- 5K display
- Ethernet (both ports)
- Analog Audio (both ports, no headsets)
- Digital Audio
- Microphone (both stereo mics)
- HDMI/DP audio
- USB A ports
- USB C ports
- TB3 ports (including hotplug)
- SD card slot
- NVMe/SATA SSD
- CPU power management
- Sleep/Resume
- Wifi/BT (using DW1820A card)
- Installation, updates, App Store
- eGPU accelerated games/apps
- iMessage, iCloud, Siri, iTunes, other services
- FileVault2, APFS, Time Machine, SSD TRIM
- Metal, GPU accelerated applications
- Parallels/VMWare, other VM software
- Handoff, Continuity, Universal Clipboard, Apple Watch unlock (using DW1820A card)
Links
