meri vritti

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