This is the first Hackintosh I've ever built and the choice of parts was really a matter of what I could source on the local second hard market. In the end I picked up a a reasonably priced gaming PC, Asus Prime Z270-P but chose to upgrade the ram to 16GB and swap the graphics card to an AMD R9 380. The old 660ti did not play well on the Hackintosh. It came with Windows 10 on an SSD, so I installed Mac OS on a spare SSD drive so I could duel boot. Since this is my first Hackintosh, my process was mostly trial and error. Today, it functions perfectly. I have Wifi, Bluetooth, Airdrop, iMessage, wake/sleep and the USB 3 ports all working. The components actually closely match that of an iMac 18,2, so in many ways I lucked out. In addition to the above I installed this SATA card (for more internal ports) plus a compatible Wifi and Bluetooth card. Both from Aliexpress.

https://i.redd.it/afhqwwech0i21.jpg

Motherboard settings

I just followed the settings online for Asus Kaby Lake boards. Morgonaut has a good video guide of the settings here.

Installation

I used UniBeast to get my machine up and running. At the time I didn't know what I was doing, so injecting kexts all over the place. I got OSX running, but with missing hardware features. I actually just needed the following:

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RealtekRTL8111.kext (Ethernet)

AppleALC.kext (Audio)

FakeSMC.kext (and sensor kexts)

Lilu.kext

WhateverGreen.kext (graphics etc.)

I don't use USBinjectall.kext - more about that later.

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I sort of worked backwards as I finally got most things working with this EFI folder. Although the folder for the series 10, 20 and 30 board finally got all my hardware working, something was buggy as hell and I got random restarts.

Useful apps and workflow

For beginners like me I learned that it's a good idea to make a copy of the machine's EFI folder and keep it on a folder on the USB installer (month this with Clover Configurator). If anything went south, I could use the USB's clover to start my Hackintosh (e.g. load the USB installer and then choose the boot drive from there) and once booted replace the EFI with the last working version.

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I also discovered it was best to keep kexts on my EFI partition (Clover/kexts/other) rather than on my Mac's extensions folder. This kept things simple when updating the OS. This guide was also super useful when it comes to the core kexts.

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Clover configurator - as a beginner you need to now how to tweak config.plist Certain updates meant some tweaks became obsolete and I wondered if they were a source of the instability. To find some sort of baseline, I found the vanilla Kaby Lake guide and used the tweaks there as a model. It pretty much nailed it in terms of working settings. It's useful to boot in verbose mode to see messages as it boots.

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Kext updater - Updates me with the latest kexts and clover.

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PCIManager - shows your hardware and you can generate a DSDT if you want to get into that. Note: it doesn't contain malware. Personally I just use the DSDT patches in the vanilla guide and use clover... To read the file you'll need MaciASL (again if you want to do that).

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Hackintool - great collection of tools. Shows your loaded kexts, your USB ports and other hardware. Useful for framebuffer patching. Personally I couldn't get that to work. My intel video decoding appears to work anyway. Checked with VDADeocderChecker (scroll to bottom of the post here).

USB Ports

Personally I found USBinjectall and XHCI-200-series-injector.kext made my machine unstable (or I didn't understand the kernel/kext patches it required in Clover). I put the Hackintosh aside for a while, but then discovered this Youtube guide here to map your USB ports and create a custom kext. It appears Macs have a 15 port limit and a single USB port is really two ports (one usb 2 and one 3). I therefore mapped my ports and then deactivated an unused port so I was within the port limit. This will ensure the ports work after updates.

How it performs

It's now working exactly like my Mac. Even though the SSD is slower, the performance is better than my i7 MBP. Sleep and wake work perfectly. Airdrop works. iTunes and protected content works. Cinebench Open GL is about 103.88 and CPU is 562cb. It has hardware H265 decoding.

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Last thing - I removed EmuVariableUefi-64.efi from Clover/drivers64UEFI as my motherboard has VRAM. With this file, clover wouldn't boot from the last boot volume, making updating the OS to the last version impossible. Now fixed!

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