First Hackintosh and workarounds for problems: i9-9900K and RX 580 on Z390-A

Hardware Specs

• Motherboard: Asus - PRIME Z390-A ATX LGA1151 $188.99
• CPU: Intel - Core i9-9900K 3.6 GHz 8-Core $489.99
• GPU: Sapphire - Radeon RX 580 8 GB PULSE $199.99
  
• RAM: Crucial - Ballistix Sport LT 64 GB (4 x 16 GB) DDR4-3200 $416.50
• CPU Cooler: Noctua - NH-D15 82.5 CFM $89.95
• Power Supply: Cooler Master - MWE Gold 650 W $89.99
• Case: NZXT - H700 Matte White $129.99
• SSD (Boot): WD BLACK SN750 500GB NVMe M.2 2280 $107.99
• SSD (Storage): WD BLACK SN750 1 TB NVMe M.2 2280 $217.25

(Onboard ethernet, no wifi)

Total core equipment cost: $1930.64

I also bought a couple of extra:

• Samsung 860 EVO 500 GB 2.5" SATA SSDs $79.99 each

for boot volume backup and upgrade experiments. (Had to buy a few extra SATA cables as well.)

Hardware Challenges

I was familiar with installing RAM, hard drives, and PCI cards, but this was my first time building a PC from the CPU up. I just looked up a YouTube video as reference, and everything was pretty straightforward, though it took me a few hours.

I liked how most of the cables could only really plug in to one place. There was only one part that wasn't fool-proof, though, and I messed it up. :\ When I finally threw the switch, the motherboard main power light came on, but nothing else. No fans, no POST.

Turns out my power supply had a set of "CPU/PCI" 12V 8-pin outputs, but there are two different kinds of 8-pin cables that are wired differently. The CPU cable is 4-pin + 4pin, while the PCI cables are 6-pin + 2pin. I had used the PCI 8-pin cable to hook up power to the CPU. Once I swapped that out for the CPU 8-pin cable, it POSTed the UEFI screen!

Software

Mojave 10.14.5

I basically followed the vanilla guide, though I had trouble running the Clover installer, so I followed the net boot guide's instructions on setting up the EFI partition.

Through this, I learned that the EFI partition basically needs to be a FAT32 partition (that might need to be the first one?) on a GPT-partitioned drive. I used the vanilla guide for the config.plist.

Installation Challenge

The installer kept hanging near the end, with about 2 minutes left. After a bunch of Googling, I found that it might be AptioMemoryFix-64.efi that was the problem.

I first tried swapping it out for OsxAptioFix3Drv-64.efi. That didn't work.

But OsxAptioFixDrv-64.efi worked!

Everything installed fine!

(Fyi I initially installed onto one of my SATA SSDs, formatted directly with a FAT32 EFI partition and APFS main partition, then later partitioned my NVMe drive the same way and used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone over the Mac partition, which worked fine.)

USB 3.0 Challenge

Next, I tried to use these USB injectioninstructions and installed USBMap, but I couldn't see any of my USB 3.0 ports. (2.0 ports showed up fine.)

I eventually found this USB Port Limit Patch post on Hackintosher.com with instructions on config.plist tweaks for 10.14.5.

I also re-downloaded USBInjectAll and found that XHCI-unsupported.kext seemed to apply, so I installed that, too.

I haven't bothered checking if both of the above steps were needed, or only one, but when I did them, my USB 3.0 ports showed up! And luckily I have less than 15 total, so I don't think I need to make a custom injector?

Final drivers and kexts

drivers64UEFI:

• ApfsDriverLoader-64.efi
• HFSPlus.efi
• OsxAptioFixDrv-64.efi

kexts:

• AppleALC.kext
• FakeSMC.kext
• IntelMausiEthernet.kext
• Lilu.kext
• USBInjectAll.kext
• WhateverGreen.kext
• XHCI-unsupported.kext

(I might try out switching to VirtualSMC at some point. I think I switched to FakeSMC at some point in a failed attempt to solve one of the above problems.)