Running High Sierra 10.13.6 (17G14033)

Introduction

Hey guys! Due to being extremely bored due to COVID, I recently decided I wanted to do a little Hackintosh project. I picked up a new SSD off of Amazon, read through a bunch of documentation , successful builds on similar specs, and managed to go from complete noob in unfamiliar territory to having a pretty decent Hackintosh in about a day.

Specs:

CPU: i9 9900k
GPU: GTX 1070 (MSI ARMOR)
RAM: 16GB Corsair Vengeance 2400MHz (due an upgrade, I know)
Motherboard/Laptop Make and Model: Gigabyte Z390 AORUS PRO (non Wi-Fi)
Audio Codec: ALC1220-VB
Ethernet Card: Genuinely can't remember but IntelMausi kext works for it

EFI folder

Installation:

Not gonna lie, for the most part I just followed OpenCore's installation guide for Windows (I sold my MBP a couple weeks ago - would've been useful). I used the Rufus method with gibMacOS, and used ProperTree and GenSMBIOS for the config.plist setup (as do the majority of people I assume). I am dual booting Windows and Mac, however the guide made it sound way more difficult than it was - I just skipped to the 'I know what I'm doing' part when it came to that. I did f**k up following the guide when I forgot that I had a 9900k instead of my old Skylake CPU and only realised halfway through. It wasn't too hard to fix though, I needed to add 2 more drivers on-top of the ones I had installed for my 'Skylake' CPU, and luckily hadn't started configuring the config.plist (thank god). But yeah, everyone said OpenCore was much more difficult than Clover, however I found relatively easy success, aside from the few problems I faced...

Problems (and fixes):

Issue: It wouldn't boot.

Fix: Followed the guide again and realised I needed to change a bunch of BIOS settings. Not everything was listed in the BIOS that needed to be disabled, but I managed to wing it with just disabling Fast Boot and CSM and enabling above 4G decoding and EHCI/XHCI Hand-off (which was causing a kernel panic).

Issue: The bootable MacOS recovery drive was in Russian.

Fix: Someone tell me PLEASE! I tried what OpenCore said to do, realised that what I needed to enter into the config.plist was encoded in Base64 so I changed it to en_GB and encoded it. If changing to GB was the wrong thing to do, I'll switch it to US, however I was sitting there with Google Translate open the entire installation and would recommend trying the other OpenCore fix (deleting the entry).

Issue: MacOS wasn't seeing my SSD I was trying to install it to.

Fix: Opened Disk Utility in the recovery and formatted to HFS+, went back and was a breeze - aside from the Russian that is. Somehow my Windows machine can see this drive, which (as far as I'm aware) shouldn't work. On the flipside, my Mac installation can see my Windows drives too, however NTFS is read only so I can't mess with it accidentally (unless my finger slips in Disk Utility).

Issue: Post-Install, I couldn't download the Nvidia Web Drivers.

Fix: This was a pisstake. My Mac showed as some random display with 8mb of VRAM. 8 MEGABYTES. I was fuming, it was very laggy and I wanted to die. And to top it off, I couldn't download any of the drivers for some reason. The older ones I was too new for and the newer ones I was too old for. I downloaded the Security Update 2020-004 (I believe) and ended up downloading some script off of GitHub to download the latest supported version, and I had drivers! I then updated to the Security Update 2020-006 and installed the 387.10.10.10.40.139 web drivers.

WHY CAN'T I GET THE 140 DRIVERS!

Issue: Post-Install, Pressing Caps Lock lags my entire MacOS and doesn't work at all.

Fix: Yeah, don't have a fix for this one either. I'm assuming it's either an SMC thing or a keyboard thing. I installed the Steelseries Engine for MacOS as my lighting was all messy, but it didn't fix anything (not that I thought it would, that'd be too easy)

Issue: Post-Install, Discord screenshare didn't share audio.

Fix: Downloaded Audio Hijack from this link (direct install btw). I didn't need the program, just ACE (Audio Capture Engine). Discord utilises this and allows audio to be shared across multiple programs or whatever, I'm pretty sure Mac has some weird exclusivity thing when it comes to sharing across applications. Anyway, I started the installation of Audio Hijack, waited until it installed ACE, quit the installer, reinstalled Discord and voila, sound was working in screenshares.

Finishing Touches

I installed all my programs, did a Geekbench 5 test and scored way above average - 1301 single core and 9237 multi-core. Not too sure if my overclock is working since I haven't looked into any of that stuff for Mac yet. I installed the Monterey wallpaper, enabled dark mode and decided to type this up! All in all, it took around 5 hours of work and probably 5 hours of reading to achieve. I thought I was challenging myself using OpenCore instead of Clover but realistically I think it'd have been around the same!

I'm happy to answer any questions you guys have, and I want to say a big thank you for everyone's reddit posts that helped me get here!

SIDENOTE: I may edit this post in the future to add or change wording, I have written this after a very sleepless night playing with my new toy lmao.