Following my foray into building a Hackintosh Pro earlier this year, here’s a short update plus additional tips to help you folks build one yourself. If you haven’t read it yet, here’s my earlier post on building my rig using a Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5 motherboard.

INSTALLING SNOW LEOPARD

The good thing is that Snow Leopard works flawlessly with the build. An even better thing is that digital_dreamer over at InsanelyMac has updated his Standard Retail DVD Install script and has made it Snow Leopard compatible. Go on over there and read up.

OVERCLOCKING AND PERFORMANCE VS A REAL MAC PRO

Although there are some that have managed to get a pretty stable overclock at 4.0GHz on the i7 920, my little experiments have led me to a stable 3.72GHz overclock and well within a reasonable temperature range of 40C to 70C (70C being under heavy load).

This is a 40% increase in GHz over the stock speed of 2.66GHz.

Considering the Hackintosh Pro is 40% cheaper than a similar Mac Pro and is 45% faster based on Geekbench scores, I’d say the Hackintosh route makes way more sense.

In terms of performance, a 2.66GHz Xeon W3520-based 2009 Mac Pro has a Geekbench score of 8,144.

A Hackintosh Pro built like the one I have running at the stock speed of 2.66GHz has a score of 8,667.

And finally, overclocking the Hackintosh Pro to a stable 3.72GHz gives a score of 11,789!

Considering the Hackintosh Pro is 40% cheaper than a similar Mac Pro and is 45% faster based on Geekbench scores, I’d say the Hackintosh route makes way more sense.

TIPS THAT’LL SAVE YOU YEARS OF YOUR LIFE, OR MAYBE NOT

Build tip #1: Windows 7 Likes to Think It’s King

Install Windows 7 on the first SATA connector as its installer is picky about that. How picky? Well, after wasting a few minutes of your life, it’ll give you a message to the effect that Windows cannot find itself to install itself. Or some borderline existentialism of the sort that only Redmondville can conjure up.

Build tip #2: Install OS X and Windows 7 on Separate Drives

My initial install had both OS X and Windows 7 on the same boot drive. It was tricky to set up, yet it worked flawlessly. The only snag was that it would bork up every time I installed a new Windows release or reinstalled Chameleon and I’d have to go through a tedious routine to get it all back in shape.

Besides, if one hard disk goes down, I still got at least one OS operational until I get the chance to replace the other one from a backup disk.

When using separate disks for OS X and Windows 7, install Chameleon on the OS X disk and set it as the boot drive in the BIOS. When Chameleon boots up, select the partition icon labeled “System Reserved” and not the one labeled “Windows” to load up Windows 7.

Build tip #3: Ensuring that Sleep Works

This one’s simple, at least in my experience. To keep sleep working fine, make sure that no drives are plugged into the Gigabyte JMicron SATA controller. On the GA-EX58-UD5, these are the white connectors as opposed to the blue connectors for the Intel SATA controller. If you do use the JMicron controller, right-click ejecting the drive before performing a sleep will ensure that your Hackintosh will wake up; obviously you could still keep the drive physically plugged in.

Build tip #4: Installing Silverlight

When installing on a Hackintosh, Microsoft’s Silverlight installer package will erroneously report that it cannot be installed on a PowerPC-based Mac. To avoid the installer assuming such nonsense, you’ll have to slightly modify the installer script.

Select the package in Finder, right-click and select Show Package Contents. Navigate to Contents/Resources/ and load InstallationCheck using a text editor such as TextEdit. Change all occurrences of 96+6 to 0. Save the file and run the installer.

Build tip #5: Enabling Quartz Extreme and Core Image

Under Snow Leopard, OS X’s System Profiler will not indicate whether Quartz Extreme or Core Image are enabled. Apple figured out that since 10.6 will only work on Intel machines, and all Intel-based Macs are QE and CI capable, such a check is not necessary.

This presents a problem for Hackintoshers as we need to ensure that our device-properties EFI string in the boot.plist (whether added directly by us or amended at boot time via so called injectors such a NVEnabler) is working as it should be.

All is not lost however, as there is a quick way to check whether QE and CI are enabled and that’s by dropping a new widget in Dashboard. If the screen ripples, then that’s QE and CI at work. If it doesn’t, then QE and CI are not enabled.

Build tip #6: Fix Broken Printer Spooler in Windows 7

If you’re using VMWare Fusion to run Windows inside OS X, then you may experience printing failure if you boot your machine into Windows directly. This is caused by a buggy ThinPrint client installed by VMWare Tools. To resolve this issue, load up Windows via Fusion in OS X, remove VMWare Tools, and re-install VMWare Tools but this time untick the ThinPrint client option. Now you’ll be able to print when Windows is loaded directly at boot time.