[Ronald Farber]

I don’t mean to resuscitate this post that has gathered a bit of dust, but I came across it from a Google search so I thought I would throw out my 2 cents of experience.

I recently took on the challenge of building myself a pimped out Hackintosh (first time doing it too I might add). It consists of an iCore 7 Intel Processor running at an overclocked 4.0 GHz, contains 12GB of RAM, a Quadro 1700 512MB video card, etc…as I said, pretty pimped out. I jumped a few hurdles in the process but eventually was shown the promise land of the Mac “Welcome” video. I installed all my software, entered the serials and was on my merry way “creating.” Every piece of software runs swimmingly without hiccup or delay, nor crashing or errors. That includes Final Cut 7. The only thing “wrong” with the Hackintosh is that on-board audio doesn’t work, but I have USB speakers so I’m fine with that not working (for now), and the “sleep” function doesn’t work…if I let it go to sleep, it won’t wake back up and I have to force shut down. But since this is a rendering computer for my CG work, I just told it not to sleep…ever. I just shut it down when I don’t need it.

That’s my experience.

I go to school for VFX and Motion Graphics. I enticed a few of my friends into doing the same with the promise I could set it up for them IF (and ONLY if) they bought parts of the exact same specs so that I wouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel for each setup. Two friends did so, only buying different CD-ROM drives as the website no longer carried the one I bought. For their machines, I simply gave them a cloned HDD of my HDD with all the applications already installed, and magically, Final Cut doesn’t work on neither of their machines. I have no idea what it is, but I really suspect it’s a Final Cut thing more than a Hackintosh thing because 1) every other piece of software works, and 2) what it does it crash on startup. Doesn’t even open, just shows the splash screen before quitting. I have no idea why it would work on my machine and not theirs, considering they are exactly the same parts, at least in every area that matters. I’m still troubleshooting it for them as they’d like it to work but I think if you truly know what you’re doing, or at least turn to forums for help where people know what they’re doing, you can build a Hackintosh that behaves exactly like you’d expect a Mac to. Researching what hardware people have had success with in the past is a good idea, though I must admit I’m guilty of not having done that myself. I was pretty set on “this is what I want, I’m gonna make it work.” And either I just lucked out or I know what I’m doing (I suspect a little of both. 😉

But all in all, I felt the need to post my experience because people who had bad experiences with -any- software on a Hackintosh build, in my opinion, clearly didn’t have it setup properly to begin with.