Toward the end of last March, I wrote about how I had ditched my iMac for a self-built Hackintosh. Given the huge cost savings and flexibility you get from a Hackintosh, I field a lot of questions about how well it works and if I’m still glad I did it. I thought after six months, it was time for a follow-up.

Am I glad I did it? Mostly yes, but a few niggles remain. On the whole, the machine runs brilliantly. It’s never kernel panicked or crashed, and with the Core 2 Duo at 2.8 GHz and 4GB of RAM, I can keep all the apps I regularly use open all the time with very little slowdown. I can pack a whole bunch of hard drives into the case, and have the connections necessary for up to two 30″ monitors should I want to connect them — all things that you can normally only do on the $2500+ Mac Pro. For $600, I can’t complain too much.

But I can complain a little. For one thing, the card reader in my Dell monitor has never worked right. This is solved with a separate USB card reader, but it’s another thing to have to hook up. The Line In/Microphone don’t work…which would be a significant problem if I didn’t also have a MacBook Pro for the times I need to Skype or something. And finally, system updates can be a pain. The small updates aren’t a problem, but the big ones (10.5.4, 10.5.5, next up is 10.5.6, etc) will hose your Hackintosh if you just run them straight from Software Update. They require varying degrees of handholding and third-party packages provided by the Hackintosh community, along with some dedication and patience.

So I am glad I tried this project, and it’s working out great for the most part. Will I do it again? Probably not. Ultimately, I’d like to buy a Mac Pro. Another option I’m considering is seeing if I can consolidate my life down to one machine — a MacBook Pro — for simplicity’s sake, which I would just dock at my desk when I needed a larger monitor. The home-based massive file store (2.5+ TB) would return to either a basic Linux server or a Drobo. I could use the home theater Mac Mini to run any secondary tasks (like long downloads) that I can’t leave my MacBook Pro behind for.

That’s very pie-in-the-sky stuff at the moment though, because I’ve never been without a desktop computer to fall back on. And while the simplicity of a single computer appeals to me, insofar as I would no longer have to be constantly moving files around and maintaining two primary machines, the lack of redundancy scares me a bit. So for now, the Hackintosh stays and continues to chug along. I’ve definitely gotten my money’s worth, and if you’re a bit of a computer tinkerer a Hackintosh might work well for you too.

Hello what?

As detailed in many places around the web (and to which an entire community is dedicated), a “hackintosh” is a computer built of off-the-shelf PC components that can, with just a little bit of tweaking, run the Mac OS X operating system. Ever since Apple made the switch to Intel processors a couple of years ago (and thus to a platform very similar architecturally to what every other computer vendor uses), this has been a growing community. Fed up with the iMac’s glossy screen and 4GB memory limitation (and partly because, as my wife repeatedly points out, I just always “have to have a project”), I finally jumped in myself.

I built myself a hackintosh, bought a Dell 24″ screen to be the primary display, installed the latest OS X Leopard (10.5.2), and now about 36 hours later I’m not missing the iMac one bit. I’ve been working on my web sites, editing RAW photos from my D40, watching movies, and basically doing everything I can possibly think of to stress-test it, and it’s been absolutely fantastic. For me, this fills a hole in Apple’s desktop lineup. The Mac mini is just too weak and can only run one monitor. The latest iMacs come with crappy-quality displays, at least for graphics work (they’re actually worse than the previous generation — something I didn’t know when I purchased the newer one because I just, you know, assumed that they wouldn’t actually downgrade something on a new model), and they’re limited to 4GB of RAM (I’m going to stick 8GB in my hackintosh eventually). Then from the iMac you jump up to the Mac Pro, which is very expensive and in reality is too much power for me. I don’t need a lot of CPU or GPU power — I just need lots of RAM and big, good-quality monitors. Basically, I’d be happy with a small Mac tower that fell somewhere in between the Mini and the Mac Pro.

For about $500-$600, this is what I bought (which, save for two cores, is very near a $2500 Mac Pro for most people’s purposes):

• Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R motherboard (if you don’t need as many SATA ports, get the GA-P35-DS3L for ~$25 less)
• Intel Core 2 Duo E6550 2.33 GHz (these suckers are hugely overclockable — mine’s currently up to 2.8 GHz and hasn’t even gotten anywhere near hot); add about $150 and you can have yourself a quad-core 2.66Ghz
• 4GB of RAM
• 500GB SATA hard drive
• Silent (fanless) Nvidia 7600GS PCI-E video card — bump up to an 8600GT for ~$40 if you care about gaming at all
• Antec Sonata III whisper-quiet case and efficient 500W power supply
• SATA DVD-RW drive

The install process for this particular hardware set, detailed in this thread, just requires a few extra package installations after the initial boot, and now everything works 100% just as on a real Mac. I’m really quite pleased. It was a fun project, and now I have a more powerful and more flexible machine than my iMac — and a bigger, far better monitor to boot.

I still love my MacBook Pro to death, and money being no object, yes a Mac Pro would be awesome. But I like getting my hands a little dirty, and this was very easy to do. Now of course as mentioned in every other post about building a hackintosh, it’s legally questionable — but I know many who have done this (including myself) buy a copy of OS X Leopard so then at least it’s somewhat morally justifiable (don’t steal OS X — it’s such a great piece of software, make sure Apple keeps developing it!).

If you have a hackintosh, have thought about building one, or have any questions about it, just post in the comments!

Gallery: Hackintosh build