The ish is for the new HDD I put in.
After watching the $70 hackintosh video on YouTube, I was inspired. But it turns out WVU doesn't do surplus sales to the general public. But Pitt does. I found a few SFF Optiplexes going for $50 each. I got a 790 on Monday. An i5-2440 and 8GB RAM should be sufficient. But that HD 2000 video is a problem. And the mere 240W PSU compounds that. So I decide to wit for payday and upgrade both.
Until I read the reviews. The PSU I had chosen turns out to be mostly crap. 400W, but some people said it wouldn't fit their case, and everyone agreed the fan was way too loud. I tried to find another video card, but didn't really find anything still available that would work with the limited power available.
So back to the Pitt Surplus Store. There was a mini tower optiplex, but only dual core. But wait, what's this? An optiplex 7010 SFF? i7-3770 CPU, HD 4000 graphics, AND a Radeon discrete card. Missing memory, but I can scavenge that out of the 790 when I get home. I stopped at Best Buy for a new 2TB HDD, and set to work once I got home.
Or so I thought. Turns out the PSU in the 7010 was DOA. But thankfully the 790 used an identical PSU, and it worked. The Radeon card had a dead fan, but the HD 4000 graphics will work. Once I got that all sorted out and cleared the old password out of the BIOS (this system's old home was the Pitt dental school), I was good to go. A quick Windows detour to update the BIOS, and I was ready to hackintosh.
And this is where I was pleasantly shocked. I used the Unibeast/Multibeast method to install Sierra, and the process was as smooth as anything I've seen. No errors. No hiccups. Ethernet worked right out of the box. Setting up the bootloader and booting the new system, went perfectly.
The only hiccup was getting the ALC269 sound to work. After a couple of dead ends and forum posts talking procedures I didn't quite understand yet, I was pointed to VoodooHDA 2.8.8 at Sourceforge. Installed that, rebooted, and now there's sound! This morning I followed a YouTube tutorial, and now iMessage is working.
You could call it a $180 Hackintosh, because without the 790 to donate parts, the 7010 wouldn't have been running so quickly.
Specs:
Mobo - Dell GXM1W (Optiplex 7010 SFF mobo)
CPU - i7-3770
Graphics - Intel HD 4000
RAM - 8GB
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