Dell 3010 SFF - i3 3245 - 8GB RAM - HD4000

Skip to the TL;DR bolded below, the two following paragraphs are just a bullshit intro with more detailed prices.

I’ve been meaning to get around to making a hackintosh out of post-lease equipment that would be as cheap as possible yet still viable as a run-of-the-mill desktop for a late-teens adolescent. My niece is finishing high school this year and she hasn’t had a desktop in her life, most of her schoolwork was done on an iPad. Regardless of whether she will be going to college or entering the workforce, she would need a desktop before either finding decent internship/employment or doing research and writing papers as neither is really possible rudimentary knowledge of the most popular OSes and office suites around (I know that an iPad could potentially handle some of these tasks, after all I’m writing this on one; but she has a 16GB mini 4 so that’s going to obsolete quite soon).

I would drop by the local eBay analog on the regular to look for cheap used parts of post-lease desktops. One day, I found the Holy Grail—a stripped Dell 3010 SFF desktop, sans CPU, RAM, or storage for $52. After a quick search I added two sticks of 4GB Kingston 1866MHz RAM for $47. I had some unused 120 GB SSD around the house, so I chucked one in there, too. The day before scoring the desktop, I bought a used i3 3245 for $23—it’s a solid CPU with HD4000 on board which easily handles everything Mojave would require (she won’t be running FCPX or Lightroom anytime soon; and I’m running the same CPU on my primary rig and it handles 10.14.3 like a charm).

TL;DR: I found a cheapo Dell 3010 SFF station for peanuts, dropped in a used i3 3245 cpu, and two sticks of cheap RAM, plus a spare SSD I had. Then ran Mojave on it.

I updated the 3010 to the latest BIOS (A22), left most everything on by default, except for switching the boot to UEFI only, and turning off Secure Boot and virtualization.

I prepped my USB stick beforehand, because I more or less knew what I wanted there.

• For the EFI/CLOVER/kexts/10.14 folder: FakeSMC, AppleALC, Lilu, Realtek8111, WhateverGreen, plus USBInjectAll, all in their latest versions.
• For the EFI/CLOVER/drivers64UEFI folder: ApfsDriverLoader, AptioMemoryFix, CsmVideoDxe, HFSPlus (just for kicks, I guess), EmuVariableUefi.

For config.plist:

• in the ACPI section: ticked AddDTGP, AddIMEI, Generate P States and Generate C States both. Added dropping for DMAR tables, plus Cpu0Ist and CpuPM.
• in the Devices section: 0x1E3A8086 in IMEI to fake the Management Interface Engine for a 7-series board, whereas the 3010 has a 6-series chipset (H61).
• in the Graphics, I ticked Inject Intel to yes (although I know I don’t have to, WEG does everything for you at this point).
• in Kernel and Kext Patches, I ticked on AppleIntelCPUPM (absolutely required, otherwise you’ll get a kernel panic immediately after launching the installer), and DellSMBIOSPatch

As per all my previous adventures with iCloud:

• In the RtVariables section: I set the ROM to MacAddr0, left MLB empty, set BooterConfig and CsrActiveConfig to 0x28 and 0x67 respectively.
• For SMBIOS, I picked iMac13,1, the closest choice possible, I changed both serial number and uuid around 10 times each, ran the serial through Apple’s checkcoverage website and EveryMac’s serial lookup, with the former coming in as negative.

I ran the installer for 10.14 without problems. After logging in successfully, I installer the latest Clover revision and copied over the config.plist off the USB installer, because I fine-tuned it beforehand. Copied over the drivers64uefi and the kexts folders, too. Everything works, basically, although I still haven’t checked iCloud (don’t want to spoil the surprise): sleep, sound (HDMI right off the bat, onboard Conexant audio works, although I haven’t tested all the layouts, layout 11 gives you a headphone port, probably the front, I’ll be checking that later), with sound coming back after sleep, too. All USB ports work (there’s no 3.0 on board, so there’s that).

All in all, a nice little rig for people with low needs/low expectations. Mojave runs smoothly on it, although don’t expect miracles from 3rd gen two-core chip in 2019.