iATKOS | United Kingdom

I got some free time and decided to repurpose my old desktop as a Hackintosh. So far so good. Here are my specs:

• First gen. i5 750 Nehalem/Lynnfield CPU
• Intel DP55WB mobo with P55 chipset
• Sapphire Radeon R7 250 DDR3 2GB(oland, PCIID: 6610)
• 16 gigs of RAM 1333mhz (4x4 DIMM)

For now, everything (except Fairplay 4 decoding) works nice and smooth on Catalina. It almost took me 2 weeks learning and trying to get everything up and working. To be frank, It was a good journey, I learned a lot of new things. I never used OSX before but a long time Linux user (almost 18 years now, I started using Linux in 2003 and never looked back) and have a reasonable amount of software knowledge, it certainly helped. But I believe anyone can build it with enough research. OpenCore guide is just perfect.

So, here is what I did and how, for reference.

First problem was booting. My board is from 2009 but surprisingly supports UEFI. Linux (and Windows) boots in UEFI mode just fine. But OSX refused it. Kernel panics. I tried almost everything without luck. I believe it's because the board have an old UEFI standard (2.0 I believe), so I went with legacy boot.

Second problem was ACPI. USB ports were utterly broken, HPET, RTC, LPC... Almost everything required some kind of patching. At this point Clover helped me a lot, I tried various combinations of fixes from boot menu, then wrote SSDTs manually to use with OpenCore.

After ACPI stuff, installaton went fine. Then the third problem emerged, GPU. There are some folks claiming the exact same model is working, some others report it as not working / or not working in Catalina-Mojave but in High Sierra. Anyway, after enough trial and error, I found it's working! Full Metal. It turned out I needed ID spoofing as 682B, choosing the SMBIOS as iMacPro1,1 because my CPU & mobo doesn't have iGPU. Also despite the forum posts and WhateverGreen documentation, radpg=15 parameter is not needed; even it's not working with it. Just vanilla Lilu+WEG with spoofed id is sufficent. And don't use VGA port. It's not working. Use a HDMI converter if you need. I spend several days until I found out it was the problem. I know nobody using VGA anymore but I said my PC is old, but still kicking ass =)

So only problem I have now is GVA Fairplay 4 decoding. 1/2/3 works fine but playing a FairPlay 4 video (e.g videos in AppStore or some videos in Safari) semi-freezing the machine. My GPU doesn't support h265 acceleration but couldn't make it fallback to software decoding. I tried many WEG parameters, unfairgva, shiki etc. Nothing's working right now. Actually I don't even want it, but can't disable or turn it off. When I hit a FP4 video, machine stutters heavily. Anyway I will do some more research and hopefully make it work.

I want to thank all the hackintosh devs for spending their time, especially OpenCore folks for making such a good piece of software and awesome guide/documentation.