Successful Ryzen 5 2600 Hackintosh Build running Catalina 10.15.4

[Saul]

As some of you will know, over this past week I have been putting together an AMD Ryzen based Hackintosh. This was completed a few days ago.

The days when it was difficult or nigh on impossible to build a Hackintosh around an AMD chip are long gone. The Ryzen line of CPUs are not only more powerful than their Intel counterparts, but they are also a LOT easier to build a mac system with.

My system spec:

AMD Ryzen 5 2600, Zen+, 6 Core, 12 Thread, 3.4GHz, 3.9GHz Turbo, 19MB Cache, CPU.
Wraith Stealth Cooler.
Gigabyte B450 I AORUS Pro WIFI Motherboard.
Corsair Vengeance LPX 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4 3200 MHz C16 XMP 2.0 High-Performance Memory.
Western Digital WD Blue SN550 NVMe 500GB SSD
XFX 7870 Graphics Card (From my old PC)
G7 Power Extreme 780 watt PSU (again from my old PC)

All this went into my old PC case. The motherboard is an ITX form factor so takes up very little room.

I had originally used the AMD Ryzen 3400G CPU. That worked but due to its integrated Vega graphics, there was a glitch with audio. It would stutter and had a slight delay. It is a known issue with the G series chips. I replaced it with the Ryzen 5 2600 which has no integrated graphics and now it works fine. Also has the advantage of 6 cores and SMT so 12 threads. Fast and smooth

There was, of course, some fine-tuning to be done with the plist and EFI but eventually, I got there.

What is not working?

Right now the only things not functioning are the Bluetooth and WIFI. I can solve that with a PCI-E Network Adapter which covers both the Bluetooth and WiFi but it's another £50. There is a possibility I can at least get the WiFi functioning with the motherboards Intel® 2x2 802.11ac Wave2 but I will need to find a kext for it.

At the moment though I have ethernet and a superb wireless mouse, which I can highly recommend! The Logitech MX Master. I am also using a wired Apple keyboard.

The audio is working really well. Logic Pro X is fine as is Pianoteq 7 and my MIDI keyboard is working perfectly via USB.

Apps are smooth and fast and it is generally a much more pleasant experience using this machine than my old Mid 2010 iMac.

I also have my Windows 10 SSD installed and can boot from that if required. So one machine that does it all. Saves desk space and power usage

If anyone wants to give this build a go I can highly recommend it. I will also be happy to share my files so you don't have to do the legwork

[bnz99]

Congratulations, it seems like a nice build. I built a Hackintosh from my Nuc8i5 last year or so which was quite easy to do as well, but I didn't actually use it as I have switched most of my desktop devices back to Windows (after about 15 years being a Mac user...I even had an ios app in the app store). Back then, the major updates were still a little work (not sure if they still are) and I didn't want to spend the time to reread some tutorial every year when I have already forgotten the procedure. So it's a proxmox server now with a bunch of linux vm's doing things for my smart home

It'll be interesting to see how long the hackintoshes will work with new macos releases given that Apple switches to it's own SOCs. My guess is they'll drop support for Intel in 2-3 years. But who knows, the hacked changes may still work after that.

[Saul]

I think we will probably have 2-3 years yet and then the OS's will switch to ARM based only. But that's fine with me. For my current purposes I needed a fast Mac now in order to do my work and my music.

Going down the Ryzentosh route made sense also from a monetary perspective. By the time this system is no longer supported and workable there should be plenty of used ARM based Macs out there.

The updates are a LOT easier than they were. It is really just a matter of going through a check list and making sure you have everything ticked. It also depends on the build. Some can simply update as normal, others take a little more tweaking. I won't be updating for a while yet. However, I may pick up another drive and test a Big Sur build on that.

[Saul]

My 'Ryzentosh' is now running the latest build of Catalina which is 10.15.7 I don't think there is another above this. Apple went straight to 'Big Sur' but as that still has a lot of issues with audio software I doubt I will update to that for quite some time.

The update was just the normal Apple update. No tweaks or messing about. Just hit update and then on the first reboot choose OS Update from the OpenCore boot menu. After that is all just automatic. Took around 20 minutes total.

I needed to update in order to run the latest version of Final Cut Pro. Everything is working fine as before. I did clone the drive before the update though, just in case!