This motherboard is from my old Windows desktop that I’ve had for probably six years now. About two years ago, my wife’s brother-in-law who’s also a Hackintosher, challenged me and we looked up what the specs of the board were to see if it was possible to do. Turns out, this board is easy to work with if you don’t use the onboard audio, graphics, and network (which is why I suggest using vetted and working parts instead).
Right now, this is my “gaming PC” and it has a Core2 Quad 9550 processor, with 8GB of RAM; essentially maxed out. Now, throw on a Samsung 850 SSD, and this system is quite perky! Only downside will be power consumption since it is a non i-Series processor.
The other essential parts I used for this build:
- Network: Intel 82574L
- Audio: Maya 44 USB (simple USB card works too)
- Graphics: Nvidia GTX 950
This leaves a PCI legacy slot open (950 covers two slots), and makes use of the single X1 and x16 lines of the PCIe bus.
The beauty of this build is, it’s a pretty vanilla build! The only mandatory kext is FakeSMC which is always mandatory. After that, you’ll need to add your kexts that you can add on your accessories. Onboard audio can be enabled via Toleda’s ALC patch script. As for Ethernet.. it could be done? Not recommended. There are some discussions on fixing sleep here and here, but I have not tried them out.
This build started with Multibeast and 10.10.5, but I’ve since switched the build to Clover and will stay and retire the machine at 10.11.6. I’m looking at consolidation, and will end up taking my Dell T3500 and making that my desktop and adding a NAS to host my drives, which will be covered in a later post.
- macOS Sierra is not through its cycle yet
- With that said, Sierra will not support MacPro 3,1 system definitions, which is what this board emulates. You can adjust that to iMac 14,2 and it will work.
Motherboard Specs:
https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards/P5G41TM_LX_PLUS/specifications/
**Note, this guide is more informational, but to get started on hackintoshing, please visit the main page here (coming soon) to follow a basic guide.**