It all started with udemy.com having a sale and me spending in the region of £10 on a "iOS 9 app development" course and then realising I need a Mac because the course deals with Xcode only, which isn't available on Windows. Maybe I should have thought about that beforehand, but I'm nothing if not resourceful.
From there comes the download of "VMWare El Capitan image". Cool. From there comes the install of VMWare Player and a patch that lets me run OSX as a guest OS on Windows. Even coolerer.
With 8GB RAM in my laptop, the OSX VM got 4GB of it. Plenty, until I then get myself an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription and start mucking about with 4k video formats. Yes OK I know that all the Adobe stuff runs natively in Windows... but... well they just look nicer on Mac. Listen, this is all just me setting up my excuse for buying an additional 16GB for may laptop so now I have all the RAM ever and things are super lovely.
Except they aren't, because of how you can't do anything with graphics when you're running OSX as a virtual machine. Nobody has yet figured how to enable hardware acceleration for OSX guests, which makes for uncool computing.
My patience is legendary, but not infinite. This situation is doomed not to last. I either spank £2400 on an actual iMac, £2000 on a Mac Pro (ewww, tiny 15" screen) or buy one of those stupidly underpowered and overpriced Mac Mini things. I'm not averse to the buying of a shiny 5k iMac, but... well I just don't want to spend £2400 right now. Also, I build computers. I don't buy pre-built. It makes me twitchy just thinking about it. I mean, OK, one day yes I probably will buy an actual Mac, but not until I have Flappy Birded my way to success.
I decide I'm allowed to spend around £500 though. I reckoned that to be a good target.
Much procrastination ensues. 3 weeks of it, to be relatively accurate. The build hit £500. Then I got all miserly and thumped it down to £400. Not a bad build. Core i3 and 16GB RAM, but a cheap/nasty SSD.
Long story short. Actually not that short. Look, just bear with me, OK? I don't do long posts a lot of the time.
The button finally go pushed tonight. £357 spent at scan.co.uk and £150 spent at Amazon. Saved a little bit by splitting it up between them. I convinced myself I needed an i5, otherwise I'd still be at the £400 level. £507 though... it's a lot of money still, but this is just for the machine. I've got all the external bits and bobs already.
The breakdown is as follows.
- Aerocool Dead Silence Gaming Cube micro-ATX case. White, because Macs are vaguely white. Or used to be, at least.
- Asus Z97M-PLUS motherboard. It's on the hackintosh compatible list. I don't like ye olde PCI slots, but it doesn't really matter.
- Intel Core i5 4460. Wasn't planning this. Was going to be a much lower powered i3 4160T, but I'm a victim of marketing.
- 2x8GB Corsair RAM. 1.35v because that sort of thing makes me happy.
- Samsung 250GB 850 Evo. I'm going to make my girlfriend cry because my 'crappy' hackintosh is going to boot and load things faster than her 2010 fully loaded Mac Pro.
- TP-Link N900 PCI Express WiFi thingy. I was hoping my Netgear USB adapter was going to work, but it probably won't. This was £24.99 I wished I didn't have to spend.
- A Scythe Shuriken low profile cooler, because honestly I forgot to remove this from the order when I changed from an i3 that didn't include one to the i5 that does. Still, it's a nice cooler and I might put it in my older server, because the AMD cooler in it is really loud.
- 430W Seasonic ECO PSU. I was going to go with a £12 PSU, but I came to my senses.
I can't let the girlfriend see any of this yet, because she thinks I'm broke. I'm going to stealthily locate this behind my existing desktop (it will be out of sight) and just not use it when she's around for the next few weeks.
I'm excited about this build. I haven't cobbled a PC together in a couple of years, so I'm keen to get back to doing things like this.
I'm less excited about the OSX install procedure. I've skimmed the guides and I've downloaded a stock El Capitan image. The USB thumb drive is on standby for this duty.
I haven't got a separate GPU yet. I'm hoping to take advantage of some price drops when Pascal GPU's hit retail shelves and Maxwell becomes nicely affordable. A GTX 970 would be a very nice addition.
If anyone gives a hoot, I'll do my best to document the build and install process. I'm hoping for an easy time of it, because I picked parts specifically listed on the compatibility database.
Anyway, thanks for reading. I'll be like a giddy schoolboy on Christmas morn just as soon as the parcels start arriving!
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