Hackintosh Performance Hardware Options

Recently I described my latest Hackintosh build, a mini-ITX system based on an Intel Core i3-3220 CPU, an ASUS P8H77-i motherboard, and an ASUS GTX660 video card. I had to work with what our vendors sent us for the project, but that doesn't mean that you do. In this follow-up article I'll explore the performance and price of some different CPU and video hardware options.

As Apple moves aggressively down the road towards making all of their products sealed, non-expandable, and non-serviceable computing appliances, the allure of the Hackintosh only grows. Apple started this with the original Macbook Air's soldered-in memory, and the iPhone's non-removable battery and lack of a card slot carried onwards to the iPad. The iMac is the latest product to be a glued-together black box, and I'm sure the next refresh of the Mac Mini will be a sealed slab of aluminum, too. Only the very expensive Mac Pro retains any semblance of expansion and service features.

For readers of this web site, the appeal of a Hackintosh is that you can design a Mac work-alike machine exactly as you want it, and can easily upgrade it to boot, since it's just a PC hardware-wise. I've written three previous Hackintosh articles, covering the original X58-based machine in October, 2010, and the updated Sandy Bridge version in August, 2011. In between these two articles I covered the Hackintosh Experience in November, 2010.

In my most recent article, I showed you how to build a mini-ITX based system with a modern Ivy Bridge CPU and NVIDIA GTX650 video card. However, since I had a Core i7-3770K CPU available, and ASUS had generously supplied one of their hot GTX660 TI-DC2O-2GD5 video cards, I thought it would be interesting to benchmark some alternative component configurations.

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