First build in 12 years!

[keef247]

Hi guys, new to this site and second post so bare with me haha! I haven't built a hackintosh since 2008!

I'll try keep this short, looking to buy the following from the UK such as scan oc-uk etc and want to know if there's either something you'd recommend that's better/more supported/cheaper/known to work. Nothing is set in stone so I'm open to suggestions. Basically want to dual boot win10 for gaming and then have a reliable hackintosh for everything I care about to replace my aging old macbook pro! Ideally want it to be micro atx so I can have a mid size case that caters for maybe in the future going to a 3070 super when they're cheap and wanting the b550m as it's pci-e 4x for again future proofing but if there's something better that's 4x let me know!

Specs are as follows:
ASRock B550M Pro4 Micro-atx
Ryzen 7 3700X zen 2 8 core
Either a RX580 8GB ARMOR OC or a GTX1080Ti
16GB Crosair 2x8GB DDR4 Vengeance LPX Black PC4-25600 (3200 clocked to 3600mhz) CAS 16 Ryzen optimised
Gigabyte 240gb sata 3 ssd temp till I can afford an m.2 ssd
700W psu depending what's on offer out of preferred brands and a case that catches my eye.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated, from my brief modern understanding I'll want to use opencore and do some tweaks? I can obviously create whatever in my existing macbook pro catalina install to aid this installation so that's not a problem

Thanks again!

 

[Aluveitie]

The GTX card would only run on High Sierra, if you plan to install Catalina or Big Sur you'd have to go with AMD.

 

[keef247]

The GTX card would only run on High Sierra, if you plan to install Catalina or Big Sur you'd have to go with AMD.

Thanks, that's fine I'll just stick to the RX580 or maybe a 5700... Can I still overclock the 3200 ddr4 to 4000mhz? as I see guides setting the memory to profile1 which defaults to 3200mhz. I'd ideally not like to have to pay double the price for 4000mhz ram when the 3200mhz stuff does it fine - a friend has already done this with the same brand/model memory

 

[Aluveitie]

@keef247 3600 MT/s is the sweet spot for Zen 2. RAM and Infinit Fabric clock are 1:1 up to 1800 MHz, above that it will fall to 1:2. You can manually override it but that will result in additional latency due to async delay. So RAM at 3600 MT/s results in best overall performance.

Also, MacOS Big Sur seems very sensitive to memory overclock. Mine ran fine at 3600 with Catalina, but I had to go back to stock 3200 with Big Sur.

 

[keef247]

@keef247 3600 MT/s is the sweet spot for Zen 2. RAM and Infinit Fabric clock are 1:1 up to 1800 MHz, above that it will fall to 1:2. You can manually override it but that will result in additional latency due to async delay. So RAM at 3600 MT/s results in best overall performance.

Also, MacOS Big Sur seems very sensitive to memory overclock. Mine ran fine at 3600 with Catalina, but I had to go back to stock 3200 with Big Sur.

Ah thank you mate that makes a lot of sense, sorry to ask potentially dumb questions - I've been messing around with grip and drift car builds for the last ten years and that dating pyschos haha!

Another question if you don't mind I see that all the B550M boards that are dual m.2 are pci-e 4x4 on 1 and 3x4 on the other which annoys me, and the only option is the x570m which then shares the second m.2 with the sata drives and bottlenecks the performance my original plan you see was to go dual m.2 for win10 for games macos for mac and then have a sata for each os for storage like a sammy evo 2tb... but obviously the above with bottleneck that... now i'm thinking can I go old school and say buy a 1tb m.2 and dual partition it without windows doing it's usual destroy the bootloader after every update? or is that not an issues now? I'm hoping I don't have to keep fixing it everytime it decides to update!?

Thanks again for all your help, I'm getting so motivated to put the cars on hold and go for this new build as I have only spent money on cars in the last 10 years so really want a nice new pc that does it all!

 

[Aluveitie]

I don't have Windows installed myself, but as far as I know it should work with both being installed on the same disk. I think you just have to install Windows first to get the partitioning right.

Also, I think there are B550 boards (at least one I heard of) that can re-allocate 8 lanes of the first 16 gen4 lanes the additional .M2 slots. That makes a lot of sense since no current GPU saturates the 16x gen3 bus which is equivalent to 8x gen4. The only problem can be MacOS being sensitive to PCIe gen4.

 

[keef247]

I don't have Windows installed myself, but as far as I know it should work with both being installed on the same disk. I think you just have to install Windows first to get the partitioning right.

Also, I think there are B550 boards (at least one I heard of) that can re-allocate 8 lanes of the first 16 gen4 lanes the additional .M2 slots. That makes a lot of sense since no current GPU saturates the 16x gen3 bus which is equivalent to 8x gen4. The only problem can be MacOS being sensitive to PCIe gen4.

thanks again for all your help mate, that makes sense nicely now.