Beginner Guide for Building a Fully Working Snow Leopard Hackintosh Along With Windows 7 (Part I – Hardware Selection)

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It was a little under a year ago, we posted a very general guide on how to dual boot Mac OS X together with Windows 7. While the guide is still useful, with the rapid new hardware and software came out recently the guide is become outdated. For the last few years there have been an ever growing interests in the OSx86 project, a lot have changed since we initially post the guide.

This guide will be a series of guides on How to Build a Successful Snow Leopard Hackintosh Dual Boot With Windows 7.

4122650014 02bf4c7226 thumb - Beginner Guide for Building a Fully Working Snow Leopard Hackintosh Along With Windows 7 (Part I - Hardware Selection)Part I – Laptop and Desktop Hardware Selection

First we will focus on selecting the most compatible and stable hardware. Choosing the right hardware is a VERY important step if you want to have a fully working Snow Leopard on your PC. (*IMPORTANT* please note we strongly suggests you purchase the retailer version of Snow Leopard from Apple, any none official Snow Leopard image is not recommend and will not be discussed here)

Laptop and Netbook

Laptops and Netbook owners will experience higher difficulty in order to make your system run SL. Here is a good check list to read before any attempt to try to dual boot SL and Windows 7 on your laptop.

You can stop reading if you have a computer that runs AMD CPU. Apple has never supported AMD CPUs on their hardware and doesn’t look like they will in the near future.

As of all the netbooks it is important to note that Apple has stopped support for all Intel Atom CPUs as of 10.6.2. Those are all the 32 bit CPUs, that means netbook can only run up to 10.6.1 (the current version is 10.6.7 as of writing this post). And I personally I don’t recommend to try to dual boot your netbook knowing that your system is going to be permanently outdated.

This only leaves all the Intel Laptops, tonymacx86 and all their community users have come up a List of Successful Laptop Install Spreadsheet

It’s a Google Public Doc anyone can view, check out this spreadsheet first, see if your model is listed.

This list is constantly being updated, and you will only find some of the most recent and popular model being listed in here. If your computer is say over 2 or 3 years old it probably will not make it on the list. If that’s the case, go to this wiki osx86project to check all the hardware compatibility list of Portable Computers for each of the OS X version update.

If you see none, Google is always your friend.

Desktop

You have more freedom with Desktop since we can always build a desktop from ground up. If you have an OEM desktop you are facing the same issue with all the Laptop users, which is the limited hardware choice your system have when it comes out with the manufacture.

This guide will rather focus more on selecting the right hardware for a desktop build from scratch by selecting the right motherboard and CPU and other hardware that are necessary for a working desktop.

CPU Chipset and Motherboard Selection

If you are building a new machine that specifically want to make it compatible with SL and Windows 7 dual boot you have two options.

One is go with the previous generation of the Intel Core i3/5/7 CPUs and chipsets (H55/P55/X58) and the other is buying the new Sandy Bridge chipset (P67/H67) along with the latest second generation of the Intel Core i3/5/7.

If your goal is to achieve a stable system right now, your best bet is looking into all the P55/H55/X58 chipset motherboards from Asus and Gigabyte. (of course older chipsets that supports Core 2 Duo/Quad P45/P41 still works)

If you want to have a faster performance go with the new Sandy Bridge family, Intel has already fixed their Sandy Bridge Chipset (B3 re-version with the fixed chipset) has already start to appear on the market. Also please choose between Asus and Gigabyte, and don’t buy any other brand motherboard, as this is very important when it comes to editing DSDT after installing the Snow Leopard. (DSDT stand for Differentiated System Description Table, in a nutshell you need to modify your DSDT in order for the OS to understand your hardware so it can work more efficiently)

Some notes on choosing H-series chipset vs P-series chipset:

The difference between the two are H series chipset comes with an integrated graphics (in the Sandy Bridge the GPU is within the CPU but with the H series it will enable the Intel HD 3000). Where as in P series you need a discrete dedicated GPU for all video out.

Please note that with Hackintosh there have been almost no success to use the integrated graphics from the motherboard, which means you are always need to have a dedicated GPU for your motherboard doesn’t matter if you have a H series or not. (latest news from the new MBP there seems have been discussion on enabling the Intel HD 3000 graphics with the new Sandy Bridge, but all this are still under development and highly depended on Apple’s future OS software update. So don’t put any hope on buying an integrated graphic motherboard and save money on not buying a discrete graphic card, chances are you most likely need to buy one any ways.)

Video Card Selection

Video Card support in Hackintosh SL is getting easier. Most cards from NVIDIA especially not the latest cards should all work in SL meaning if you have any of the 8xxx or 9xxx series and GTX 2xx will most likely all working fine.

For ATI 5770 is the most popular cards that works out of the box. ATI HD 5870 is another card that should work out of the box. Don’t get 48xx series cards, it usually have a hard time to get it working. Some encourage news recently after the 10.6.7 update is that it seems Apple has added more native support for 56xx 57xx 58xx and 68xx series for SL, go here to see a list of cards that are newly being added.

Memory/Hard Drive/SSD/DVD ROM

There aren’t many key issues you need to be aware of when selecting RAM. As long as you pick the ram that your motherboard supports, it should work fine in Snow Leopard. Note during the OS install phrase we will talk about in part II, in some case the MAX memory support is only limited to 4GB even though your motherboard can support more than that. At meantime, try to pick rams that are low on voltage, V1.5 is better than V1.7. Frequency doesn’t really matter, unless you are the type of hardware enthusiastic person.

For hard drive, please keep i
n mind Snow Leopard will not work on a partition larger than 1TB. Meaning if you buy a 2TB or 1.5TB hard drive it “might” not work properly. However that should not be an issue if you partition the hard drive down to 1TB.

Try to avoid Seagate Momentus Hybrid Drive or another Hybrid Drive in general. Users have reported issues on those hard drivers even installed on a real Mac hardware.

For SSD, Snow Leopard has yet to support TRIM natively (unlike Windows 7 it supports TRIM out of the box). That means you want to choose a SSD that have a hardware level garbage collection. Usually choose sandforce as the controller chip in a SSD is a good way to start.

There aren’t any restrictions on DVD ROM, usually DVD player that can detect by your BIOS should be sufficient. Please don’t buy any Blue-ray Player it might not work properly in Snow Leopard, as Apple has yet to adopt this technology and doesn’t look like they will any time soon.

Conclusion

That’s all for the first part of the guide on start building a fully working Snow Leopard Hackintosh along with Windows 7 dual boot. In the next series of this guide we will talk more about the software side on how to INSTALL two OS running side by side. Stay tuned !

Part II of How to Build a Successful Snow Leopard Hackintosh Dual Boot With Windows 7 is up read on here

29 COMMENTS

  1. Very nice piece of writting. So far, so good. I am getting tomorrow a delivery with all parts needed to build a dual boot os x (snow leopard or lion) and windows 7. Asus mobo, hd 5770 graphic card, sandforce ssd, 1tb hdd… I can’t wait to read second part. Thanks

  2. Hey, I got a pretty decent system with QX9650 and 4gb of RAM, can i just use the older guide to install OSX and windows 7 simultaneously?

  3. Hi! the guide looks great so far! unfortunately I have an msi motherboard… x58a gd65 model. Would I still be able to dual boot leopard properly with an msi motherboard?

  4. Hi Jonathan, so the guide looks amazing what about part 2 I can’t wait. also a have asus p5b-plus motherboard would i be able to dual boot? thx for reply and also thx for part2 in advance:P (sorry if my english isnt so good its not my native language (czech republic))

  5. I must disagree about the Atom processor. I had (until March, 2011) a Dell Mini 10 running 10.6.6 and dual booting Win 7; it had the 1024 x 600 screen which made resolution just too low for the things I wanted to do. There was an issue getting from 10.6.1 to 10.6.2 which was corrected with the newer Netbook 0.8.3 RC4 CD. But I always kept the OS up-to-date via downloading the stand-alone file and running it; no issues. I do not know if the current owner upgraded to 10.6.7.

  6. If AMD proccessors are not supoorted then why in the Beginner Guide for Building a Fully Working Snow Leopard Hackintosh Along With Windows 7 (Part II – Installation) | Windows7hacker does it say that it can support AMD?

  7. Hi

    I just built a pc with an INTEL H61 MOTHERBOARD, i3 Intel® Core i3 2100 Processor – 3.10GHz, Socket 1155, 3MB L3, 2.0Gb/s DMI Interface ,8gig DDR3 Memory, 1TB hard drive, will this work for snow leopard

  8. does my Acer Aspire 5950G support OSX?

    Intel core i7 2.2GHz
    AMD Radeon HD 2GB Vram
    16GB DDR3 Memory
    750GB HDD

    I will install it on the same HDD, seperate partition of course.

  9. hi,
    i have dell inspiron 5110 15R 2nd generation
    core i5 2.40 processor
    4 GB RAM
    500 GB HDD
    1 GB NVIDIA GRAPHIC CARD

    can i run both MAC and WINDOWS 7 OS ?

  10. Hey there
    just a quick question please ….which OSX distro is more suitable to these specs???because i have tried about 5 types now and non of them worked;
    Intel Pentinum P6200 @ 2.13GHz
    Arrandale 32nm Technology / RAM
    – 4.00GB Single-Channel DDR3 @
    532MHz / MotherBoard – Hewlett-
    packard 3674 / GRAPHICS – Intel
    (R) HD Graphics / Hard Drives –
    488GB Hitachi
    HTS547550A9E384(SATA) /
    Optical drives – hp dvd A
    DS8A5LH / Audio – Realtek High
    Definition Audio
    THANKS

  11. HiI’m a music enthusiast and love to produce music. I’m looking for a newer machine, so kindly suggest me a configuration, which should:1. run both Mac and Windows 7(in future Windows 8 also).2. have USB 3.03. I had shortlisted a z68 series mobo with an i5 , as it was suggested better for music purposes on some websites. But that was before I was thinking to make it a Mac/Win bootable pc. So, kindly guide me on that as well.
    Thanks in advance!

  12. Hi, with this mobo wich could be the bios setup for an ASUS P8Z68-V PRO/GEN+I5-2500K+GSKILL 1600(4GB)+WD 160GB, i tried tonymac way, but doesn’t work, i believe he problem it’s my bios setup, who can help me?
    Sorry my english.

  13. hi is mine good enough ram is 3.00 gb 64 bit operating system 3.20 ghz processor is pentium(R) Dual-Core CPU E5800 i have 264 gb left on computer i have ubuntu on here and it works fine and my video card is a 1gb Radeon HD 5570 ATI DDR3  

  14. This guide is not true. With custom kernels, AMD and Atom processors ARE supported. Not officially, of course, but by hackintoshers. Just download the nawcom bootcd and you’ll be set.

  15. I already own an MSI P67A-GD65 B3. I hope it will work. LGA
    1155 – Chipset Intel P67 – 4 slots DDR3 – PCI Express 16x – SATA II
    & III – Gigabit LAN – USB2.0 / USB3.0 / Audio HD / FireWire
    Just let me know. Thank you!

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