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There’s a new sheriff in town

On the heels of retiring my Hackintosh 2, I went ahead and transformed it into my new PC game machine.  My old PC game machine was created from the parts from my original Hackintosh (now referred to as the Hackintosh 1).  I was able to successfully transfer all the files from the old game machine to the new game machine using PCmover Professional from Laplink.  Now there’s a company that’s been around for a long time.  Sort of a blast from the past.

After I got things set and made sure there weren’t any issues, I went ahead and installed the RTX 3080 graphics card.  I ran into an issue that when I had the second NVMe card installed on the motherboard, the machine wouldn’t go into the bios with the RTX 3080 installed.  I removed the NVMe card and I was able to get things working.  I am not sure what caused the problem exactly.  This card was wide and took up 3 of my slots instead of 2 like the RTX 570 that was in there before.

I installed Cinebench to see what kind of numbers I could get with my machine.  The numbers weren’t too bad.  I still have a few little things to do to the machine before I am completely finished.  I need to remove the old Hackintosh 2 drives (disconnected inside) that are still in the case and then install a few extra drives for use with the game machine.  Well, that’s it for this post.

Oh, here are the numbers from the Cinebench test.

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Alas, Poor Hackintosh!

It has been a long time since I last made a post for this blog. So it is high time that I get back to blogging here.

While the Hackintosh is still around, its days are numbered. Apple’s M1 Macs marked the beginning of the end for the Hackintosh era. These silicon chips give Apple complete control over the Macs.  Apple has been transitioning away from Intel since the release of the M1s two years ago.  And Macs with M2s have started coming out in 2022. Apple is expected to stop upgrading software for Intel-powered Macs in a few years or so. At that point, the era of Hackintosh will be officially over.

While my Hackintosh machines have served me faithfully, I decided to make the jump to Apple Silicon now.  I didn’t want to mess anymore with all the work that was involved with the process of upgrading the OS from time to time.  Since MacOS is my OS of choice, I wanted to keep on top of any security updates as needed.  I want to spend less time tinkering with hardware and more time doing actual development work.  So I retired my Hackintosh 2 and have replaced it with a Mac Studio.  I got a Studio with 32GB of ram and a 512GB SSD.  I wanted more memory than I could get with a Mac Mini.  The studio also has more ports plus an SD card slot too.

This is my third Apple computer.  The first one was a Mac Book Pro 15″ that I bought in 2007.  And the second one was a Mac Mini that I bought in 2009.  Both had been upgraded to run SSDs in addition to adding a second SSD to each one.  I used drive adapters from OWC for both.

I cleared off everything that I could from the Hackintosh2’s boot drive, before I ran the Migration Assistant application to transfer my setup over to the Mac Studio.  The transfer went very well.  Afterwards I spent time upgrading any application that needed an update. I removed a number application too along the way.  I added a few new applications that would be useful for my development work.  I purchased one of OWS’s Envoy Express enclosures for extra storage.  I had an WD Black 1TB NVMe that I put into the enclosure.  The Mac Studio is pretty much all setup now.  As for the Hackintosh2, I transfered all the data from the other drives to my TrueNAS.  The Hackintosh2 will become my new Windows game machine.  I will have to do a migration from my current Windows game machine (formerly my Hackintosh1) to the Hackintosh2 machine.  I also have an RTX 3080 card to install in the machine as well.  That’s it for now.