Turning PC into Apple Macintosh: Hackintosh Computer

By David Ramsey

Even the most jaded Microsoft Windows fan will admit, grudgingly, to an occasional bout of “Mac curiosity”. Since Steve Jobs’ return in the late 1990s as part of Apple’s acquisition of NeXT, Apple’s trajectory has risen, and they currently sell several million Macs per quarter, representing (depending on whose analysis you read) about a 10% share of the domestic PC market and landing them in the top 5 computer companies in terms of U.S. sales. Their market capitalization current ranks them as the second largest company in the world, and they may overtake Exxon this year.

A “Hackintosh” is a computer that runs Apple’s OS X operating system on non-Apple hardware. This has been possible since Apple’s switch from IBM’s PowerPC processors to Intel processors a few years ago. Until recently, building a PC-based Mac was something done only by hard-core hackers and technophiles, but in the last few months, building a Hackintosh PC has become much easier. Benchmark Reviews looks at what it’s possible to do with PC hardware and the Mac Snow Leopard OS today, and the pros and cons of the building a Hackintosh computer system over purchasing a supported Apple Mac Pro.

Before we get started, I’d like to mention a few warnings and caveats:

• This is not a detailed guide on building your own Hackintosh; it’s a description of my personal experience building one, and how the result compared with my existing Mac Pro. If you want to build your own Hackintosh, there are many comprehensive resources on the Web. I’ve found Insanely Mac to be very useful.
• I won’t be arguing the relative merits of OS X vs. Windows, or other aspects of the Apple/Microsoft rivalry.
• It’s gotten easier, but building a Hackintosh is not for everyone. At the very least you must be someone comfortable with building your own computers. Prior experience with Macs, especially at the software level, helps a lot.
• No matter how much time, effort, and money you put into a Hackintosh, it’s not a Mac, and has drawbacks relative to the “real thing.”

(While Apple is routinely derided for its “proprietary” attitudes, Hackintoshes probably wouldn’t be possible without Darwin. Darwin represents the core operating system functionality under OS X, and Apple releases a new version of the Darwin source code under the Apple Public Source License with each major update of OS X. The current version of Darwin, 10.4.0, was released on June 15, 2010, to correspond with the OS X 10.6.4 upgrade. Darwin source code is an invaluable resource for those working in the Hackintosh trenches.)

That said, getting a Hackintosh going is kinda fun. This article describes my experience doing so, and the pros and cons of this approach.

Full disclosure: I worked for Apple in the late 1980s and am the author of “MacPaint 2.0”. I use Macs for all my serious work and consider PCs to be best suited for video games.

EDITORS NOTE: Benchmark Reviews has also published an updated Apple Hackintosh: Moving to Intel Sandy Bridge article, as well as our Budget Hackintosh PC Build Project, Hackintosh OS X Software Installation, and Hackintosh Performance Hardware Options.

Some of the earliest Hackintosh work was done on netbooks, but I’ll be working with desktop components since you have more freedom to design your system this way (and a netbook is hardly a replacement for a Mac Pro, either). There are two classes of desktop Macs: the consumer machines are the diminutive Mac Mini and the all-in-one iMac, both with limited expandability, while the professional system is the Mac Pro. As a programmer, I’ve used Mac Pros since they came out with the IBM PowerPC G5 processors in 2003, and my current system is a 2006-vintage machine with two dual-core Xeon processors running at 2.66GHZ and 9G of 667MHz DDR2 error-correcting FB-DIMM memory. While obscure now, FB-DIMMs were the memory Intel specified for these processors in 2006.

The basic appearance of the Mac Pro hasn’t changed in the past 7 years: they’re workstation-class computers in thick-panelled aluminum cases. Internally, the computer’s layout is almost supernaturally neat, with almost no visible cables. On my machine, memory resides on pull-out cards for each processor; modern Mac Pros use ECC DDR3 memory and the processors and memory all live on a single pull-out tray for easy upgrades. The closest PC equivalent to these heavy-duty systems would be something like an HP Z800 series workstation.

2006 Mac Pro interior showing memory cards and hard drive caddies.

However, since we’re building a Hackintosh, we needn’t worry about exotic workstation-class hardware; we can, within some limitations (well, to be honest, quite a few limitations) use generic PC hardware. For the software, I’d recommend the latest Mac OS X 10.6.3 “Snow Leopard” since it’s the first version of OS X to be a “pure Intel” release, and is available for a mere $29 online from Apple or at your local Apple store. Another alternative is the “Mac Box Set” available from Newegg for $119: it includes Snow Leopard, the iLife software suite (iPhoto, iWeb, iDVD, iMovie, etc.) and the iWork office suite.

But while the latest “Snow Leopard” version of OS X runs on Intel-based Macs, it doesn’t mean it’s easy to get it running on other computers. Modern Macs may use “standard PC hardware”, but they’re still different enough to make running OS X on anything else rather tricky. There are several impediments to running OS X on non-Apple hardware:

• Apple doesn’t want you to. To this end, parts of OS X are encrypted.
• Along these lines, the OS X EULA specifically prohibits you from installing it on non-Apple hardware. Apple has used this provision to shut down Mac cloners like Psystar, but (so far) has shown no interest in going after individuals or the multitude of Hackintosh sites on the net.
• Macs use the modern EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) instead of the ancient BIOS; you can’t boot a Mac volume from a BIOS.
• Apple only has to worry about device drivers for their hardware. You’ll need hacked drivers for PC motherboard chipsets, audio, video, networking, and other devices and interfaces.

My own impetus for building a Hackintosh was curiosity: I’ve been using Macs since they came out in 1984, and have been using the Mac Pros since their introduction in 2003. I’d casually investigated the idea for a year or so, but it seemed dauntingly complex (even though I’m a programmer) and online reports of compatibility and usability problems and overall system reliability deterred me. But the state of the art has advanced since then, and while it’s still hardly “plug and play”, it seemed as though it could be fairly easy…if you started with the right hardware.

There’s also the cost issue. While Mac Pros are competitively priced compared to other workstation-class machines like the HP Z800 and Dell Precision series, the starting price of $2,500 for a single quad-core processor model running at 2.8GHz (and going up past $5,000 for a dual hexacore processor model) is still pretty high. The problem is that the iMac and Mac Mini have very limited expandability, so if you want more than one internal hard drive or optical drive, more than two memory slots, discrete video cards, and so forth, the Mac Pro is your only choice in the Apple lineup. And while it’s possible to upgrade a Mac Pro, the single processor and dual processor models use different motherboards (so your single-processor model can’t be upgraded to dual processors). Also (frustratingly for hackers) it’s difficult or impossible (depending on the model) to overclock a Mac.

After some research I determined that I had hardware— specifically, a motherboard, processor, and video card— that seemed to be well supported. So I decided to give it a shot.

Before you start a Hackintosh project, you need to spend some quality time on the Web researching your hardware. While AMD systems can be used as Hackintoshes, there is much more support and information available for Intel systems. And unless you like writing your own drivers, you should choose a motherboard and processor that others have successfully used as the basis of a running system. Graphics card support is spotty: NVIDIA cards seem better supported than ATI cards, with many boot loaders (we’ll get to those in the next section) providing drivers that will work with most NVIDIA cards made in the last few years. ATI cards are less well supported, but experimental support for the 5xxx series has just become available and seems to work.

Much of the existing knowledge and support in the Hackintosh world is for older hardware; LGA775 motherboards based in Intel P45 chipsets and older netbooks are well represented. However, in the last few months, support has been growing for the newer Intel chipsets such as the P55, H55/57, and X58 motherboards. Since Apple has never produced AMD hardware, getting OS X running on an AMD system requires modifications to low levels of the OS X kernel and I wouldn’t recommend it for most people. What you build your Hackintosh on depends on what motherboards you have available or are willing to buy. But if you plan to buy new hardware, remember that there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to get anything running, or that it will be reliable enough to be useful if you do.

For this project I chose an ASUS P6T V2 Deluxe motherboard (since I happened to have one available), an Intel Core i7-920 processor, and an NVIDIA GTX 280 video card. The memory, hard drive, optical drive, and power supply you use don’t matter much, but it’s best to stick with SATA drives. Although the ASUS motherboard I used has an IDE port, IDE support is less than perfect and as of this writing I’ve not been able to get an IDE optical drive to work (an optical drive connected to a SATA port works fine). And while you can use multiple video cards to drive multiple monitors, NVIDIA SLI and ATI CrossFireX don’t exist in the Mac world, so don’t plan on using these features.

For my case, I used an HP Blackbird chassis with its Topower 1.1kW power supply and ASETEK water cooling system. The Blackbird chassis is one of the few PC cases that’s in the same class as a Mac Pro case: the massive aluminum structure weighs over 50 pounds and incorporates a full SATA backplane for up to five plug-in 3.5″ drives. A pop-up panel on the top of the case opens to expose an integrated card reader and USB and audio ports. The Blackbird computer was the first fruit of HP’s acquisition of Voodoo PC and while the case was never made available as a separate part, you can occasionally find them on eBay for very high prices (“very high” = “>$500”).

Funny, it doesn’t look like a Macintosh…

OK, let’s take a look at what we have to do from the software side…

The software problems start at boot time: Macs use EFI to boot from GUID-partitioned hard drives, whereas Windows PCs typically boot from a BIOS to an MBR hard drive. The GUID Partition Table (GPT) and Master Boot Record (MBR) are two different ways of designating the partitions on a hard drive, and forcing a BIOS-based system to boot from the Snow Leopard installer DVD is the first hurdle. This is where the “boot loader” comes in. I’m oversimplifying this a bit, but basically the bootloader “catches” the BIOS boot and redirects to an EFI boot, and also “injects” the patched drivers necessary to use non-Apple chipsets, networking interfaces, audio, and video.

There are several boot loaders available, but the Chameleon bootloader is the most popular, and it’s open-source too! Chameleon consists of several files that must be installed in specific places on your disk (“specific places” being short for “I hope you’re familiar with Unix disk partitions and devices”). There are two basic ways of creating your initial bootable Snow Leopard volume:

• If you don’t have access to a Macintosh, you’ll use the “intermediate boot disk” method: you create a special Chameleon boot CD, boot from it, then switch to the retail Snow Leopard CD when the Chameleon boot screen appears. After running the OS X installer to put Snow Leopard on your disk, you must perform some additional patching. This method is described inthis thread on Insanely Mac, which is specific to the ASUS P6T series of motherboards and includes a post-install “P6TV2Deluxe” package that adds support for the P6T hardware (audio, network, etc.) Many other threads in this forum give specific directions for installing OS X on other motherboards, so look around to see if yours is represented.
• If you do have access to a Macintosh, you can create a patched Snow Leopard installation volume, and boot and install from it directly. This is the method used by the myHack installer, and is the one I prefer since you’re left with a bootable Snow Leopard installation disk (USB key, in my case), which can be very handy.

There are also the “manual” installation methods described on the Chameleon home page, but those are best left for the experts…the ones familiar with “Unix disk partitions and devices.”

I started with the myHack installer, created a bootable USB key, used it to create a bootable OS X hard disk, and then applied the “P6TV2Deluxe” package installer as the final step. This package installs the specific drivers for the various components (audio, networking, etc.) on the ASUS motherboard. The difference between the myHack installer and the P6TV2Deluxe installer is that the former tries to create a generic bootable system that will work on a range of PC hardware, while the latter is optimized specifically for that model ASUS motherboard. If you’re using an ASUS P6T series motherboard, you can skip the myHack installer and just apply the P6TV2Deluxe package, but I’d originally set it up for a different motherboard and applying the P6TV2Deluxe package overwrites any changed files it needs to, so the end result is the same.

In the image above, note the check boxes for the processor DSDT files. DSDT stands for Differentiated System Descriptor Table, and is a file containing low-level information about your processor and other hardware. For example, no current Macs use the Core i7-920 processor, so OS X doesn’t know how to invoke its low-power or Turbo Boost features without a corresponding DSDT file. Your Hackintosh will run without this file, but not as well as it could otherwise. Separate DSDT files are available for most current Intel processors.

And that was pretty much all it took. The newly-created volume booted and ran (almost) perfectly on my hardware. Once you’re done, you’ll notice a new folder, named “Extra”, at the root level of your hard disk. This contains driver and configuration files that are loaded at boot time, so don’t remove it! The bulk of the bootloader code resides in a file at the root of your hard disk labelled simply “boot”; obviously, you shouldn’t remove this file, either.

So what does OS X think it’s running on? Some weird quad-core Xeon, apparently…

The more detailed analysis is in the System Profiler application, invoked by clicking the “More Info…” button in the dialog above.

Interestingly, the System Profiler app thinks I’m using ECC (error-correcting) memory: notice the “ECC: Enabled” notation in the screen shot below.

My original Hackintosh attempt was with an ASUS Rampage II Extreme motherboard. Although I was able to get it running, hard disk performance on anything except the boot disk was very slow. This seems to be a problem with AHCI mode on the SATA ports of some motherboards, and the only solution anyone has been able to come up with is switching to IDE mode, which I didn’t want to do. This lead me to switch to the ASUS P6T V2 Deluxe motherboard, which didn’t have this problem.

Although most things were working perfectly, there were two problems with my new system. One of them I’ve managed to address; the other I have not. The problems were very slow OpenGL performance with my NVIDIA GTX280 video card, and the fact that the optical drive attached to the motherboard’s IDE port wasn’t recognized by the system.

The OpenGL problem is widely known but its causes remain mysterious. Some NVIDIA cards such as the GTX 280 and GTX 285 return much slower OpenGL performance than other cards such as the older 9600 series. It seems to be chipset-specific (i.e. people report that cards that are slow on X58 systems return much better performance on P55 Hackintoshes). Nobody seems to be sure what causes the problem or how to address it. If you don’t plan to do any gaming or professional rendering on your Hackintosh, this isn’t a concern, since the Mac’s native rendering system (“Quartz”) runs at full speed, so all your user interface, QuickTime, and other features will work just fine. However, this is an excellent example of the type of problem you’ll see on a Hackintosh: subtle, poorly understood, and (at least in the short term) unfixable. Half-Life 2 was almost a slide show on my system with the NVIDIA card.

What I did was switch to an ATI Radeon 5870 video card; there are no OpenGL problems with ATI cards. However, since the system I’d built didn’t contain any ATI drivers, booting with this card produced a black screen. I had to re-install the NVIDIA card, get a patched version of the bootloader with experimental ATI 5×00 drivers here, and install it (which consisted of simply replacing the “boot” file at the root level of the hard disk). However, booting still resulted in a blank screen, and it took me some time to figure out why…

Inside the “Extra” folder mentioned above is a file named “com.apple.Boot.plist”. This “property list” file contains parameters that are read in at boot time. There’s a parameter for the graphics mode your Hackintosh will boot with, which in my case looked like this:

<key>Graphics Mode</key>
<string>1280x1024x32</string>

This default resolution works with most monitors, but my monitor is 1920×1200, and that’s what my Mac environment is configured for. With the NVIDIA card, the resolution switch occurred during the boot process just before the desktop was displayed; but the (admittedly experimental) hacked drivers for the ATI 5870 couldn’t handle the switch— I’d see the initial boot screen, but it would go black before the desktop was displayed. The fix was replacing the line in com.apple.Boot.plist with:

<key>Graphics Mode</key>
<string>1920x1200x32</string>

Having the final resolution in the boot configuration file means that the resolution switch that caused the problem doesn’t occur. This is another good example of the fun you’ll have with a Hackintosh. However, despite my success with the video cards, I’ve never been able to get the system to recognize the optical drive connected to the IDE porft.

I wanted to update my 2006-vintage Mac Pro to get better performance. The hardware I used for my Hackintosh should provide a significant performance boost relative to my old Mac Pro:

For benchmarking, I used CINEBENCH 11.5 (yes, there’s a Mac version), Handbrake video encoding, and GeekBench to compare the performance of the Hackintosh with my existing Mac Pro.

Maxon Cinebench is a real-world test suite that assesses the computer’s performance capabilities. Cinebench is based on Maxon’s award-winning animation software, Cinema 4D, which is used extensively by studios and production houses worldwide for 3D content creation. Maxon software has been used in blockbuster movies such as Spider-Man, Star Wars, The Chronicles of Narnia and many more. Cinebench Release 11.5 includes the ability to more accurately test the industry’s latest hardware, including systems with up to 64 processor threads and the testing environment better reflects the expectations of today’s production demands. A more streamlined interface makes testing systems and reading results incredibly straightforward.

The Cinebench R11.5 test scenario uses all of a system’s processing power to render a photorealistic 3D scene, “No Keyframes” the viral animation by AixSponza. This scene makes use of various algorithms to stress all available processor cores. The OpenGL graphics card testing procedure uses a complex 3D scene depicting a car chase with which the performance of your graphics card in OpenGL mode is measured. During the benchmark tests the graphics card is evaluated by way of displaying an intricate scene that includes complex geometry, high-resolution textures, and a variety of effects to evaluate the performance across a variety of real-world scenarios. The chart below summarizes the benchmark results.

With a modern video card, faster processor, and faster memory, the Hackintosh thoroughly trounces the Mac Pro. The CineBench rendering test uses Hyper-Threading if it’s available, and the eight virtual cores from the i7-920 CPU have a decided advantage over the four real cores from the pair of Xeons in the Mac Pro.
Primate Labs’ GeekBench is a “one-click” benchmark utility that performs a number of processor and memory tests; it does not test video cards or disk I/O. There are 12 integer CPU tests, 14 floating-point CPU tests, 5 basic memory tests, and 8 memory bandwidth tests. All tests comprise a mixture of single-threaded and multi-threaded versions. It produces a weighted composite score based on the individual scores.

“Pure synthetic” benchmarks like GeekBench are generally poor predictors of real-world performance. However, the results here seem to be roughly in line with what we’re seeing in the other benchmark tests.

Few consumer applications will make good use of a six-core processor, or even a four-core processor. Extra cores can give you a system that remains responsive when performing a computationally-intensive background task, but will rarely accelerate the execution of an individual program. There are several reasons for this:

• Few users have more than two cores. According to Steam’s August 2010 statistics, dual-core systems comprise 54.77% of its users, quad-core systems 27.49%, and six-core systems a miniscule 0.03%. Thus developers tend to concentrate their efforts elsewhere.
• Relatively few computational problems scale well with the number of threads available. (One common task that does is rendering, which is why modern video cards have dozens or hundreds of cores).
• Writing good multithreaded code is difficult and time-consuming. Developers generally realize a better return on their effort for other code optimizations.

All that said, media transcoding (converting to a different format) is something that does scale well with the number of available cores, and the free and open-source Handbrake 0.94 video transcoder is an example of a program that makes full use of the computational resources available. For this test I used Handbrake 0.94 to transcode a standard-definition episode of Family Guy to the “iPhone & iPod Touch” presets. The encoding times are in seconds; lower is better.

The Core i7-920’s eight Hyper-Threaded cores easily beat the old-school Xeons, encoding the video in less than half the time.

I built my Hackintosh with components I had available. Using the configuration utility at the online Apple Store, I configured a real Mac Pro to match as closely as possible the hardware I used. I selected the base 2.8GHz quad-core Xeon “Nehalem” processor (although Apple does not name the exact model Xeon used, the specifications are those of a Xeon X5660), 12G of error-correcting 1333MHz DDR3 memory (3x4G), an ATI Radeon 5870 video card, and accepted the standard “Superdrive” optical drive and a 1T hard drive of unknown provenance. The total cost for this configuration from Apple is $3,974.00.

Below is a list of the parts I used in the Hackintosh, with current Newegg prices where available. A couple of caveats: first, although I used an Intel Core i7-920 processor, it’s no longer available, so I substituted the closest thing, the Core i7-930; and since the HP Blackbird case is not a retail item, I substituted a high-end Lian Li case to approach the quality of the Mac Pro case, and an Antec Signature SG-850 power supply as my “best guess” for a match to Apple’s custom Mac Pro power supply, whose specs I couldn’t determine. These matches aren’t perfect, and you could choose a much less expensive case and power supply for your Hackintosh. I also included the cost of OS X and iLife, since this software is included with every Macintosh.

• ASUS P6TV2 Deluxe motherboard: $269.99
• 12G Crucial memory kit CT3KIT51264BA1339: $329.99 (direct from Crucial)
• SAPPHIRE Vapor-X 100281VX-2SR Radeon HD 5870: $375.99
• Western Digital VelociRaptor WD6000HLHX 600GB: $279.99
• Intel Core i7-930 BX80601930 CPU: $284.99
• Antec Signature SG-850 power supply: $249.99
• Lian Li PC-B70 Black Aluminum full-tower case: $229.99
• Mac OS X “Snow Leopard”: $29.99 from Apple
• iLife ’09 software suite: $64.99

PC Hackintosh total cost: $2,048.05

Apple Mac Pro total cost: $3,974.00

So, my PC Hackintosh cost $1,925.95 less than an Apple Mac Pro, and, although I wasn’t able to test it directly against a current Mac Pro, is probably significantly faster due to the overclock.

EDITOR’S NOTE: While some of the components used in this article were necessary for compatibility with Snow Leopard, items such as the video card, hard drive, power supply, and computer case are all flexible. Builders should consider the best option to fit their project and budget.

Mac Pros are expensive, but obviously there are people who feel they’re worth the money. Apple works hard to provide their customers with excellent support and service, and the result of their efforts is a consistent top ranking in customer satisfaction, which has been steadily increasing over the years. If you’re not the type of person that other people call with their computer problems, a real Macintosh can provide some peace of mind.

Right now, I’ve been running my Hackintosh for about two weeks. Once past its initial teething problems, it’s been as stable and reliable as any Mac I’ve ever owned, and so far every program and device I’ve run has worked just as it would on a regular Macintosh, including Microsoft Office, Adobe CS5, a Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner, and even older PowerPC programs that require Apple’s “Rosetta” emulation layer. Syncing my iPhone to iTunes works perfectly. And Windows 7 running under Parallels 6.0, allocated 4 cores and 4G of RAM, is very snappy, with none of the stutters or slow performance I noticed on my Mac Pro.

But getting everything working this well took a lot more effort than simply plugging in a retail Mac and starting it up. Even with the hold-your-hand installers for specific motherboards being created by enthusiasts, problems like the ones I mentioned in the previous sections are still all too common, and require diligence and some degree of expertise to overcome.

There’s another problem: software updates. Like Microsoft, Apple releases frequent software updates, and OS X will alert you to them as they become available. You can even set your Mac to download them automatically (although they won’t be installed without your specific direction). But updates have the potential to render your machine inoperative, since they can replace some of the patched components your Hacktintosh needs to run. In general, application updates (for Office, iWork, and other programs) are safe, while OS and security updates are less so. You should be especially cautious of “OS version” updates. For example, the update from OS X 10.6.3 to 10.6.4 disabled the audio on many Hackintoshes, requiring a patch script to restore the previous audio driver. No problems have been reported with security updates, but the possibility still exists. The Hackintosh community is pretty good about staying on top of this stuff, and you’ll generally know within a couple of days of the release of an update whether it’s safe to install it, so it’s a good idea to wait before installing any OS level updates until they’ve been vetted by the community.

But since disaster can strike anyway, I’d strongly recommend a couple of things: first, keep a bootable OS X installation volume (USB key or DVD) around, preferably the one you used to create your system. This disk contains programs like Terminal and Disk Utility which can be very useful in resuscitating a non-booting Hackintosh. Second, dedicate a second hard disk to Apple’s “Time Machine” built-in backup feature. Time Machine backs up any changed files on your system hourly, and should your boot volume be toasted for whatever reason, the OS X Installer will offer you the option of restoring the entire disk from a Time Machine backup. I’ve used this feature to migrate my Hackintosh to a larger hard disk, and it worked perfectly.

The last thing to keep in mind is how hardware-dependent a Hackintosh is. Most Hackintosh setups are hand-tweaked to run on the specific hardware in a single computer. If the Radeon 4870 video card in your Hackintosh dies in a couple of years, you probably can’t simply swap in the current equivalent Radeon without some extra effort and boot loader updates, which will be difficult to do with no video.

If you remain aware of these issues, and adjust your expectations accordingly, a Hackintosh might be a viable option for you. When I started this article, I told my editor that even though I had gotten everything working, I’d never recommend a Hackintosh for daily use in a production environment, or as a main computer. But I’m starting to change my mind…

The rapid advancement in the Hackintosh field over the last year or so had made what was once a hacker’s toy into a real option for some people. The drawbacks of the Hackintosh approach— spotty hardware support and the requirement for hand-tweaked software, no support from Apple, and the vulnerability of the system to software updates— are countered by the lower cost, greater performance, and versatility in selecting components that it affords.

EDITORS NOTE: Benchmark Reviews has also published an updated Apple Hackintosh: Moving to Intel Sandy Bridge article, as well as our Budget Hackintosh PC Build Project, Hackintosh OS X Software Installation, and Hackintosh Performance Hardware Options.

+ Potentially faster than a real Mac
+ Substantially less expensive
+ You can configure exactly the system you want
+ Easier to upgrade (especially video cards, assuming driver support)
+ Geek cred for getting it done

– Still not a real Mac
– No Apple warranty or support
– Very vulnerable to hardware changes, especially video cards
– Software update may disable all or part of your system

UPDATE: Readers may be interested in our follow-up editorial: The Apple Hackintosh Experience