It’s been a little over three months since Stephen put together his guide on how you can build your own Mac Pro using off-the-shelf PC parts. Granted, you don’t get the sleek and shiny “trash can” looks of the real thing, but you do get more upgrade options and flexibility. He also looked into whether you could take the PC DIY route to build an entry-level Mac Pro Hackintosh too.
Well, after all this time, it looks like Stephen isn’t the only one interested in building his own Hackintosh with new Mac Pro equivalency. The folks at Lifehacker have consulted with Hackintosh expert tonymacx86 on what it would take to build your Mac Pro. One of the key differences here is that while Stephen’s posts were largely theoretical and they were only builds on paper, tonymacx86 and the people at CustoMac.com actually put their builds together to see how they worked.
They’re covering their bases with an entry-level “Hack Pro” that’ll cost just a touch over $2,000, a mid-range option at around $2,750, and something closer to the top at a $4,100 cost. These are all cheaper than their official Apple counterparts, but naturally some compromises and tweaks were made along the way. The cheapest model uses an Intel Core i7 4770K 3.5GHz processor and EVGA GeForce GTX 780 Ti graphics, for instance, whereas the top end Hackintosh Pro gets bumped to an Intel Xeon 2.8GHz E5 10-core processor, albeit with the same graphics card. Unlike the real thing, though, you’ll get Windows 7 support in these versions.
Read through the post on Lifehacker for details on what they put into their new Mac Pro DIY Hackintosh computers.