How to build a 3rd Gen Ryzen Hackintosh – MacOS Catalina
It’s been a couple months since I made the 24 core Threadripper hackintosh guide, and you guys loved it, but as with all software, especially community driven software, that guide is pretty much out of date. So, this video we are going to walk you through exactly how to make a 3rd gen Ryzen hackintosh, using OpenCore, and get your system up and running.
Now I have a couple of disclaimers I should point out, first, at the time of filming, 3rd gen Threadrippers are not currently supported. There are a lot of people working on that, but for now, it’s standard Ryzen, or 1st/2nd gen Threadrippers only. Next, I’m using an AMD GPU here – NVIDIA GPUs can be supported and I will be making a video about that shortly, but this video is setup to use an AMD GPU. And finally, this guide is as accurate as I can make it at the time of filming, but this software changes so rapidly that there may be some inaccuracies by the time you watch it and try to make it yourself – to help with that, I’ve included sources and more detailed guides in the description to help you as much as I can. Right, lets get to building then.
When it comes to the hardware, beside the AMD GPU, you can use a pretty wide variety. I’m using a Ryzen 3900X 12 core, on an ASRock B450 Steel Legend motherboard, an RX 470 from Sapphire, 16GB of DDR4 RAM, and a Samsung 970 EVO M.2 SSD as the boot drive.
When it comes to the software the majority of the work is in creating the bootable USB so let’s go through the tools you’ll need first, and again I’ll include links to these in the description, so you’ll need:
- GibMacOS
- GenSMBIOS
- MacSerial
- Notepad++ (or other xml editor)
- OpenCore (i’ll include my copy which includes Kexts and SSDT_EC0
- MountEFI (on the Hackintosh once booted)
Once you’ve got all that downloaded, you can start by running GibMacOS. Download the most recent version of Catalina available, let it download, then you can close that. Plug in your USB stick and run the MakeInstall.bat file inside the GibMacOS folder, select your USB stick, then press y to format it. Once that’s done, copy the folder location of Catalina you just downloaded, it’ll look something like this: “C:\Users\techteamgb\Downloads\GibMacOS-master\macOS Downloads\publicrelease\061-10700 – 10.15.2 macOS Catalina”
Let it extract, then once it’s complete, open the drive in explorer and delete the EFI folder that’s there. You can then copy OpenCore’s EFI folder and get to work on that. First I would check what ethernet chipset your motherboard uses – I’m using an Asrock B450 Steel Legend which uses a Realtek RTL8111H (you can normally find that on the manufacturers website) so I need to make sure I have the Kext that supports that enabled – so take a look inside the kexts folder on the drive, and if you are using my copy, you’ll find most of the kexts you’ll need in there, the IntelMausiEthernet kext is the catch all for a number of intel ethernet chipsets, but the newer 211 ones are supported by the SmallTree kext.
Once you’ve got all the kexts you need in there, it’s now time to work on the config.plist file that’s in there. Open it in your favourite XML editor, I’m using notepad++, and scroll to the Kernel part, then open the patches.plist from the AMD Vanilla github and replace from the <array> just below <key>Patch</key> down to the close array </array> in your config file with the same from the github.
Next you can scroll down to find the kexts, under the key “Add”. Most of the ones you’ll need are already there, but depending on your ethernet chipset you might need to copy one of the dicts and paste a new one in, replacing the BundlePath string with the name of the kext, ExecutablePath with the name of the kext, minus the .kext part, and the comment with the name minus .kext too.
Finally in the config file, you’ll need to generate new serial numbers, board serial numbers, and a new UUID. Start with the serials, open CMD and use the “cd” command to navigate to the folder MacSerial is in, then run “MacSerial.exe –model iMacPro1,1”. It’ll give you a list of serials, pick one pair and copy them to the right places, the shorter is the SystemSerialNumber, and the longer is the MLB. Replace all instances of that key in DataHub, Generic, PlatformNVRAM and SMBIOS, then you can run GenSMBIOS and press 4 to generate a new UUID, again replacing all copies of the UUID, then you should be good to go.
Once all that’s saved, you can then put the USB stick into your hackintosh system and boot from it, selecting to boot “Install macOS from base system” if you need to. Once you are booted I’d recommend opening the disk utility and formatting your drive to APFS, then you can close that and press Re-Install MacOS.
That might take a while, and it’ll reboot too, but once it’s complete, you’ll be greeted with the usual Apple setup wizard, you can set that up and in theory you should even be able to log in with an Apple ID here if you want to, then, once you are in MacOS, the final step is to open terminal and git clone corp newt’s MountEFI tool, you might have to install git but it’ll prompt you to install xcode tools, just agree and it’ll sort it for you, then chmod +x the mountefi.command file then run it with ./MountEFI.command, pick your boot drive – in my case it’s the 970 EVO, then open the folder it mounted, and your USB stick, and copy both the boot file and the EFI folder to the newly mounted folder. Once it’s copied that’s it, you have a working Hackintosh! If you ever need to make changes to the config file, add kexts or anything else, you can just mount the EFI folder again to access it.
With all that said, do keep in mind this guide is not complete and doesn’t cover everything perfectly. While these are the steps I used to make a functioning hacktintosh, do remember this isn’t a simple OS install, it’s called “hack” for a reason, and you may encounter issues along the way. If you do, feel free to leave a comment, join our discord, or even better the AMD OSX discord to get help.
Links:
Complete guide: https://khronokernel-2.gitbook.io/opencore-vanilla-desktop-guide/
AMD Vanilla Config Patches: https://github.com/AMD-OSX/AMD_Vanilla/tree/opencore/17h
Open Core (my copy): https://github.com/andymanic/CatalinaEFI
GibMacOS: https://github.com/corpnewt/gibMacOS
GenSMBIOS: https://github.com/corpnewt/GenSMBIOS
MacSerial: https://github.com/acidanthera/MacInfoPkg/releases
MountEFI: https://github.com/corpnewt/MountEFI
AMD OSX Discord: https://discord.gg/sMA2TTq
