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6Feb/126

Sandy Bridge-E Intel 2011 Socket confirmed working with Hackintosh

[Update] Intel Socket 2011 does not only support Sandy Bridge-E, but also the upcoming Ivy Bridge-E Chipset, as outlined by one of our commenters. That makes the Socket-2011 Mainboards a perfect choice for a hackintosh system.

Many of us are waiting for an update to the Sandy Bridge (E) Chipset to the upcoming Intel Ivy Bridge (along with the release of new Apple Hardware), that would allow running the new Intel Chipset with Hackintoshed customac systems.

But what about Sandy Bridge-E?
Ivy Bridge will be Quad-Core. If you want more threads and cores, go for SB-E. Sandy Bridge-E as well as Ivy Bridge will have PCIe 3.0. SB-E has 40 PCIe lanes (compared to 16 lanes in Sandy Bridge) as well as 1600MHz memory speed (quad-channel memory) which should be around 33% faster in theory.

There are confirmed builds that can run Mac OSX 10.7 (Lion) as well as 10.6 (Snow Leopard) with the Intel Sandy Bridge-E (SB-E) X79 Chipset. Integrated Graphics are not supported, but who needs them anyway, since the AMD 6990 GPU or the upcoming 7990
Here is a list of the confirmed mainboards:

ASUS Asustek P9X79 Mainboard Socket S2011 hackintosh chimera

Asus P9X79 Deluxe (user: vonmolk)
$370 in the US, €299 in Europe

Pro: good build quality (compared to other versions of that board)
Cons: none. The Asus Rampage IV has even better build quality.

Gigabyte GA-X79-UD7 Mainboard Socket 2011 (ATX, DDR3 Speicher, SATA III, USB 3.0) Intel Hackintosh chimera

Gigabyte GA-X79-UD7 (user: machacks)
€297 in Europe, ??? in the USA

Pro: Awesome board! (nanofunk recommendation). Gigabyte has a longer history of hackintosh-capable boards, so get one of those.
Cons: none, really. Overclocking features could be better.

ASUS RAMPAGE IV EXTREME - LGA2011 - X79 - 8x DIMM - PCIe 3.0 Motherboards Hackintosh chimera

* ASUS Rampage IV Extreme (user: nfsking2)
$415 in the US, €369 in Europe

Pro: awesome build quality, extreme overclocking support.
Cons: expensive.

The MSI X79 Big Bang XPower II is suspected to work as well (once it becomes available). Theoretically, most of the X79 boards should work, we just have to wait and see what early birds (early adopters) are coming up with. Keep up the great work, ppl! (and don't forget to share your experiences in the comments below)

   
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