The Fastest Mac In The World Is Now A Hackintosh

John Brownlee ()

The Fastest Mac In The World Is Now A Hackintosh

Apple’s fastest Mac is the 12-Core Mac Pro, featuring two 2.93 GHz Xeon processors. Configure it with 25GB of DDR3 ECC SDRAM, and Apple’s fastest Mac will cost you $8,749.00.

Yowza. That’s an extraordinary amount of money. If you don’t mind dropping an extra $300, though, you might be interested in Macintouch’sguide to building not Apple’s fastest Mac, but the world’s fastest Mac yourself.

Yup, according to Macintouch’s tests, their Hackintoshed monstrosity — a total beast of a machine running two 3.33GHz hexacore Westmere processors overclocked to 4.2GHz each and supplemented with 24GB of DDR3 RAM — melted the Mac Pro’s face off.

Of course, there’s a lot of drawbacks to this approach, including compatibility issues and a much louder system than the Mac Pro, as well as a desktop footprint that makes the Pro look compact. But as of right now, it seems that a Hackintosh is the fastest Mac in the world. God help us.

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[via Hardmac]

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About the author

John BrownleeJohn Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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  • Colin

    I’d bet that the worlds fastest mac is running somewhere in Apple in Cupertino.

  • Me

    I was running few hackintoshes for few months. They don’t work as good as the real deal. Not so stable, not so reliable, not as fast – even if benchmarks say so.

  • Mark Gary Blumenthal, MD, MPH

    I’d bet that Colin is right, and that ‘ME’ is also correct.

    Now that I have increased the RAM to a full complement of 8 GB I have no complaints about the speed and power of my MacBook Pro.

    For $275, it is the best bang for the buck and gives me even more speed and stability than my Mac had before.

    Of course, it also allows me to run Windows and/or Linux at ‘full speed’ and with total stability (not that I would bother).

    IMHO, there’s rarely any substitute for the ‘real deal’, and there’s no free lunch in the universe. By and large, we get what we pay for, at least where Apple is concerned.

  • Thomcarl

    Fast yes, but how good is the warranty when your Hacintosh explodes?

  • Elmer Fudd

    Been running a hackintosh for years here. From nearly the beginning of the whole OSX86 project. The comments from “Me” are BS.

  • imajoebob

    It only seems fair – and ironic, since the fastest Windows machine, as tested by one of the PC magazines (double irony) has ended up a Mac the last couple trials.

  • alu

    i did some kind of try before buy. I used my core 2 quad 6600, 6gb, 6HD, Nvidia 8800 GTS intel dq35jo, and test it like an hackintosh. There is certainly a lerning curve and there are only one feature that does not work: sleep, but every thing else works ok, and… yes it super stable and blazing fast. From there i took the decision to make the change to Mac, so i buy a Mac book pro, love the sleep feature and the touchpad, but my hackingtosh 2- 24 inchs screens is unbeatable compare to my macbook pro.