Hackintosh Mini - Hidden Features.
As part of the process to build a new dev box for iPhone development I started building a hackintosh. The first step with this is hardware selection. After a few false starts with different motherboards, I eventually ended up with a Gigabyte GA-B75N, it is a mini-itx socket 1155 motherboard with great connectivity options
- 2xHDMI and 1xDVI perfect for a multi monitor dev environment.
- 2xGigabit ethernet connections, not necessary but good to have a backup.
- 1x6Gbps sata and 3x3Gbps.
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| Gigabyte GA-B75N showing mini PCI-E wifi card installed. |
So after installing the board, everything was setup and working nicely. Eventually my thoughts turned to wifi, this lead to some interesting research about whether 1x PCI-E cards would work in the full length slot (most of the research points to yes). Extrapolating further I found some great resources on building your own PCI-E card using a mini PCI-E card and an adapter (http://x86wifi.blogspot.dk/2010/04/how-to-build-your-own-real-airport-card.html).
This got me thinking about getting hold of a mini PCI-E card and an adapter, the process of looking at these cards triggered a few memories from the build. The motherboard looked like it had a half height mini PCI-E slot (micro PCI-E?). A quick flick of the screw driver and suspicions were confirmed. After some further screw driver work with donor laptop a full size mini PCI-E card was wedged in to the half height slot, a linux reboot and some inspection of the PCI-E bus and it was confirmed.
The Gigabyte GA-B75N rev. 1.0 has a working mini PCI-E slot. This was contrary to what Gigabyte has on their website and the included documentation, but I could now confirm that the slot was operational.
After shopping around on ebay I got a used mini PCI-E wifi card with an Atheros AR5B93 chipset. This card slotted in and after pulling the antennas out of the donor laptop it was all hooked up.
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| AR5B93 installed with antennas attached. |
After putting everything back together and booting into the mac environment, the only setup required was to open settings, goto network and add an adapter named Wi-Fi. Mountain Lion recognized the card without a problem and it performs well.
Things to consider :
Selecting the right mini PCI-E card is crucial. Not many are compatible out of the box with OS X. The card I chose had good availability on ebay and was reported to be simple to install in Mountain Lion this turned out to be the case with no custom kexts required and no real fiddling with Multibeast etc.
The AR5B93 only supports the 2.4Ghz wifi spectrum, so I an still considering an upgrade to a card with a Broadcom BCM94322HM8L chipset as it also supports 5Ghz and has good support in Mountain Lion according to various sources. I used the following links for information on Mountain Lion support
In Russian but information seems pretty complete :
https://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=0Arr23WYNror4dEc2T045WkFrbm56N0JfQVdiSU5jdHc&hl=ru&output=html
Less complete but information seems consistent :
http://osx-hackintosh.blogspot.dk/2012/11/wifi-adapters-with-native-support-in-os.html
There is a surprising lack of documentation for the mini PCI-E slot on the Gigabyte GA-B75N. Gigabyte don't mention it and google did not turn up anything concrete except a bit of speculation on a few forums. This may mean firmware revision could remove the functionality, but for the moment everything is working well.
