Apple Questions & Answers

Installing Mac OS on a non Apple notebook

Follow Question Posted by Captain_Obvious on Mar 30, 2011

Hello, I've recently purchased an Acer 5740G notebook, which has ATI 5650 graphics and Intel Core CPU. Can I install Mac on this thing?

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2 ikarus on Mar 30, 2011

Level 2 As far as I read through forums, Mac OS X 10 don't support 5xxx AMD GPU family.

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3 Dexter on Mar 30, 2011

Level 5 Sure you can try. Even if your graphics card is not fully supported, for "getting to know" the OS it will be ok. I've installed Leopard on a laptop with Intel GMA HD graphics and have successfully changed the resolution to display's native, but most of the software would not work, and you will probably have problems even watching a full screen movie at lower than HD resolutions.

To be honest, it's a tough job getting all the hardware to work, and personally, I haven't seen fully supported pre-built device (laptop), unless you build it yourself (desktop) after good research of the supported hardware.

Best place to start is the OSx86 Wiki to see if all your hardware is supported. I'm always looking to get the most needed functions working, and then jumping into experiments with the rest of the hardware. My advice is, first search for:

- Graphics support (QE/CI is apple's hardware acceleration of the graphics cards - stands for Quartz Extreme / Core Image).
- Sound and mic support
- At least LAN connectivity

If your system does not support the above, you can always try the OS via Virtual machine like VMWare, or the real deal - go to the nearest Apple store.

Places to start your research and get advice:
http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/
http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Happy hacking. Get fully loaded with patience.

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4 Slash on Mar 30, 2011

Level 2 I've read somewhere that they got the 5650 to work with Snow leopard thanks to Lion kexts, so I'd suggest you wait for the OS X Lion before installing.

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5 mindhacker on Apr 07, 2011

Level 2 As far as I know, Lion is already available to developers, so if you really want to check out it's new ATI kexts you should google a little bit. Oh, another good place to look for updates on graphic cards (especially manufactured by ATI) running on mac is netkas.org blog.

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6 Twisted on Apr 07, 2011

Level 2 Is there a list of the supported Nvidia cards

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8 ninjamode on Apr 19, 2011

Level 2 Anyone successfully installed Snow Leopard Retail on an ASUS notebook? Particularly X52JE?

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