Minimalist motherboard for a hackintosh

RomHeu · November 29, 2019

Hi from France!

I want to assemble a new hackintosh, probably based on Core i5-9600K or i7-9700K.

I can study the Ryzen 3 track if I have a crush on a motherboard, but the AMD CPUs make some concessions on macOS (especially CPU power management).

I'm looking for advice for a minimalist motherboard:
- I'd like it to be as visually sober as possible
- that there are as few exotic chipsets as possible (as they are unlikely to be supported by macOS)
- and as a bonus, the BIOS/UEFI is as neutral as possible (models: Intel NUC and PC manufacturers such as Dell, Lenovo...)

For the moment I have located the EVGA B360 Micro Gaming, which is only available in the United States, but I am so motivated I might import it in France. Its only flaw, in addition to its unavailability in France: the anachronistic PS/2 port! I wouldn't have been against a second slot for a PCIe NVMe SSD, for Windows, but a SATA SSD does the job to play CSGO

Otherwise I like the NZXT Z390 Coverless, but I find it expensive for what it is, and the input/output panel is a little too crammed for my taste.

For your information I will not use the iGPU, so I don't need (or even want) video outputs on the I/O panel, nor the audio chipset of the motherboard, because I have a good USB DAC, so I don't need the 5 jacks and the SPDIF output (who still does 5.1 audio with 3.5mm jacks?! or even with SPDIF ? :-/)

The smaller the PC the better, but I would like to have 10GBASE-T sooner or later, and it seems to me that in 2019/2020 it is more cost-effective to add a PCIe card than to choose a motherboard with an integrated 10GbE port, so unless there is a great find, it excludes mini-ITX.

By the way, I'm thinking of the Fractal Design Define Mini S, but if someone has a sober, more qualitative box to offer, I'm open

Thank you in advance for your advice!