I'm actually using a Hackintosh! Mavericks is my favorite operating system, but there's no question that modern CPUs are superior to older and slower ones. OS X releases won't boot on Intel platforms newer than what existed at the time of their introduction. Someone with deep knowledge of XNU could fix this with a custom kernel and/or runtime patches, but I'm not that person.
When I decided to downgrade to Mavericks, my initial plan was to use a type 1 hypervisor with GPU passthrough for close-to-bare-metal performance on modern Intel platforms. Unfortunately, I have never been able make GPU passthrough work under Mavericks. I tried two different Mavericks-compatible graphics cards, a GTX 780 6GB and a GTX 780 Ti. In both cases, passthrough works fine in High Sierra, but not in the older releases I wanted to run.
Then I discovered that in 2017, a developer named Bronya had released a custom Mavericks kernel with Ryzen compatibility, to little fanfare. I ran down to microcenter and bought the just-released 16-core Ryzen 3950x, and went about building what would probably have been the most powerful Mavericks machine on the planet. It worked, but only when graphics acceleration was disabled. My GTX 780 Ti froze after logging in. My GTX 780 displayed a beautiful desktop in full resolution, but the entire machine slowed to a crawl when it was in use. Opening new Finder windows took upwards of 60 seconds, perhaps related to a cryptic message that kept appearing in the console: "kernel: NVDA: Channel Timeout!"
I suspect that Bronya's kernel has some sort of bug with Kepler-series nVidia GPUs, in which case, a different Mavericks-compatible GPU would have worked. Unfortunately, I could not get my hands on an alternate GPU in time for Microcenter's 7-day return window, and I decided to cut my losses and return everything. Bronya's kernel is also closed source.
Instead, I built a new Hackintosh around an Intel Core i7 4790K (4C 8T 4 Ghz), the GTX 780 6 GB I already had, and 32 GB of the fastest DDR3 memory I could find (2400 MHz). This is the machine I'm typing on right now, and I think it's just about the fastest hardware Mavericks can run on if single-core performance is prioritized. It more than holds its own against modern hardware.
I mostly haven't been able to ask for help in Hackintosh forums, because no one else is interested in trying to run such old releases. If anyone else is trying to build a Mavericks-compatible Hackintosh, please get in touch and I'll do my best to help.
I would like to try Ryzen again some day, with an AMD GPU.
When I decided to downgrade to Mavericks, my initial plan was to use a type 1 hypervisor with GPU passthrough for close-to-bare-metal performance on modern Intel platforms. Unfortunately, I have never been able make GPU passthrough work under Mavericks. I tried two different Mavericks-compatible graphics cards, a GTX 780 6GB and a GTX 780 Ti. In both cases, passthrough works fine in High Sierra, but not in the older releases I wanted to run.
Then I discovered that in 2017, a developer named Bronya had released a custom Mavericks kernel with Ryzen compatibility, to little fanfare. I ran down to microcenter and bought the just-released 16-core Ryzen 3950x, and went about building what would probably have been the most powerful Mavericks machine on the planet. It worked, but only when graphics acceleration was disabled. My GTX 780 Ti froze after logging in. My GTX 780 displayed a beautiful desktop in full resolution, but the entire machine slowed to a crawl when it was in use. Opening new Finder windows took upwards of 60 seconds, perhaps related to a cryptic message that kept appearing in the console: "kernel: NVDA: Channel Timeout!"
I suspect that Bronya's kernel has some sort of bug with Kepler-series nVidia GPUs, in which case, a different Mavericks-compatible GPU would have worked. Unfortunately, I could not get my hands on an alternate GPU in time for Microcenter's 7-day return window, and I decided to cut my losses and return everything. Bronya's kernel is also closed source.
Instead, I built a new Hackintosh around an Intel Core i7 4790K (4C 8T 4 Ghz), the GTX 780 6 GB I already had, and 32 GB of the fastest DDR3 memory I could find (2400 MHz). This is the machine I'm typing on right now, and I think it's just about the fastest hardware Mavericks can run on if single-core performance is prioritized. It more than holds its own against modern hardware.
I mostly haven't been able to ask for help in Hackintosh forums, because no one else is interested in trying to run such old releases. If anyone else is trying to build a Mavericks-compatible Hackintosh, please get in touch and I'll do my best to help.
I would like to try Ryzen again some day, with an AMD GPU.