[colug-432] hackintosh build tips/advice?

[Rick Hornsby]

It's been many years - over 10 maybe - since I've built my own system, and a lot has changed. The tonymac site has been helpful, but there's a few things hardware wise (not necessarily hackintosh specific) I'm having a hard time finding answers to.

It appears that M.2 and U.2 are the same, except for the form factor/packaging/connector? By the same, I guess I mean mostly their speed.

When choosing a mobo, is there any reason to choose or lean toward a video card from the same maker? I.e. Asus board and an Asus video card. I know an eVGA or Gigabyte video card will work fine on an Asus board, but are there likely to be any benefits at all from pairing them?

The hackintosh specific caveat to the mobo+video card match/no match is that I'm going to lose access to a bunch of the software driven stuff (like tweaking the BIOS/UEFI from the OS) since those utilities are Windows only (I have to assume). So any sort of desktop software that enables the pairing to be useful isn't going to factor in.

I know I can watercool the CPU (that seems like a very common thing to do), but I'm having a harder time figuring out which video cards might support the same. There are enough coolers out there which support cooling your CPU + 1 that it seems to be a thing. Maybe +1 cools the northbridge? Are the north/south bridges still a thing? In any case, the goal of liquid cooling is both more efficient cooling and to keep the racket down.

On a somewhat amusing note, every mainboard I'm seeing comes with wifi. It's so bizarre to me to see pictures of antennas or antenna wires coming out of the case to a weird little fin looking thing. I've had laptops and my old macpro (internal wifi) for so long - long before wifi became so ubiquitous - that it took me a while to figure out what the little fin thing was.

thanks!