HP 800 G1

HP 800 G1 mini Hackintosh - OpenCore

The HP 800 G1 Mini is a tiny PC and first gen. of the HP 800 mini series. Perfect for hackintoshing!

About this guide

This is not a complete tutorial but based on the OpenCore Vanilla Desktop Guide for Haswell. I reccomend reading the guide carefully to understand OpenCore. Or else you will not learn anything! My goal with this guide is to help you avoid all the errors you would encounter. The OC guide is great but every PC is different and this one was a bit quirky and needed some tweaking to work! I assume you already have made an OS X install-USB.

Specs

  • Intel i7-4785T @ 2.20GHz (35w) 4-core/8-thread
  • 16GB (2x8) DDR3 1600MHz
  • 6 x USB-3, 2 front, 4 back
  • M.2 NVMe AHCI 128GB drive
  • 2.5" SSD Samsung 860 EVO 500GB
  • BCM94360NG(M.2) wifi/bt card
  • 65w external power supply
  • OpenCore 0.6.0

What is working

  • Mac OS X 10.15.6
  • Sleep
  • Wifi/Bluetooth with new Broadcom card
  • Audio, in/mic and out
  • Multi-monitor (2)
  • iMessage, AppStore
  • AirDrop, Handoff etc.
  • Dual-boot OS X / Windows 10

About mini-PCs and this machine

I am fascinated by these small, cute Mac Mini-like PCs and have had my hands on many different models from Lenovo, HP and Dell. You can get the first gen. models very cheap online (much cheaper than a slower Mac Mini) and they pack a lot of power considering their small size and price. They are all easy to upgrade with RAM, hard drives and CPU. That is not possible with a Mac Mini! What differs these machines are mainly:

  • Different Intel gen. 4th, 6th, 7th, 8th etc.
  • RAM speed and max capacity
  • USB3 / USB-C and USB3 speeds
  • Single or dual drive capacity
  • Heat and noise differences

The HP 800 G1 is the first gen. in this series. It features a Haswell low-power cpu, up to 16gb RAM and 2 drive slots, 1 x M.2 sata and 1 x 2.5".

Pros HP 800 G1

  • The "T" cpu runs cool
  • Easy to open (thumbscrew)
  • Simple to swap to 3rd party wifi/bt card (the HP 800 G4 would not accept the same wifi/bt card)
  • Can install 2 hard drives
  • Easy to install 2.5" hard drive

Cons HP 800 G1

  • The fan on this are a bit noisier than others I have tested even when temps are low
  • The CPU heatsink must be removed to swap the M.2 drive. Thus new thermal paste must be applied
  • The M.2 drive is NVMe but only SATA meaning not better speed than a 2.5" SSD.

Installation

  • I installed Windows10 on the drive and used SSDTIME to generate the SSDTs. I copied these over to the ACPI folder. I can not guarantee these are perfect for your PC but I suggest you do this on your own HP 800 G1 to be sure.
  • Copy over my EFI folder to the EFI partition
  • Edit config.plist to enter new serialse UUID etc.

BIOS setup

I suggest upgrading to latest version which is L04 V02.33 (04/17/2019). There is not much to configure. The only thing I changed was Security -> VTd -> Disabled. You can also disable this in config.plist. Make sure your Storage -> Storage Options -> SATA Emulation > AHCI, but this is default. There is no IGPU config so this must be set in deviceproperties in config.plist. I suggest setting Power->Thermal->Fan Idle Mode->lowest to make sure the fan are quiet when not under load. The fan noise is acceptable but can blow hard under heavy load. I don't think I ever see the CPU over 65° C.

USB port mapping

I have enclosed the USBports.kext derived from hackintool. It should work on your PC of this model.

config.plist changes

I had a lot of different errors mostly related to "com.apple.AppleFSCompressionTypeDataLess load succeeded" and kernel panics. Coming from Clover I found the equivalent to "usb fixusbownership" which is "ReleaseUsbOwnership -> YES" in OpenCore. This seemed to fix those problems. And to be honest I don't remember all changes I did. You will see the OC sanity checker complain about those changes :-)

Wifi - Bluetooth

I am using the BCM94360NG from FENVI. This requires no extra kexts to work as it is recognized as a native card.

BCM94360NG

I also tested with a Dell 1820A wifi/bt card that is much cheaper and am using it in some other Hackintoshes. To make it work you have to add the airport* and brcm* kexts in the Kexts_off folder. I do not reccomend these cards as some work and some don't. I had one left over and this must have been bad because I suddenly got kernel panics and all kinds of different boot errors. After many hours I removed the 1820A and everything was ok again! That is why I suggest to use the extra money on the BCM94360NG. It just works. I am not sure about the AirportBrcmFixup.kext since it only renames the wifi card to AirportExtreme. I did not see any speed difference with it. Have to test more.

For info I have tested the BCM94360NG on HP 800 G2 and the G4 version but none of these seemed to accept any other M.2 wifi/bt cards than Intel. I don't know why and HP could not help me (on windows of course). Random crashes, terrible speed. That is why I was so glad this G1 worked!

Multi-monitor

This works OTB with no other patching then the one from the OC Guide. So I have 2 monitors working with not problems. VGA does not work like on any other Hackintosh!

Audio

Realtek ALC221. This works fine with correct alcid=11.

Devicepropertides for audio and gpu:

BCM94360NG

Misc.

RTC clock

No problem with RTC clock on this one. This is a problem on some PCs I have a HP 800 G2 that I still can not fix. Get the BIOS clock warning on every boot.

Performance

This Haswell is a i7 4785T, 4-core/8-thread. It is faster than e.g. a Skylake 6500T. Of course a Skylake also has faster RAM. I just love the Haswell versions since they are so easy to hack- Skylake has been a pain regarding sleep and GPU issues. This runs 32 tracks in Logic Pro X (the test file) with all plugins. Not bad for a machine you can get for $200-$300 used, or maybe $100 for a i3 or i5 version. The cool thing about these is you can buy a cheap i3 Intel version and buy a faster i5 or i7 cpu online.