macOS on a Dell PowerEdge R720 server?

Any pointers for how to get macOS going on a Dell PowerEdge R720? Spec wise this is probably equivalent to a Mac Pro 6,1. The technical guide says the chipset is an Intel C600.

I currently have a Mac Pro 2012, but I'm pissed at Apple for their stupid feud with Nvidia and their insanely out of touch pricing on the new Mac Pro, so I want to try out a hackintosh. Unfortunately I'm dependent on the accessibility and workflow features of macOS for a disability I have, otherwise I would leave the Apple ecosystem entirely.

The R720 I have has two 8-pin GPU power headers and can accommodate two full-length double-wide GPUs according to the technical guide. I would love dual AMD Radeon Vega Frontier Editions or Vega 64s, but I don't think the budget will allow for that at the moment... but future-wise I want to get into machine learning with the Metal API.

From the standpoint of storage I can put just about anything in there, it's a 16-bay machine, I have a ton of SAS gear, PERC H710, Adaptec 78165, LSI 9207-4i4e, Intel 750 NVMe, Optane 900p, Samsung m.2 AHCI, SATA SSD & HDD, USB sticks, USB to SATA adapters.

For processors I have two Xeon E5-2670 v2 (also have v1 cpus) and memory will be 16x 16GB DDR3 RDIMMs.

For sound I have a USB attached DAC, in particular a S.M.S.L. AD18.

I also have a highpoint USB 3.0 card and a Chelsio 10 GbE NIC I could pull from my Mac Pro 2012 if needed. Currently I have a Broadcom BCM57840S rNDC in the R720, but I could swap that out very easily with an Intel X520 + i350 rNDC.

I'm not sure about bluetooth (keyboard, mouse, and trackpad are all bluetooth). However, come to think of it I think I have a Apple WiFi Broadcom card and PCIe adapter... but, I'm not sure the R720 supports PCIe slot bifurcation to support the WiFi and Bluetooth at the same time... although I can get by just fine without WiFi.

The R720 doesn't support booting from NVMe devices to my knowledge (there might be a way to mod the UEFI firmware to include support, but that's a project in and of itself). I think the best option for boot support could be an Samang SM951 AHCI that I have.

submitted by /u/Hopperkin
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