To this day, Realtek still hasnt officially released drivers for OS X Mavericks (10.9) or Yosemite (10.10), the two newest versions of Mac OS X-- however, Realteks drivers for Lion (10.7) and Mountain Lion (10.8) sometimes work on newer versions of OS X anyways.If you want to connect your Hackintosh to the internet via WiFi, youll usually have to set up a separate wireless adapter (also known as a WiFi card).When choosing a WiFi adapter, your two main options are to buy either a PCI adapter or a USB adapter.The names are self-explanatory; a PCI adapter should be attached to a motherboard PCI slot, while a USB adapter should be attached to a USB port.
Best Wifi Adapter Drivers For OSWe discussed buying a PCI WiFi adapter last year, but if that isnt an option, read on for a list of compatible USB WiFi adapters instead. Most motherboards have a relatively limited number of PCI slots. You may not want to waste an extra slot on your WiFi adapter if you plan on connecting a lot of PCI devices, such as graphics cards, sound cards, Firewire cards, RAID cards, TV tuner cards, or so on. Mini-ITX motherboards are even worse; most of them only feature a single PCI slot, making a USB WiFi adapter all the more important. Most PCI adapters cost 30-40, while USB adapters rarely cost more than 20. Sometimes, you can even find USB adapters on sale for half that price. Its not a big price difference, but its still something worth considering. While Mac OS X only supports an extremely limited number of PCI WiFi adapters, there are literally hundreds of USB WiFi adapters that work with OS X to some degree or another. This means that you might not even have to buy a new adapter for your Hackintosh; if you already own a USB WiFi adapter, theres a decent chance that itll work in Mac OS X. In many cases, buying a PCI WiFi adapter would actually be a better choice. As we discussed in last years article, some PCI adapters are natively supported in Mac OS X, meaning that they will work on your Hackintosh automatically. This is not the case for USB adapters, which always require third-party drivers. In addition to installing drivers, in order to get WiFi working correctly with a USB adapter, you will have to turn on a third-party WiFi utility app every time you boot your Hackintosh. Although this is not very hard to do, it can get to be very annoying if you reboot your computer frequently. The lack of native support for USB WiFi adapters means that you cant count on your adapter to work between different versions of Mac OS X. Instead, every time Mac OS X gets a big update (e.g. Mountain Lion to Mavericks), youll have to wait for WiFi chipset manufacturers to update their drivers appropriately. For instance, the chipset manufacturer Ralink didnt release drivers for OS X Mountain Lion until October 2012, four whole months after the official July 25 release of the operating system. ![]() You can find the chipset of a USB adapter by searching Google; for example, if you want to find the chipset of the ASUS USB-N13, search USB-N13 chipset. Usually, the first or second result will be a link to wikidevi.com, which will tell you what chip the adapter uses. Most chipsets inside USB WiFi Adapters are manufactured by either Realtek or Ralink.
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