I'm trying to build a machine that is going to only run OSX86. I'm using the Wiki and trying to sift through threads to find out what the best hardware would be to run it without a ton of modification.

I'm building it at New Egg and want to spend around $600.

I'm looking for the best for the money in terms of performance and ease of installing/using OSX.

Here's what I've got so far:

See third reply for updated configuration!

Can't figure out a video card. Are these good choices? I haven't built a machine in about four years... I'm not up on the latest stuff!

Any help guys?

While AMD processors with nForce motherboards can work, if you're looking for "the best hardware...optimized for osx86," I'd recommend getting an Intel chip and 945 or 965 chipset motherboard.

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E4400 (or E6320 for about $30 more)
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3
RAM: 2x1GB DDR2 800. No reason to fill all four slots when you can spend less and only fill two.

The GeForce 7 series works very well with very little effort (simply installing the driver in most cases). I don't know what kind of video performance you're looking for, but it seems the 7300GT, 7600GT, and 7950GT work best (I've seen a few people have problems with GS cards for some reason). Get a 256MB card if you want it working with the least effort (512MB cards need a firmware update I believe).

check my signature. this apparatus had a street price in decembre 2006 at about 650Euros (incl. case and ATI graphics card). Meanwhile prices haven't risen afaik ;-) I am pretty comfortable with it. This doesn't include a keyboard/mouse combo or a screen.

kind regards, ximekon

I appreciate the input guys!

Here's what I've modified the configuration to:

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E4400 $139
Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-965P-DS3 $95
RAM: WINTEC AMPO 2GB (2 x 1GB) $78
Hard Drive: Western Digital Caviar SE WD2500JS 250GB $65
Media: LITE-ON $28
Wireless: NETGEAR WG311T $60
PSU: Thermaltake TR2 W0070RUC ATX 430W $40
Video: SAPPHIRE 194L Radeon X1650 256MB $70

Total shipped: $592.76

Whew, things have come a long way. That's a smoking fast machine compared to the last one I built!

That all look good? I'll probably be ordering this weekend.

Oh this keyboard too, has ridiculously good reviews and is dirt cheap!

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16823107120

I've got a 22" Acer widescreen I just picked up over the weekend in Memorial Day sales. Have a case and a mouse too.

Don't forget a case! lol. The rest looks good, except for the keyboard. I'd get a USB one. But do note that on that motherboard, for some reason USB is disabled by default in the BIOS. You can still get to the BIOS settings using a USB keyboard to change it though, so it's not really a problem.

I've got a case

Whats the advantage to a USB keyboard over the standard plug?

In OS X, USB is the standard plug

Thats good to know

Any other critique of my setup? I should be able to throw 10.4.9's latest revision from TPB in there and have no trouble, right?

I'm worried about the video card with the more I read.

Everything else seems to be okay, compatibility-wise, but the card has mixed reviews.

If you're worried about that card, you might want to look at an nVidia 7600GT. It's slightly faster, shouldn't cost much more, and they normally work very well for Hackintoshes (my boyfriend's worked out of the box with no hacking of kexts).

Sarah, just the kind of recommendation I was looking for.

Thank you!

Placing my order for this machine tomorrow... Any advice or help on the config would be greatly appreciated.

As I said before, my real goal is to put it together, slide in the latest 10.4.9 from TPB, and have it install without great issue or problems.

I think the build resembles a similar configuration to most Intel Macs now so it should be okay...

Good luck

Damn New Egg is fast! Everything but the wireless card will be here Monday... I ordered Friday afternoon!!!

This thread is going to be my project thread

Congrats and good luck with the build-out, the hardware seems nice and from everything I've read **supported**... Just don't get discouraged if things don't go supper smooth on the OS install... It's fairly common to have a hiccup someplace or another - the people here should be able to help you out if/when needed - also make sure you have a nice installer (as current as possible) to get X installed. A dvd with 10.4.9 + lots of optional / required drivers is floating around, you might wanna look for that.

D

I got everything but the DVD RW and wireless card today. Threw it in a case with another DVD-ROM I had laying around.

I hit a huge snag when the SATA DVD wouldn't work. Rigged up a USB enclosure to work with the DVD-ROM and plugged it in... Success! This is a nice little work around for all of you who can't get it to work with your SATA-only board.



The rest of the install went pretty well. The screen would load sideways and the mouse was totally sideways too. I restarted and it was right. I don't know. About five restarts since it's still fine. No idea what that was about.





Most everything works great. There are two problems I'm having.

#1 The HD is bound to the 128GB. Any way around this? Can I use disk utility to expand it to a second partition or something?

#2 Everything is really, really fast. In Xbench I score really high, like 200+, until the disk test, where I score around 5-- with under 3 MB/sec. Any reason this is so slow?

hey mjaleo,

congrats on getting it up and running so quick. i am currently running an AMD hackintosh but am ready to upgrade so i am piggy-backing on your research to put together my shopping list.

i have a couple questions:

1) maybe i missed the resolution somewhere up in the thread, but which video card did you end up getting?

2) any reason you chose to install 10.4.8 instead of 10.4.9?

hi, congrats on your success i was just wondering, is your Harddisk SATA or IDE? I guess if your DVD was IDE it would have worked without a hitch, right?

Thanks for the congrats. It did go pretty smoothly!

I did end up with the EVGA e-GeForce 7600GT, 256MB, PCI-E. Everything worked right out of the box! I think there is a link to it in this thread.

I did 10.4.8 mostly because I heard mixed things about if 10.4.9 ran quite as well yet, and it was more readily available. I actually couldn't find 10.4.9 patched and everything on TPB or anywhere. .8 was easily found.


Thanks

My hard drive is SATA and my DVD-ROM was IDE, but with the way this board works, they run through the same channel, so it thought it was SATA. I'm unsure if that was the real problem or not, but using the USB IDE enclosure, it worked great!

i ordered pretty much the same bunch of stuff that you did except that i ordered the ASUS EN7300GT GeForce 7300GT 256MB and no HD and wireless since i am going to use my existing ones.

i recently upgraded to 10.4.9 on my AMD box (should update my sig) and it wasn't so bad. i followed this guide. if anything, performance since the upgrade has seemed a touch snappier and there have been no ill effects (reliability, etc) that i can see.

if you haven't solved your slow HD issues by the time my stuff comes, i will dive in with you if i see the same thing, though i will be installing my existing seagate sata disks so maybe i will not have that same issue... but i hope you figure it out first for both of our sakes!

Very cool. I appreciate your offer, if you're getting the same thing! Hopefully you're not and I fix it anyway

Annoying to say the least, but everything seems to work very quickly.

Posting from it! WG311T came in the mail.

The Wiki is wrong when it says this card works out of the box as Airport. Search for the wireless kext that borrows from 10.4.5. The directions in that thread say that no restart is required, but you must restart with this card after Terminal tells you it is installed.

Only thing left totally not working is audio. Starting on that now.

The hard drive issue is annoying. Restoring stuff from my USB 2.0 external hard drive goes about 3 MB/s.

ALC883 was solved from Skippy's driver. Easy install, restart, and it works!

It's called ALC883Audio.mpkg.zip.

Only down to the hard drive issues!

mjaleo, did you already see this thread?

and take a look at this too if you haven't already seen it.

sziggle, thanks for the links.

The plist edit is a little bit over my head. Posted for help in that thread. Thanks!

stuff arrived and i am starting my build today. i have to interleave with work so it may take a while before i have anything.

i have been following the various threads on the disk-related issues with the MB and i'm kinda wishing i had bought the DS4 board now .

anyway... once i get the thing booted and see what i am seeing, i will update.

mjaleo,

here's where i am at so far:



amazingly to me, that is the result of just pulling my system disk out of my old box -- an AMD64 box on a mobo that has an nvidia chipset -- and dropping it into this new box with the GA-965P-DS3 and the intel core2duo. i plugged the disk into the top, orange sata port.

i didn't think it would work, but it just fired up. like you, disks were very slow though.

then i ran that ds3-4pack.1.2.dmg installer (i only applied the audio patch, the ethernet patch, and the jmicron patch) and i put the disk (a seagate barracuda sata disk) on the purple sata port [EDIT: this was with the BIOS set under integrated peripherals with "Onboard SATA/IDE Device" enabled and Onboard SATA/IDE Ctrl Mode set to IDE]. and that is what you see in the picture. to me, that is still too slow on the disk, but it's a workable starting point for doing research and tweaking until we get it optimized.

other things that might be different... as you can see in the screenshot, i had already upgraded to 10.4.9 on my old box. i am also running a very recent universal kernel that i got from irc irc.osx86.hu in the #1049 channel. i will probably try monkeying with the intel-only kernel soon now that my AMD days are about over for a while.

so far everything i have looked at seems to be working good. but i haven't gone in depth yet. i am posting from the new box right here, so on the net with my wireless card. listening to music and it sounds good in stereo and that's all i've got so i won't need or know about the multi-channel. i just looked in the sound preference pane and there is no input device found, so that probably means there is more to do on the audio.

guess i better be updating my sig pretty soon.

@mjaleo
i tried to setup 1 pc to run mac next to my lovely G5. i follow your hardware setup pretty much (or close to) yours hardware setup. check this link http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=53593.

sorry that i'm a newbie for this hackintosh thing but i have several questions before run the installation. here is the questions:

got my dvd installation 10.4.7, when the installation start i should select costumize. i skip the language translation and there are option 10.4.7 patch also SSE2 patch option and SSE3 patch option.
questions:
- should i select the SSE3 patch option ? or just skip it ? or skip it both SSE option ?
- i read somewhere in the forum that IDE harddisk wont run with 965P-DS3 series. can I use IDE to USB converter ?
- my dvd-rom also have PATA interface, again should i use IDE to USB converter ?
- what about audio on-board ? is some people manage to work with it ?
- is Marvel LAN on-board working good as well ?

thanks before

juragan,

I'd recommend getting 10.4.8 instead of 10.4.7 if you can. Choose only SSE3. I'm not sure if you have the same revision of the 965P-DS3 as my boyfriend, but his LAN worked out of the box, audio worked with the ALC883 drivers, and IDE and SATA both work (if I remember correctly, his boot drive is a 120GB SATA, and he has a 500GB IDE).

@sarahbau
thanks for your input.. will try tonight

soooooooo.... i have this box more or less working now with the GA-965P-DS3 mobo. with my seagate SATA disks connected to the top two orange ports and the BIOS configured for those ports as AHCI and native, my disk-related xbench scores are in the mid-50's which still seems a little slow to me for new SATA stuff, but i can live with it and have been using it for the past 4 or 5 days.

what i can't live with however is something that i have actually never seen until now. it's this horrific transparent grey overlay that falls down over the screen like a waterfall of death and then pops up a message telling me that i need to reboot.

F--- that.

there seem to be a few very specific things that crash the box dependably, but it also happens at seemingly random times -- and at those times, always associated with some heavy disk activity. discounting possibilities like bad ram or a faulty mobo, that makes me think that the issue is related to the possibly flakey ICH8 SATA support that seems to give people fits with this mobo.

i have tried three different systems (jas 10.4.8 ppf1 clean install, jas 10.4.8 ppf1 upgraded to 10.4.9, uphuck 10.4.9 v 1.3) and a bunch of different kernels, and with and without the ds3-4pack.1.2 patch and i see the same crashes in all cases.

me, i'd rather switch than fight! [and i will be very suprised if there is anyone besides me old enough to remember that ad campaign around here... but apple should revamp and spin it and insert it into their current "switch" ad campaign]

so i ordered an asus P5B Deluxe mobo and i am going unbuild the box and rebuild on that mobo using Mistico86's package for that board and see if i can kiss the waterfall of death goodbye again. then i'll just return the gigabyte.

if no better, i'll take apart and rebuild again and return the asus since it is a more expensive board.

i guess i was very lucky when i first installed osx on my AMD box in nov/06. from then until now june/07, under heavy use, it never once crashed. i mean not once. i literally have never seen that waterfall of death thing until i got this new hardware. it was a total shock to me the first time i saw it. now i am too sickeningly familiar with it...