MODS CLOSE THIS THREAD. IT IS FULL OF MISCONSTRUED INFORMATION.



Some info about this board was posted in the Hardware Section, but I figured I'd give this topic more face time in this section.

Gigabyte has recently released the GA-E7AUM-DS2H. This mobo is powered by Nvidia's 9400 chipset. A desktop version of the 9400m chipset found in the new unibody revisions of the Macbook/Macbook Pro. This baby supports Hybrid Sli as well as 16GB of DDR2 ram.

The specs are very nice...

Chipset : Nvidia Geforce 9400
Audio: Realtek 889a (Fully supported by OSx86)
Ethernet: Realtek 8211CL (Not 100% on this, but should work)
Video: Geforce 9400 via DVI, HDMI, or VGA output.

Full spec list at Gigabytes site: Here


Assuming this new chipset is supported, you'll most likely have to sport a 10.5.6 update or Macbook/Macbook Pro restore disc minimum to install.

Thoughts? Discuss.

-Stell

very interesting, looks like it would make a great HTPC

price?

The price of GA-E7AUM-DS2H is about 14980 Yen ( japan currency).
See here for detail:
http://ascii.jp/elem/000/000/186/186755/

Hmm , expensive!

I think this board ought to capture a substantial amount of attention. Looks like a Mini-killer, even if the new Mini arrives with the 9400 chipset.

I agree with you. I think the new mini will come loaded with the 9400 chipset.

-Stell

My home theater is currently run by a 2 gHz Mini with 3 gb RAM. With Plex, it plays all but two of my Blu-ray rips just fine, even with DD or DTS audio. This new board with an e6600 ought to be just perfect for problem-free playback of Blu-ray video without generating too much heat. I suspect it will be a very quiet setup, particularly inside a Lian Li HTPC box.

agreed

Yes, it's a nice board I must say. I have been playing with it for about a week now and I'm really satisfied with it. I bought it only because of the new macbooks. I'm running vista on it right now but that will change as soon as I can get osx on it. These few days gave me a flashback to why I switched to mac all those years ago: the hunt for drivers and overall system layout. Unfortunately I'm a total hackintosh noob so I guess that I have to wait for someone else to do the dirty work. :/

I will be scouring through the bbs and at least give it a try, but don't count on me getting it working.

Where did you get your board and how much did it cost?

Very nice board. I wonder if anybody will ever make a board without stuff like a floppy disk interface, serial interfaces, and IDE connectors? It just seems logical that you some company would get the smart idea to dump all of the legacy stuff and produce a slick modern board that didn't pay homage to the past. Lets face it 99% of us do not need any of those interfaces. It is just a waste of PCB space especially on these smaller boards.

Looks like NewEgg has it in stock now at $135. Not a bad price if it can be made to work with ethernet, video and digital optical audio.

Hey all. So I have some good news....

-Nvidia 9400 works 100% QE/CI. Only tested via DVI so far.
-Ethernet works oob and has proper bonjour/afp sharing support
-firewire works oob
-ahci working oob, but with device id added to ahci kext info you get info in sys profiler (picture below)
-Vanilla kernel works (from macbook restore disc)
-Sleep works and even wakes using usb keyboard on S3.



More info to come soon. Of course you'll need a macbook/macbookpro unibody restore disc as of now.

Thanks to Signal64 for testing this stuff out for the curious crowd.

-Stell

Now that is insanely great news for the hackintosh community. Thanks for the info and keep us posted.

sweeet

Great job Signal64, i know how much hard work you put into making this possible.

sweeet! getting me one of these boards pretty soon

So afaik, the only quirk is that ethernet needs to be reset after system wake. I cannot test this as I do not currently have the board. I plan on getting it soon hopefully.

-Stell

i really have my eye on that one too
how did you install it ?

I agree that this sound awesome. I for one am glad that Apple decided to switch to nVidia. Can wait to see how this pans out for hackint0sh support!

Signal64,
Wow good job.
I just got the board and using an IDE drive can get into safe mode 10.5.5. vanilla 9.2 kernel (iDeneb). Finds Quad processor, 8 gb ram.
Can't wait for a 10.5.6 package to do the full EFI. For now what injectors would get this working?
It seems to be hanging at the mDNSResponder(or maybe after). Tried Nait and it seems to find the IGP but non safe mode still hangs, AppleNforceATA won't find the SATA drives, but will try turning on AHCI after I'm sure vista won't freak out.
Any ideas on MCP7A,Realtek 8211CL kexts, please?

Someone test HDMI and report back! I'm feeling another guide coming on

hmmm. Appletv has HDMI.

Sure enough turning on the AHCI and she found all the SATA drives. Tried different kernels but still only in safe mode though.

Raffi, you'll need 10.5.6 or Macbook/Pro 10.5.5 Restore disc. These will have the drivers for this chipset.

-Stell

That sounds great! Was looking at this board. The only drawback of this one compared to the other I was looking at was that the fsb was 1333/1066 instead of 1600/1333, but I'm sure it'll oc to 1600. Looks like this is the one!

Hi,

any news on this about what is working and what isn't?

stellarola did you just try boot132?

Stell,

I know 10.5.6 will be out soon, but I am reminded of this:

Moe: There it is! I bought it used from the Navy. This thing can flash-fry a buffalo in forty seconds. Homer: (whining) Forty seconds? But I want it now!

By chance did you test if the optical audio port can deliver Dolby Digital or DTS to a receiver? If this works, then this is a wonderful HTPC board.

Im a complete newbie when it comes to hackintosh but this is exactky what i have been waiting for. I have the board, I have the macbook dvd's now i just nee dto read up a little more on kexts and stuff like that. I really need HDMI over audi then ill be golden.

I have been reading reviews on these new boards, and they are pretty nice. But the general consensus is that they are not quite fully tuned. See below for in-depth info about it. This is the new Hackintosh I have been waiting for. While I am waiting for this board to develop for the Hackintosh community, I will continue to enjoy my current edition.

http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/15690/1

Hi guys, I'm a newbie in the hackintosh scene (this forum included)...

I've just bought, here in Italy, an Asus P5K pro mobo, and I was wondering how I could install my EN9400GT silent (http://www.digital.it/prodotti/S5801098/asus-en9400gt-silenthtp.html) in order to use Leopard under a "graphically decent" point of view.
I've downloaded such distros as iDeneb, Kaliway and Leo4all... which one do you suggest me to install?
I've read that both Kaliway and Leo4all are good for my mobo. But what about the graphic card?

Thanks,

Sam

Hoo.. I almost forgot that:
what if I install everything apart from the graphics card, and then letting the Nvidia official site finding the proper drivers (http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us) clicking on "Option 2: Automatically find drivers for my NVIDIA products."?

Might this work?

Thanks again,

Sam again.

Read the thread:

Those distributions will not work. It's not just the nVidia graphics, it's the motherboard chipset which is very different. Use boot-132 or similar.

Synaesthesia,

The 10.5.6 or Macbook/Pro 10.5.5 Restore disc won't work?

I can boot in Safe Mode, I thought when 10.5.6 comes out (Maybe today, how's your Portugues? The Apple Seed Note for Build 9G52 has no known issues) I could run an update and cross my fingers.
Boot -132 enables one to adjust kext's from, say, a USB drive. The makes it flexable to load OS X. JMicron does find the IDE drive and DVD.
I wish I knew more.......

maccompaq, that article you linked to is about the 9300 chipset, not 9400, and this board wasn't even mentioned. If you're commenting on the graphics capabilities of the IGP, of course it's not as good as a discrete card, but it should be fine enough for basic use and some gaming(assuming enough drivers work, which they seem too).

Just a quick comparison between the 9300/9400:

E7AUM-DS2H


P5N7A-VM


Both systems are running an E7300 with 2Gigs of ram (2x1Gig) at 667.
Nothing oclocked or fancy there.

The score dropped to 12,000'ish on the P5N7A-VM when a single stick of ram (single channel mode) was used. Dual channel is a necessity for both boards if you expect some performance out of the gpu.

I've been working to get a couple of minor issues resolved on both boards.

The only issue I have found on the Gigabyte is the onboard nForce Ethernet (using the new apple nvidia kexts) is not resuming from sleep correctly. It ends up with a self assigned IP address after resume and hardcoding the ip doesn't help. This is not an issue on the P5N7A-VM but it has couple of other issues of it's own to sort out.

I used a ALU MacBook 13" disk image and DiaboliK used the ALU MacBook restore disc method.
As the new updates to OS X on the ALU MackBooks is pretty extensive (goes beyond just a few kexts and into the application area as well) it was the way to go for these boards.

The issues aren't anything that will prevent you from using these boards, but I'm after a "vanilla" as possible and Perfect (without an "except for" ) working install.

I'm doing a write up on this install and if you have items you'd like me to test, let me know.

Do you have a receiver with an optical audio input to check the board for AC3 passthrough?

Ok.. I'll check AC3 passthrough and HDMI as well.

So when do you guys think we can install OSX on this board? I want to buy this board for Christmas but dont want Windows.

There is no guarantee that 10.5.6 will include all the new stuff in the alu MB restore disc, they only include stuff that is changed/updated since, so it is very doubtful 10.5.6 will contain everything.

True, the gigabyte 9400 is probably interesting, but don't forget that the 9300 boards (Asus P5n7A-VM, MSI P7NGM and ECS GeForce 9300T) should be eqaully interesting. The only difference afaik is the clock on the gpu (580Mhz on the 9400, 450 on the 9300) _and_ the price. The asus is €115,- and the Gigabyte €149,- in the Netherlands.

The main general benefit of the board appears to be lower CPU utilisation with multimedia applications. For us, the main benefit is that it is Apple's latest chipset. I'm curious to see where Apple is taking the MacBook Pro, with the dual GPU, in 10.6. It may be a reason to combine the nvidia 9x00 boards with a 9x00 (or later?) nvidia card. I assume that any hybrid SLI-ing that may tentatively take place, would require all-nvidia GPUs. Too bad, because as it stands now, I would prefer an ATI 3870; still plenty fast for gaming, quieter, faster in quartz, dirt cheap (if you don't take the Mac & PC version). I'd like to see X2 support, but that's another story.

FSB is on par with current Apple offerings, but RAM is only DDR2 on the 9x00 boards, while Apple offers DDR3 on the MB and MBP. The 9x00 boards could support a 1600Mhz FSB and DDR3 ram, but apparently, we'll have to wait a while for that.

All in all, I'd say that it's too early to say anything except just "interesting"

I'd say the most interesting bit of the whole thing is finally a no bullshit solution to onboard video. That's why I'm psyched for the 9300/9400 chipset.

-Stell

Well the most interesting stuff will happen if somebody gets this board working :-) so far it's seems most owners are the ones (at least me) who just can manage to get a distro download and try it, just tried the latest Iatkos 5i but with no success :-( Hope some MAC sawy person will manage to get their hands on a board and maybe make a step by step guide.. my only hope I think..

Thanks much!

It works retail.

-Stell

So a step by step for someone like me at this point in time would be:
1. get a retail DVD no later than 10.5.6 or maybe 10.5.5 for macbook or macbook pro ?
2. install
3. start testing and evaluate it

Sounds to good to be true, isn't there any special boot steps to consider?

Pvutop,

You'll need something before your step 1 such as a BOOT-132 CD

I really want to do a build based off this mobo, but I can't seem to find the Leopard 9F2114 build used in the unibodies available anywhere.

Did anayone try to boot with boot-132 ?
Do we need some special kexts??

thx for any reply

john

Exactly!