Fry's special today is the E8500 with ECS G31T-M, GMA 3100 video (for $210). The general info on the chip looks good and I'm pretty tempted. From this page it appears it works well as a hackintosh:

http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/view/96752

Any reason not to buy this thing? I'm pretty tempted.

Strangest thing - I went down to Fry's, asked if they had any in stock, and the guy told me every one of these boards they'd sold had been returned. He said they'd had more than 50 returns. I don't know if I believe him, but it was enough to put me off buying it.

Doesn't surprise me. That board always seemed like a pile of crap. I've used one for a client PC build and it was nothing to write home about.

For Hackintosh it only seems to work by disabling all but 1 core, or by using a hacked BIOS. There's too many great board choices for Hack that DO work without such futzing, to bother with it, IMHO.

I'd bet any amount that the returns were 100% due to the fact that Frys is selling a rev 1.0 version of the board with the E8500 without anyone bothering to notice that the boards shipped with the original BIOS aren't compatible OOB with the E8500! (It's the old catch-22 where these boards needed to be flashed using a 65nm processor before they have Wolfdale support.) Typical of Frys not to check on such things. So of course, everyone who bought the bundle and tried to set it up found that it doesn't work- even though I'd bet they work fine with an actual compatible processor, or with the E8500 after a flash using a 65nm processor.

The good news is, they'll probably unbundle the things from the E8500 and practically give them away. I've bought a bunch of of mobos from Frys for $9.99 after they've pulled similar boners.

It's a decent board for a little file server or HTPC or something, but IMO not a good Hackintosh candidate at all, unless you're a person that likes futzing endlessly trying to make sub-par hardware run OSX.

Futzing around is the exact opposite of what I want to do - my goal is to have a decently performing system (the benchmarks on the E8500 seem to put it in the right ballpark) without spending much and with the minimal amount of futzing towards getting OS X going. I spend enough time messing around with the various other rigs, I'd like to get the hackintosh steady and hand it over to the wife.

Any recommendations for the hackintosh sweet spot motherboard/cpu/graphics card? I'd like to stay within $250 or less.

I dunno about $250 or less. The E8500 by itself will run you close to $190.

Otherwise, you could go for a cheaper LGA775 processor.

As for not futzing, and a stable, reliable system, I'd recommend Gigabyte P45 boards, IE: the GA-EP45-UD3(x) series

Otherwise, look at the HCL wiki.. Personally, I'd stick with compatible Gigabyte boards- of the Hacks I've built, all the Gigabyte boards I've used have made for rock-stable systems.

Graphics card: you can easily get away with a 7300GT, IE: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16814500025