Hi there,

I'm looking to buy myself a Hackintosh at some point in the future - love the idea of a Mac for a PC's price. I've been looking through this forum and the HCL, trying to find equivalent gear that's listed as fully working (either OOTB or with patches or kexts) that's also available from UK-based websites, specifically scan.co.uk.

As you might have guessed, this is pretty slow going with the design of the wiki (perhaps an improvement at some point in the future would be a way of sorting through components by their working status, age, OSX versions, etc etc), though the information in it is brilliant. I was wondering if anybody with a bit more experience with OSX86 would feel like taking a quick trip to scan.co.uk and picking out some of the better OSX86-able components. I'm not a fanboy of any particular brand - nVidia or ATi, Intel or AMD. The only requisites I have are:

Works with 10.5.8 or 10.4.11 (latest version of either Tiger or Leopard, so I don't have to worry about any updates).
Must be at least moderately speedy - i'd like to record and edit audio on it (through my own interface, so onboard sound isn't a major issue unless CoreAudio requires it), so something like 4GB of DDR2 RAM with a nice speedy dual or quad core processor would be nice.
Needs to have at least one firewire port.
Powerful 3D graphics aren't needed - as long as it can render 2D stuff well, i'll be fine, I don't plan on gaming on it - it'll be pure audio.
It can also be as ugly as it needs to be - I don't feel the need to encase it in a G5 tower lookalike

As usual, cost is an issue (at least until i'm rich and famous...) - I don't really have a set figure in mind, 'as cheap as possible' is probably a good phrase to go by, and my budget probably won't stretch to much over around £400 - though I can scavenge stuff like optical or storage drives, cases, and PSUs from other machines if need be.

I'd love to hear any of your input, even if it's just a page of links to read up on before buying gear.

Thanks in advance,




Loki.

The two most important parts to a successful Hackintosh is the motherboard and video card. Everything else is (for the most part) of no importance as far a compatibility goes.

One of the best, inexpensive motherboards currently in use with the community is the Gigabyte GA-G31M-ES2L.
And you preferred vendor stocks it:
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Gigabyte-GA...TA-II-Micro-ATX

Its a perfect candidate for either Leopard or Snow Leopard. I have a pair of them and they work fabulous.


The only criteria that it doesn't meet is no built in firewire. You should be able to pick up an inexpensive one for little money.


Also, the 1.x revision of this motherboard has a Realtek chipset NIC and easily supported in OS X with minor trouble. The 2.x revision has a Atheros chipset that has no none drivers for OS X.

Regardless of which board you get, I would probably suggest purchasing a pci network card. Anything using a Realtek 8169SC chipset should work perfectly with full Bonjour support out of the box with no extra drivers to install or anything. Plug and Play.

I use Trendnet cards in both mine. Model TEG-PCITXR. Works great.
Also Edimax EN-9230TX-32 looks to be based off the same Realtek chipset.

Probably lots of other based off the same 8169SC chipset.


Next up is video card. Since you are mostly concerned with audio and not 3d graphics performance, I would recommend either an nVidia 9400GT or 9500GT. Cheap, good HD video acceleration, OpenCL compliant and still decent 3d.

Perhaps this 9500GT would work for you:
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/512MB-Palit...-D-Sub-DL-DVI-I

Looking at the picture, it appears to be fanless, so that would help lower the noise coming from your PC. Those tiny fans on video cards are relentless in their noise levels.


Now that those 2 major components are out of the way, you are pretty much free to choose the other components depending on your budget.

Since crunching audio is of importance, I would probably swing for a quad core cpu.

Maybe the Q8300:
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Intel-Core-...re-Ratio-Retail

or the Q9400:
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Intel-Core-...Cache-8x-Retail


For the price difference, the Q8300 might be the better deal. The Q9400 gives you a slighter faster clock speed, 2 megs extra cache memory and VT (virtualization technology).


Course would want 4 gigs ram, so pick up a quality set of 1066:
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/4GB-%282x2G...AS-5-6-6-18-EPP


Hard drive, case and dvdrw are up to you. But with your budget you should be able to easily pick up those items.

Hi broken, thanks for your reply.

It turns out, a friend of mine is selling a machine which might be Hackintoshable - it's based around an Asus P5NE32-SLI Plus motherboard, with an nVidia GeForce 7600 GT (Fatality edition, which is fanless), a couple of SATA hard drives and an Emprex dual layer 16x DVD burner (which is IDE).

I'm thinking of buying this (which would work out cheaper than a new system, obviously), because it still has a fair bit of poke. Once I have it, i'm thinking of using the Kalyway 10.5.2 DVD and picking the relevant bits out of the instructions listed here: http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=87901, followed by installing the 7600GT with instructions here - http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=69855

Does this sound about right? Are there any pitfalls I should be watching out for?

Umm, correct me if I'm wrong but I believe the 7 Series just got epic failed in the lastest Snow Leopard. Not too sure though...