Building New Hackintosh

[DrSupachicken]

Hi Guys,

 

I have my first hackintosh up and running nicely now, there is just a few minor issues that I need to iron out but considering it is running 10.4.10 I'm quite happy.

 

I am planning to use the hackintosh I have already built for standard everyday tasks and build a new one purely dedicated to audio and video editing.

 

I want to find out what will be the best rig for me to build which has everything working and is very overclockable, looking for a pure power machine.

 

This is what I have in mind.

 

Gigabyte P35-DS3 (From what I have read everything works out of the box bar sound, but you can easily patch for full Intel HDA. I'm also told this is a very good board for overclocking)!

 

Intel Core 2 Duo E6420 or E6600 (I was told the E6420 can get up around 4GHz is this true? And will it be able to run at 1333MHz FSB when over clocked? Or am I better off with the E6600?

 

nVida 7900GT 256 PCI-E

 

About 4GB RAM of the fastest RAM I can get.

 

What do you guys think? Would this system realisticly get anywhere near 4GHz?

 

Cheers.

[dark4181]

well, the ds3 is a good match, to be sure. but if you want something a bit more feature rich, you might also consider the gigabyte 965p-dq6. it's a bit more expensive, but it has more of everything, in addition to improved north/southbridge and mosfet cooling

 

on the other hand, if you care to wait about a month, there will probably be p35/ich9® support on 10.4.9/10 by then.. the abit ip35 pro is already running albeit without sata speeds and only partial sound. but considering that chipset was just released, i figure it'll be fully supported in 2 months at most

[sarahbau]

If it can get to 4GHz, it's very very rare. I wouldn't expect to get that much out of it. The E6420 has an 8x multiplier, which means you'd have to have the FSB at 500MHz, and RAM at at least 1GHz (DDR2 800 probably won't get that high, so you might want to get DDR2 1066 if you want to try for 4GHz), unless there's a board out there that lets you run the RAM at less than 2x the FSB (that's the lowest I've seen). There's also the chance that things tied to the PCI bus might stop working. For example, on my motherboard, the PCI bus runs at 1/6 the FSB, which is 200MHz by default. If I clock it over 240MHz, the SATA stops working. On other boards, the network controller starts failing. Something with a higher multiplier or a lower bus speed should have a better chance of hitting 4GHz. The E6700 has a 10x multiplier, so it can do 4GHz with only a 400MHz bus, which is much more likely. But the CPU has to be able to handle that speed as well of course.