Hi all,
I'm looking into building a hackintosh system as I'm a student without a lot of money at the moment. I've had my MacBook for a while but don't really have the money to buy a decent Apple desktop- I fall into the same boat as a lot of you guys, in that I want a headless, upgradeable iMac.

Anyway, I've been researching and selected some hardware. I'd rather deal with the minimal hassle as low-level tweaking always gets me nervous. So I'd like to pick out hardware that the hackintosh community will have drivers readily available for.

I like the Asus P5W, but it's been pointed out to me that it might not support newer CPUs (Penryn?). Is it still the best option?

I'm having a hard time figuring out what to get on the GPU front. I want decent gaming capability but don't care to spend a ton of money. I don't care if I can't completely max all settings. I see Geforce 8800GT's in the $120-$150 range, so I was thinking about that. Will it work?

I'll be dual booting Windows and OS X. I'd rather have the OS X drive be GUID, but many guides have you installing Windows first and using it to partition, which I would expect would give you an MBR, correct? It seems to me the simplest way to handle this is to simply use two drives, so I'm looking at buying a 500 GB drive and a second, cheap 160 GB drive for Windows.

And a 500W PSU.

Take a look and tell me what you guys think:
http://secure.newegg.com/NewVersion/wishli...Number=11307887


Any help appreciated! I was planning to install Kalyway 10.5.2. Will I have to worry every time I run Software Update?

Thanks for any help! Sorry for any noobishness.

Don't run software update until you've checked the forum and/or the wiki to see how to update.

I'm a first-timer too, what I did was consult the wiki hardware component compatability list, and made a shortlist of primary components I was considering based on ease of installation and feature sets. Then I compared each of those products based on price, customer reviews, and professional reviews. Then I searched the boards to see who had used what. Unfortunatley, I didn't find much on my particular board, and the boards I found the most out about were either a little more than I wanted to spend, had an inadequate feature set for me, or problems I didn't really feel like dealing with.

So check the wiki compatability list for your gear, I seem to recall most of it there, and post your opinions/questions about your findings. Off the top of my head, most of your gear is compatable, but check the Wiki.

Hey, I am pretty much in the same situation, own a little MacBook too but can't afford a Mac Pro. The Asus P5W DH Deluxe does in fact not support 45nm CPUs. I was about to go for the Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4, but apparently the audio needs some patching. The P5W works completely OOB right? I have an E6850 which does 3,6GHz and a Club3D 8800GT plus all the other components needed to start testing, may be should buy the P5W too ..

Alrighty, I compared everything in there, looks good Is the Kalyway DVD a good way to do this, or should I use Leo4all? What's the difference?

Yeah, exact same line of thought here. I'm not sure if I'm comfortable with having to worry about patching things, especially when future updates are taken into account- I'd rather something that works OOB, like the P5W.

I figure a quad core 64-bit CPU'll last me a long time and I can upgrade the RAM and GPU as I go.

An E6850 is dang nice. It's 65 nm so you don't need to worry about 45 nm support unless you're looking at upgrading down the road...but I don't think the performance difference is that big, is it?

My E8400 does up to 4,3GHz, my E6850 (which I was about to sell) only 3,6 .. so OC-wise there is a performance difference. But apart from that, 45nm and 65nm at same speed/clocks is are almost identical.

The Q6600 is the perfect choice and it got quite affordable, too.

Luckily, I just found a used P5W for 60€ (95$), so I guess I am almost ready for my first attempt to build a Hackintosh from scratch.
Club3D 8800GT should do the job.
If everything goes well, I will upgrade to Q6600.




Probably integrated drivers/features but actually, I have no idea

Where do you look to find used motherboards? Seems like it would be a pretty limited market as far as modern hardware goes (not a lot of people are parting out nearly brand new systems).

Is Q6600 really an upgrade from the e6850? As far as I can tell performance will be pretty similar, with the 6850 actually doing better in single-threaded apps (most notably games) while the Q6600 doing better in multi-threaded apps (like Photoshop). The benchmarks I've seen show that the e6850 actually does a little better in most apps except the high end multi-threaded apps like rendering apps- but those benchmarks were on Windows, which historically has very poor handling of multiple processors, and Mac apps tend to be more multiprocessor-aware since Apple has made dual processors a key part of their lineup for decades while only Windows servers ever had them.

Wow, that was a mouthful. The point being that while the Q6600 will probably be a little better in the long run as multithreaded apps become the standard, the upgrade seems a bitsmall to warrant ~$200.

Otherwise, sounds like we're looking to build the same machine. P5W & Geforce 8800GT & Q6600. Keep me updated on how your build goes!

I bought it on a German hardware forum which has a huge marketplace that unlike eBay and stuff does not charge any fees, so I got very lucky. The board will arrive next week but I probably won't have time to put everything together until the weekend after.


I'm considering an upgrade to Q6600 because I want to use my Hackintosh (assuming it will work) for a lot of audio editing and processing (Logic Studio, Pro-Tools) since I am studying audio engineering and want to be able to do music production at home, when studios are all taken. Can't have enough CPU power for audio FX.

So, I guess: to be continued...

My parts came

And did you succeed? I'm just waiting for my 1000GB HDD to arrive, then I will try my luck.