I'm on the assignment (from a friend) to build a new hackintosh. He will use it mainly to do video editing with FinalCut, after I spoke him all sort of marvels and wonderful things of this project, and he actually used my own hacky for a couple of hours, just to make sure "PC architecture" cause no "conflicts" with their existent FCP projects (yes, he is "that" kind of Mac user) .

Anyway, after a loooong shopping day, and having in our hands memory (4 DDR2 667mhz Corsair modules), CPU (Core 2 Duo E6600), video card (XFX 7600 GT), power supply (Cooler Master something, 600 watts), case (generic), hard drive (Seagate Barracuda 250 GB SATA II), DVD writer (LiteOn 18x) and a cheap Firewire card, we found very few compatible and/or affordable motherboards.

I was after a MSI 975x Platinum Power Edition, but all the stores we went to ran out of stock. However we found a (relatively) cheap Intel Bad Axe 1, and some Gigabyte 965's. I've read lots of posts about non-working IDEs on the 965 cards, and my friend have bunchs of these disks, all flavors and sizes, so I want to stay away from it as much as possible. On the other hand, I've read contradictory information about the BX1, some people says audio won't work ever, but the Wiki says it does. I want to keep things as easier as possible since my fellow is not very computer-savvy (well, you can tell that from the comments above) so, when he eventually need to do a system reinstall he can handle it following my instructions.

Basically, the questions are:

1. Can I expect everything on the board to work (SATA, IDE, USB, Audio, and LAN) doing the usual patching, etc?
2. Still a good choice from the hardware point of view? (I know BX2 is a lot better, but it costs more than 40% extra, we're not in the USA). As far I can tell, the main difference is that BX2 supports QuadCore processors and have one onboard Fireweire port. These things are not really important to us.

I really appreciate your answers and help. You can imaginate how much frustated we are right now with this pile of brand new hardware that we can't use. Thanks!

Save yourself the trouble and get the Bad Axe 2... especially if you plan to do any overclocking on that system (which with a Core 2, you better not let all that potential speed go to waste). Everything works out of the box minus sound, which is easily fixed with AppleHDA patcher.

Thanks for your reply, however the BX2 is out of our reach. Just to give you an idea, the MSI board costs about 220 USD, the BX1 something like 250 and the BX about 460 USD. I know in the USA you can get it for about 200, so it may sound extrange... but that's the way it is. So, any comment about the BX1 board?

tigerdirect.ca $199.97 Canadian
http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/Sea...mp;Sku=I69-2145

even if you don't like them, you can use that as a bargaining chip.

JuVi

Jesus... I paid 140 for my BX2 at Microcenter ... that's extortion!

all the gigabyte 965 boards are functional with both sata/ide in JAS 10.4.8+

if im right then you want to try and buy it at a local store?? the BX1 i believe works fully but mabe not sound.
BX2 out of the box

i have some other suggestions so do u want full ATX or micro ATX??

Full ATX is a must I think, since I haven't seen any Micro ATX with four memory slots. And the reason behind the stratospheric prices is mostly because I'm in Latinamerica, we have to deal with lots of taxes, intermediaries and such.