Success: P5K-VM / Q6600 / Retail

[Rootus]

Not a surprise necessarily, since I chose the parts I did after doing research in these forums and the P5K-VM seemed fairly well supported. This setup replaces an existing Opteron 165 Hackintosh, which although plenty fast was proving troublesome to upgrade past 10.5.2. I wanted something that would be near retail so it would be less hassle to keep up to date.

 

Here is my setup:

 

- Asus P5K-VM motherboard

- Intel Q6600 Core 2 Quad 2.4 GHz CPU

- 4 GB RAM (2x2GB PC5300 Kingston)

- LiteOn iHAS120 DVD/CD burner

- eVGA GeForce 7200 SE 256MB PCI-E graphics card

- 2x Western Digital WD2500 SATA 250GB hard drives

- Seagate IDE 320GB in external USB enclosure (for Time Machine)

- Antec Sonata III case

- Samsung 225BW monitor

 

Mostly new hardware, but the hard drives were carried over from my last Hackintosh which is why they're so tiny .

 

I installed Kalyway 10.5.2 on one of the SATA drives and then from there I formatted the other drive with GUID, installed Chameleon, then a retail copy of Leopard 10.5.1. I immediately patched it to 10.5.4 with the combo update directly from Apple, then ran the post-patch script and rebooted.

 

My first issue was a welcome loop. After saying "Don't migrate anything" and hitting next, it would contemplate life for a minute and then start the Leopard intro video again. To work around this I rebooted back into Kaly and touched /var/db/.AppleSetupDone, then rebooted with the Kaly install DVD and used password reset to set the password.

 

The next issue I had was QE/CI support, or rather the lack thereof. After a bit of poking around on here, I removed NVinject and used Natit.kext, and now it works perfectly. I did not see any real performance issues with no QE/CI support, but VLC would not play any videos until I fixed this so it was a critical issue for me. System Profiler shows the card as a 7300 SE, but I don't feel the need to correct that.

 

The next issue was my iPhone -- it would not sync. Exactly once iTunes saw it and sync'd, every other time I tried it just ignored me. The iPhone would show up in System Profiler, but other than that nothing. After some more poking around on here and perusing the system log, I determined that the likely cause was a kernel version mismatch with the USB kext. To remedy that I ditched the 9.2.0 ToH kernel that post-patch.sh put in place and replaced it with a vanilla 9.4.0 kernel from a real Mac Mini I have which is fully patched to 10.5.4.

 

The last issue, and one for which I have not yet located a solution, is that the DVD burner is not recognized as a burner. Neither in System Profiler, nor in actual practice have I been able to get it to do anything more than read CD's & DVD's. I can work around this for a time as I have a MacBook with a functioning DVD burner, but I bought a new SATA DVD burner for this computer specifically because the last Hackintosh (a dual core Opteron box) didn't recognize its burner either, and so I really want to get it working.

 

FWIW, I'm not sure about how well the audio is really supported. System Profiler shows no built-in audio, but in preferences the line in, out, speaker, headphone, and S/PDIF devices are all shown, and at least stereo seams to work perfectly (I don't have a way to test the extended abilities of the Realtek 883 on this motherboard).