Buying advice -- willing to try native EFI

[donkey_lz]

Hello,

 

I have a few spare weeks ahead of me, and since I have recently got a Powerbook which does its job, I'm willing to sell my Mac Mini and, with some extra cash, invest in a new system. Unfortunately, there's nothing in Apple's line that suits my needs (I need something like the iMac, but without the built-in screen -- I already have two 22" monitors).

 

As I understand, EFI-enabled motherboards are available (see below), and I'm willing to try my hands at testing OS x86 on one of these. I'm not scared of having to wrestle with OS X in order to get it to play nice; I'm not familiar with EFI and OS X-related system programming per se, but I have some years of programming and system administration behind me, so it will be close to my idea of a fun weekend. I also had my share of fooling around with OS X86 on my desktop, but that was straight after the first release (and the part that made it most fun was installing it without a DVD drive ). Therefore, I'm basically familiar with OSx86 hacks, but my familiarity is a bit... out of date. Otoh, i've been using Macs since the days of m68k processors, so I know what to expect.

 

Now for my questions:

 

1. As far as I understand, we're yet to see a motherboard aimed at desktop users that supports EFI. However, as far as I remember, HP and Intel have some servers which do include motherboards with EFI support that works (in fact, I'm quite sure HP does, since OpenVMS recently got EFI support). Investing in such a beast is actually close to my needs (most of my work is related to computational science).

 

So: a) do some of these boards support EFI? and are there any desktop-targetted, EFI-enabled mainboards to come in the near future? I read a few things about MSI willing to include it in its recent neo3 line, but either I've read the specs while I was drunk, or I can't see any mention of EFI support.

 

2. As far as I know, EFI is an open standard. Are there any differences between Apple's implementation and, say, Intel's or HP's?  If so, are they critical to running/booting OS X? Can you point me to some relevant documentation regarding this? I've skimmed through Apple's docs on ADC, but I haven't quite been able to find out if Apple is including anything extra in its EFI implementation.

 

Thanks in advance. I hope I haven't been redundant -- I've searched the forums and ran some Google searches, but the information is somewhat scattered. If I found it, but I missed it, I sincerely apologize.

[sWORDs]

PC EFI isn't Apple EFI. Just get a compatible bios bord (like Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS3 or DS3P if you need firewire) and use a EFI emulating bootloader.