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Building from scratch


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I'm looking for a little advice as I try to build a new hackintosh. I am thinking about selling my macbook pro and spending the money for a hackintosh and a netbook, since I only use the mbp's real power when it is docked at home, never on the go. My main problem is I have built computers before, but never for osx. I have, however, installed osx86 on my old dell m1210, so I'm familiar with the process.

 

My first question is where should I start as far as picking the parts. I have been looking at people's sigs for ideas of completed systems, but I need a little more help. I am trying to get the most power for about $700, more if that's unrealistic. I'm not as worried about the graphics card as I am the processing power, but I do need to drive 2 monitors. I also want as close to a 100% working system as I can.

 

Second, is it possible to install vmware fusion on the osx86 to run windows xp? This seems like an easy way to dual boot if it is possible.

 

If anyone has any ideas of what parts I should look into, or where I can see some successful setups other than in people's sigs, I would appreciate it. I have some time to build it so I can do some research, but I need some help getting started. Thanks a lot.

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My Hackcintosh parts costed me $580.00 plus tax here in Canada. Should be cheaper in the US. Everything working ok as in my signature.

 

Bought MB,Ram,CPU,,500g SATA hardrive,Wireless card. I used my old 500W PS case,Video card,kd,mouse and monitor. Your mileage may vary.

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"selling my macbook pro and spending the money for a hackintosh"

 

THE HORROR !!!! :)

 

Ouch dood keep the Mac :D Hackitosh isn't that all good

 

I know, but I was going to sell the mbp and get an iMac, so I figured I could get a lot more for my money with the hackintosh. The way i see it now, I can probably get a much faster mac desktop, a little laptop, and some cash for my mbp.

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Here is my reccomendation:

 

Case

Antec Sonata III 500 Black 0.8mm cold rolled steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case 500W Power Supply - Retail

Cheap, not ugly as far as PC cases. Includes a quality power supply

 

HDD

Western Digital Caviar GP WD7500AACS 750GB 5400 to 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM

750GB is the sweet spot right now for price to size, WD is my favorite brand, and this drive will save a little power

 

Video

GIGABYTE GV-RX387512HP Radeon HD 3870 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16

The Radeon HD 3870 is arguably the best card on the market for a Mac right now. This one is OC'ed a little and is a good price.

 

RAM

CORSAIR 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model TWIN2X4096-6400C5

4GB of whatever is fine. I would stick with DDR2 if you are interested in a good price to performance ratio. DDR3 will up the price of the RAM and MoBo

 

Motherboard

GIGABYTE GA-EP45-DS3R LGA 775 Intel P45 ATX Intel Motherboard - Retail

Cheap, fully supported on OS X AFAIK, has FireWire and lots of expandability. I have had great luck Gigabyte in the past.

 

CPU

This is a little more complicated. I would get one of these:

E7300 - Dirt cheap. Get this if you want to overclock to save some coin. Since it is the highest end Wolfdale with a 3MB cache (i.e. half of the 6MB cache is disabled), it is likely you will get a core capable of much higher speeds that just happened to have some flakey cache.

E8400 - Good balance between price and performance

E8500 - Most expensive dual core before the price to performance ratio goes down the pot, you can decide for yourself if 166MHz is worth the $20 premium over the E8400

Q9400 - Best bang for the buck in a quad core, only $10 more than the 166MHz slower Q9300

 

On newegg this comes to 728.95 after rebate (with my personal choice of processor, the Q9400). You might want to get a sata DVD burner and a KB and mouse too.

 

If you want a netbook too, I'd look at the Dell Inspiron mini 9. After a lot of shopping I just bought one, I haven't recieved it yet though. Make sure to keep the stickers from your MBP to hide the Dell logo.

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I know, but I was going to sell the mbp and get an iMac, so I figured I could get a lot more for my money with the hackintosh. The way i see it now, I can probably get a much faster mac desktop, a little laptop, and some cash for my mbp.

Don't worry about the conformists. For some, the idea of deviateing from the Lord High Jobs' commandments is just too much to contemplate.

 

You definitely will get a lot more bang-for-buck and performance out of a well-spec'ed, fully-supported Hackintosh, vs. an iMac. Just don't try and reinvent the wheel- use a fully supported setup (check the Wiki and a ga-zillion threads around here) and follow a good guide.

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id consider the q6600 (can be had for $175)

8gb of ram instead of 4 (if the mb you buy supports it)

 

and the acer aspire one as the netbook ( kinda partial as i have one, but its a sweet little machine that too minimal effort to install{change the wifi card and install kexts after boot})

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