The Finale of Seem Posted February 20, 2009 Share Posted February 20, 2009 Okay, so I've been toying with the idea of building a Hackintosh. I'm an Apple tech by trade, so I'm confident enough in my abilities to do it, but I haven't had much reason until now. I'm on a 24" iMac, but the wife is on an older AMD box I threw together a while back and the BSODs are getting more and more frequent. It's time for an upgrade. I figure the worst that'll happen is that I wont be able to get a Hackie working and she can just keep running Windows. In any case, I'm looking for hardware recommendations: Motherboard - I'm looking for an Intel board (of course) that's reasonably fast and has decent overclocking in the BIOS, 16x PCI-e a must. I've been told the Gigabyte P45 boards are pretty good for Hackintoshes and I suppose they're a good example of the price/performance I'm looking for. I'm also looking for relative simplicity of installation and maintenance, something where all onboard options can be made to work without too much hacking and there are few or no issues afterward, ie sleep issues. Video card - Probably not a big deal. I'm eyeballing something in the 8800/38x0 range, probably a Radeon 3850/3870 as Nvidia drivers in Leopard have basically been {censored}. I doubt there will be many problems from what I've read, but maybe there are certain brands/models I should avoid. And a few questions/clarifications: -I'm also reading that most (if not all) motherboards with hardware RAID capability cannot use said capability on Hackies. There may only be a few PCI cards with boot capability, but perhaps I haven't read all the info. -I know that 9800Gx2 cards and 3870x2 cards can be made to work with certain conditions. They come up as two cards in OS X, so I'm guessing that they don't give the full performance of both cores, but it would be nice to hear something definitive on that front. -I might want to add a Firewire 800 card. I assume it's a safe bet that if it has Mac and Windows drivers, it will likely work, but again, I'd want to know for sure. Perhaps PCI vs PCIe 1x is an issue. If the wife's Hackie works out well, I might just build my own with the sale of my iMac as the budget. I could build a pretty wicked computer with that kind of dough. Thanks in advance for the advice! Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/153994-hardware-recommendations-for-my-first-hackie/ Share on other sites More sharing options...
supermx3 Posted February 20, 2009 Share Posted February 20, 2009 you wont get any performance bonus for the x2 cards, it will see them as 2 seperate cards because that what they are, two cards on one pcb Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/153994-hardware-recommendations-for-my-first-hackie/#findComment-1086162 Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Finale of Seem Posted February 20, 2009 Author Share Posted February 20, 2009 That's what I suspected, but I figured I should get a definite confirmation on it. Looks like the fastest card for a Hackie is a 9800GTX+ until the Mac Pros come out with the GTX 2xx line in 'em. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/153994-hardware-recommendations-for-my-first-hackie/#findComment-1086408 Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bit Shoveler Posted February 20, 2009 Share Posted February 20, 2009 Yep, I bought the Gigabyte EP45-DS3R and it's been good for me. It's hard for me to sort out the myriad mobos that Gigabyte makes. I got a Core 2 Quad Q6600 but if I had to do it again I'd go with a Q9400 instead. Smaller cache than the Q6600 but outruns it on benchmarks, and lower power demand as well. Micro Center has them for $180. Something like the E8400 would also be a good choice if you don't need quad core horsepower. Someone here managed to get hardware RAID for the boot drive working on an ICH10R based board. Search around for it. I went with a GeForce 9600 GT myself. Powerful enough for my needs, supported natively in 10.5.6 (with an EFI string), and relatively low power as PCIe graphics cards go. Oh yeah, and reasonably priced. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/153994-hardware-recommendations-for-my-first-hackie/#findComment-1086415 Share on other sites More sharing options...
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