NEW INSTALL: Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS3L

[hondafanboy]

Hardware (all new parts):

CASE/Power supply (500, or 550w I forget) Antec

Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS3L Motherboard

Intel 2.8 quad processor

4 Gigs of DDR 800 “I think” RAM ( I know the price was 69 dollars)

Evga Nivida 9800 GTX “superclock” 512 megs video card

LG DVD burner SATA

2 500 Gig WD hard drives SATA

Sony 4 in 1 (or whatever it’s called) internal memory card reader

Some name brand Bluetooth adapter (They are making those things smaller and smaller these days)

Apple wired key board

Samsung LED monitor

My story:

All parts bought from my local frys. I don’t have luxury of stepping into a nice “mom and pop” style computer store since I moved to North Texas, and I’m not one for buying computer parts online.

 

After I finished putting together all the hardware, I tried to 132-boot method with the leopard disc that came with my macbook pro (I have two macbook pro’s one I got brand new in early 08, the other I got brand new in 09) one has a 10.5.2 disc the other 10.5.5, I also tried Leopard ISO I downloaded back in Oct of 07, all three tries failed “mac gray screen of death” (or at least that’s what I call it).

Then I download and burned the IPC 10.5.6 final from pcwiz.

I was able to format one of my 500 gig drives and install leopard on it, but when it rebooted I would see a message saying it was still waiting on the “root device.”

I later found I needed to enable AHCI mode, and SATA Port 0-3 in the bios, and change the order of how I plugged in my drives on the motherboard.

I changed it to:

HD 1 SATA port 0, HD 2 SATA port 1, LG burner SATA port 2.

After that point I was able to boot up into Leopard just fine.

Then I installed the UInstaller_1.2 from pcwiz

Kext helper b7

I run the Uinstaller, and downloaded the plug in for my motherboard type

Then I selected my board, and video card from the list, installed the changes.

After a reboot, my processor was corrected, and the video improved.

I found some kext for my sound card which is built-in to the board, I used kext helper to install them, after a reboot I had sound.

 

Problems:

You know your going to have problems when you do something like this.

First problem is with networking. The computer has no problem getting on the internet, it also has no problem seeing my Windows box on the same subnet.

Problem is with it seeing my Macbook Pro’s, which are also on the same subnet.

The macbook Pro’s normally don’ t have a problem seeing the hackin0sh, the Windows box, or each other.

To make a long story shorter, I tried everything outside of replacing the router, which is a Netgear Pre N router from 06, (which it seems like they redesigned it for 08-09 “just made it black”). Now sometimes if I turn the router off, and reboot the computer, for a moment the hackin0sh will see my macbook pro’s. Also I want to add, that I can ping and trace route to the other boxes, and I had a problem with the migration wizard timing out when trying get the total size that would be transferred.

Second problem sound:

Sound only works in the front and not in the back, but other wise sounds great.

Third problem screensaver:

All Screen savers randomly crash my machine. I haven’t found the reason why, I think it may have to do with the “ask for password when resuming from screensave or sleep” feature turned on I don’t know. For now I just turned the screensaver off.

[Bit Shoveler]

I have a similar (but not identical) Gigabyte EP45-DS3R and things are working really well for me from a retail OS X install. Take a look at the post linked in my signature for some suggestions.

 

For the net problems, try the RealtekR1000.kext from Psystar.com.

 

Sound is a challenge, try tmongkol's legacy kexts. The DS3L uses the ALC888 codec, I'm not familiar with this one.

 

I wound up using a combination of superhai's VoodooPower.kext, Psystar's OpenHaltRestart.kext, and a DSDT patch to get sleep, restart, and shutdown working correctly.

[speeeding]

I have a ud3p version, and I wish could even get to the stage you guys are talking about! I'm also a total noob, and can't seem to boot the grub file. I chose F12 to choose boot from disk, but doesn't seem to work. Is here some other bios setup I have to adjust?

[hondafanboy]

I wanted to add that I tried the RealtekR1000.kext from Psystar, and it completely resolved my networking issues.

I was even able to use migrate option, and copy my profile off one of my mac's.

It did take me a few weeks to find the ktext file (when I sit down to focus on it it really took me 20 minutes), I had to search for it in Google.

Upgrading to 10.5.7 resolved the issues with my screen-saver crashing OS X.

But I still have a problem with it not always asking to enter a password when I return back to using it (more times then not it's not asking for a password).

 

One problem that I failed to mention before, which is the biggest problem of all; is it appears that OS X isn't making proper use of the CPU (what people would call studering, or mouse studering issues).

At times it could be hard to tell, because the computer starts up, and shuts down extremely fast, it also opens up applications extremely fast (lots faster then my Macbook Pros).

But when I use applications like Final cut, Itunes, Quicktime, the computer can be almost unusable. As you can see by my last sentence it's mainly with apple applications, tho I do see it with other apps like Sims 3.

If I open up the activity monitor app, it appears the OS X knows about all 4 cores, and it's assigning processes to all of them equally.

I did read awhile back that people in the OSX86 community was see issues with the Q9550 Processor, I tried some of the solutions, (I forgot which ones) but in the end didn't resolve the problem.

Updating to 10.5.7 did help some, but not alot...

If anyone has seen this issue, of have any ideas, or solutions to this problem I would love to hear them.

After watching WWDC, I strongly feel snow leopard will resolve these issues, since all the Power PC code will be removed.