TheSwagger Posted June 29, 2009 Share Posted June 29, 2009 Thinking about building a hackintosh based on some of the advice and tutorials found here. Seems to me the GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3R is a good mobo choice with 4GB Ram. Probably for the sake of money going with an E5200 which I may OC to around 3GHZ. I have a Rosewill case and 400W Thermaltake PSU not doing anything so those will get reused. My real quandry is my GPU options. I am building this primarily for photo editing with CS4, or maybe Apeture. I want something I won't hate quickly but is cheap and functional. Right now the Nvidia 9500GT seems kinda promising although I am an ATI guy. Is the 4850 easy enough to make work? (what aftermarket card builder works OOtB?). I would almost rather it be an uneventful / easy build and sacrifice a bit of performance. Any other really easy builds with tutorials you can recommend? Ok I have babbled enough. Whats my best mobo / cpu / gpu combo for a decent machine for low bucks? Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/172763-inexpensive-hackintosh-idea-advice/ Share on other sites More sharing options...
iRobie Posted June 29, 2009 Share Posted June 29, 2009 I have basically the same machine. I went with a Rosewill mATX case with 400W power supply. It's a nice case - was $40 if I remember right. I purchased the GA-G41M-ES2L motherboard because it was on sale at Frys. That and an E8200 processor for $150. Not bad. The motherboard works almost perfectly. I used retail install with Weaksauce's G31M-ES2L kexts. Time Machine, LAN, Wake on Lan, Sleep. All work beautifully. (Sleep works better than real mac because I found PleaseSleep). Sound didn't work, so I got the $7 USB sound card and it works great. I went with a 9600 GSO vid card. Works great with Nvidia injector thing. I use Aperture and Photoshop mostly - it's great for that. Though I'd actually advice against this particular card, I highly recommend Nvidia. I had an ATI 2400XT that I could never get to work fully. For install process, my install went beautifully. I started with a real mac (quite a pre-requisite!). Connected my drive via USB (and a SATA to USB connector). Used UInstaller & a 10.5.6 retail disk. In UInstaller, selected "Open Mac OSX Installer" After installing, applied the 10.5.7 upgrade. Then used UInstaller to apply the kexts, install chameleon and I think Time Machine fix. After that, plugged the drive into new computer & booted. Then installed Nvidia injector. Sounds like a lot, but it took 30 minutes and it's been working perfectly. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/172763-inexpensive-hackintosh-idea-advice/#findComment-1187983 Share on other sites More sharing options...
TomCom Posted June 29, 2009 Share Posted June 29, 2009 You should follow iRobie's advice. For photo editing, it would be smarter to spend less on the motherboard and more on the CPU, by getting for example a E7400 you could overclock up to 4GHz, or even a cheap Quad like the Q8300, unless you plan to upgrade to 8GB of RAM. If I'm not wrong, the G41M-ES2L only supports 4GB. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/172763-inexpensive-hackintosh-idea-advice/#findComment-1188571 Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zaap Posted June 30, 2009 Share Posted June 30, 2009 The G41M-ES2L does support 8GB of RAM... buuut- it only has two slots. It's very hard to find 4GB DDR2 RAM sticks. Certainly it'll cost nearly $300 to put 8GB of RAM in this board. I have a G41M-ES2L board myself- exact same experience as iRobie, so I'm using USB audio. I'd recommend the G31M-ES2L over the G41 if one is fine with 4GB of RAM. If you gotta have more than 4GB, step up to a full-sized ATX board with 4 RAM slots. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/172763-inexpensive-hackintosh-idea-advice/#findComment-1188704 Share on other sites More sharing options...
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