How do I know my Hackintosh is running at Full Potential?

[EverestDreams]

I am new to the scene here, but I am loving it. I finally got 10.5.7 running on my hackintosh with my ATI 4870 Graphics card and full sound. My question is how do I make sure that it is running at its highest potential. Meaning that it recognizes all for 4 cores of my Quad processor, is utilizing all 8 gigs of OCZ ram and such.

 

I know this is a noob question, but I Just want to make sure I am getting everything out of my new toy.

[srs5694]

System Profiler should give you this information. There are a number of ways to launch it; it's in the Utilities folder, or you can select About This Mac from the Apple menu and then click More Info. You'll then see a big list of hardware and software categories on the left. Click one to see details about that category. The two items you mentioned are both in the main Hardware category.

 

A tip: You may want to check the Graphics/Displays category. Look for the items called Core Image and Quartz Extreme. For best graphics performance, these should read "Hardware Accelerated" and "Supported," respectively. Other values indicate that your display isn't being used to its fullest potential. You might not notice this if all you do is open text editors or browse static Web pages, but you'll run into problems if you try to play a DVD or use other high-powered graphics tools. This detail is easy for newbies to overlook, but it's an important one for certain uses. Other hardware, like the sound card and USB ports, present more obvious symptoms of failure if they aren't working right. If your graphics is stuck without full CI/QE support, you may be able to improve matters by mucking with graphics drivers; OTOH, you may have to upgrade your video card. I ended up bypassing one system's built-in nVidia chipset in favor of an nVidia GeForce 7300 SE card.