GA-EP45-Extreme MB any different?

[alphaxono]

Hi,

 

Thanks to everyone who is sharing his/her knowledge here.

 

After reading the lifehacker guide I was trying to find the GA-P45-UD3P Motherboard here in Germany with no luck.

The closest thing was the GA-EP45-Extreme motherboard that I could find.

 

I searched through the forum and can't seem to find a post about experience with this MB.

 

Currently I have leopard running on an ASUS Striker Extreme with an nforce680i chip and get quite a bit of KP's. My goal is a rocksolid system.

 

-Has anyone had success with this MB (GA-EP45-Extreme)?

-How stable is it?

-Anything I have to consider while installing SL?

 

Thank you all.

 

Cheers

[droodyf]

Hi there,

 

I did a Lifehacker-esque install with an EP45-EXTREME and a Nvidia 8800 GTS. I also used an E7500 2.93 ghz Core 2 Duo processor as I didn't really want to throw a quadcore in to my first hackintosh build.

 

Everything worked until the end of the snow leopard install - it said 'install failed' and I think saying it couldn't make the partition bootable, but I simply rebooted back off the USB stick and selected the hard disk from the bootloader, which booted OSX fine. Then I installed the bootloader onto the hard disk, as suggested by the article, and OSX boots off the hard disk fine.

 

I installed the 10.6.1 patch with no problems at all.

 

Networking was working on first boot as the hackintosh happily chatted to the Apple servers during first-user setup! I have done a very quick test on audio (using a pair of headphones) and sound was working, although I have no spare speakers to do any thorough tests or check it works in every application.

 

USB works fine, the ports are recognised as Built-In and not external. I actually went to get a cup of tea after sitting with finder in front of me, only to find it had gone into sleep mode by the time I got back. It woke out of sleep without a problem, although I have since disabled that because I don't use sleep mode much on my desktops.

 

The only problem I have had, and one I thought I could rectify with a more modern graphics card (9800 GT), is that interface performance is -very slightly slower- than the Mac Mini I used to make the bootable USB installer. The Mini appears to get a better 2.1 OpenGL score and mostly better Xbench results (in fact, nearly every category other than Disk it beats the hackintosh at). Swapping into the 9800 didn't seem to help, the interface feels exactly the same speed as with the 8800.

 

But otherwise very happy, pretty much a zero problem install.