R.I.P. BadAxe2

[Shaveblog]

I give up on this board running SL without issues. It's a great board for Leopard 10.5.x, one of the very best in fact. It will do sterling duty as a Plex box soon, running Leo as the base since Plex seems to do better with 10.5 than 10.6. But I am done trying to shoehorn Snow Leopard onto this board and get everything to work perfectly without massive hacks and backflips.

 

So today I swapped it out for a new UD3P from Newegg, plus an $8 Rosewill PCI LAN card as recommended by Weaksauce, and installed 64-bit Snow with Stella's new "Pumpkin Patch" bootloader that Weaksauce terms the "beta" to Stella's "alpha" he did up for Pash's Lifehacker guide.

 

This install was so easy and issue-free it's ridiculous. Restore the SL install DVD to a USB drive. Install Stella's Pumpkin Patch. Reboot, stab at the Del key, and set the UD3P's bios as per Pash's screenshots. Then boot into the USB drive and install Snow. 20 mins later, boot up into 64-bit Snow, run Stella's Pumpkin Patch again except this time choose your main drive as the target, and you're done.

 

Zero issues. Everything works. Sound, Time Machine, Bonjour (as long as you use an add-on PCI LAN card like the $8 Rosewill -- Weaksauce says he's working on a solution for the UD3P's onboard ethernet but $8 today means I don't have to wait), restart, QE/CI (with my 8600GT at least), everything. Haven't found anything that doesn't work so far, and the system -- same Q6600, same GPU, same PS, same everything except the UD3P -- runs faster, smoother, and cooler even than with the BadAxe.

 

Thank you, Stella, Weaksauce, and the others who have brought Hackintoshery to this point of no-brainer perfection. When I think to how just a few short years ago I was struggling with Kalyway, and now you can boot up the retail Snow DVD and get it to run the 64-bit kernel flawlessly with just a simply bootloader package like Stella's Pumpkin Patch, it's pretty amazing how far things have come.

[lord_webi]

I give up on this board running SL without issues. It's a great board for Leopard 10.5.x, one of the very best in fact. It will do sterling duty as a Plex box soon, running Leo as the base since Plex seems to do better with 10.5 than 10.6. But I am done trying to shoehorn Snow Leopard onto this board and get everything to work perfectly without massive hacks and backflips.

 

So today I swapped it out for a new UD3P from Newegg, plus an $8 Rosewill PCI LAN card as recommended by Weaksauce, and installed 64-bit Snow with Stella's new "Pumpkin Patch" bootloader that Weaksauce terms the "beta" to Stella's "alpha" he did up for Pash's Lifehacker guide.

 

This install was so easy and issue-free it's ridiculous. Restore the SL install DVD to a USB drive. Install Stella's Pumpkin Patch. Reboot, stab at the Del key, and set the UD3P's bios as per Pash's screenshots. Then boot into the USB drive and install Snow. 20 mins later, boot up into 64-bit Snow, run Stella's Pumpkin Patch again except this time choose your main drive as the target, and you're done.

 

Zero issues. Everything works. Sound, Time Machine, Bonjour (as long as you use an add-on PCI LAN card like the $8 Rosewill -- Weaksauce says he's working on a solution for the UD3P's onboard ethernet but $8 today means I don't have to wait), restart, QE/CI (with my 8600GT at least), everything. Haven't found anything that doesn't work so far, and the system -- same Q6600, same GPU, same PS, same everything except the UD3P -- runs faster, smoother, and cooler even than with the BadAxe.

 

Thank you, Stella, Weaksauce, and the others who have brought Hackintoshery to this point of no-brainer perfection. When I think to how just a few short years ago I was struggling with Kalyway, and now you can boot up the retail Snow DVD and get it to run the 64-bit kernel flawlessly with just a simply bootloader package like Stella's Pumpkin Patch, it's pretty amazing how far things have come.

 

for Bad Axe 2 you only need 3 Kext ... it is so easy ... to install Snow to it ...

[Shaveblog]

for Bad Axe 2 you only need 3 Kext ... it is so easy ... to install Snow to it ...

 

Yes I agree, it is relatively easy to get Snow Leopard to run on the BadAxe2. But it has too many limitations to be a practical alternative at this point. To the best of my knowledge, nobody is running the 64-bit kernel on this board without issues, nobody has onboard audio, nobody has the 2nd set of SATA ports working, etc etc. And to even get it running 32-bit Snow with the limitations noted above, you have to work at it. It's not just 3 kexts.

 

However, if you're really running SL on this board and everything's working, here's a perfect opportunity for you to show your work. How did you achieve it? I wasn't able to, nor were any of the big name Hackintosh brains I consulted. I don't mean this as a challenge, but merely as an honest request for hard data. I issued a call for just this information previously and nobody responded, so if you're able to install SL perfectly on the BA2 with just 3 kexts, let's hear about it. I'd love to get some more years out of this board. Thank you in advance.

[ntsmkfob]

I never had the additional ports working under 10.5, as I only need 4 SATA ports. The only outstanding issue for me is broken Sound after Sleep. I've been watching and waiting for a former member here to perfect their Ultimate Snow Leopard setup disk, but I think there are some issues with getting it working with newer Intel mobos, which will be a nice upgrade path for the future. Running the XBX2 in 32 or 64 bit mode have been super stable for me, but a few things not working in 64 bit mode swung it to 32 bit for now. Once a few more updated apps are out there, 64 bit mode should be the preferred choice. Glad you have a system that works for you. I'll wait a bit longer before jumping ship, but as you say, the XBX2 has been a great system for everything up to Leopard.

[Shaveblog]

I'm not holding my breath for BS's alleged "Ultimate BadAxe2 Snow BootCD". I just don't think this board can run SL that well, and by "that well" I mean everything works, you don't have to prop it up with a ton of extra kexts, 64-bit kernel boots just as reliably as 32-bit, etc.

 

BA2 has also been superceded by newer boards when it comes to the stability of overclocking. I had to tweak my BA2 for days to overlock a Q6600, and even then all I could get to run reliably under Snow (or even 10.5.8) was a clock speed of 3GHz under Snow's 32-bit kernel. Anything faster than that and I'd get a kernel panic seconds into mprime stress testing. If it would even boot to begin with. So I stuck with 3GHz, which is certainly nothing to sneeze at.

 

The UD3P, on the other hand, is currently overlocking the same Q6600 (and the same PS, cooler, case, everything) to 3.4GHz. With Snow's 64-bit kernel. No sweat. I'm sure I could goose it even further if I wanted to. Temps remain well under 70-degress even with mprime running all 4 cores full-bore, and I can even launch other resource intensive apps like CS4 and FCP and actually use them at the same time mprime is beating the {censored} out of the CPU and RAM. This is the kind of feat the BA2 can't even begin to duplicate.

 

I love the BadAxe2. It's one of the best boards for Leopard I know of, maybe THE best. Built like a tank, solid as a rock. Intel knew what it was doing when it built this board. But Snow Leopard seems a bit beyond its capabilities, unless you're willing to tack on a bunch of tweaks and hacks and added peripherals to get it to do what newer boards like the UD3P can do out of the box, and you're willing to live with the 32-bit kernel.

 

I'd love to be proven wrong on this. Someone here claims he can get 64-bit SL to run perfectly on BA2 with just 3 added kexts. If he can show me his work so I can try it myself, and it works, we all benefit. But I don't think it's going to happen. So I'm doing a fresh install of 10.5.8 on mine, slapping an E5200 and a PicoPSU into it and screwing the board to a cookie sheet to mount on the back of my 50" plasma as an invisible Plex box with TouchPad on my iPhone as the remote.

 

 

I never had the additional ports working under 10.5, as I only need 4 SATA ports. The only outstanding issue for me is broken Sound after Sleep. I've been watching and waiting for a former member here to perfect their Ultimate Snow Leopard setup disk, but I think there are some issues with getting it working with newer Intel mobos, which will be a nice upgrade path for the future. Running the XBX2 in 32 or 64 bit mode have been super stable for me, but a few things not working in 64 bit mode swung it to 32 bit for now. Once a few more updated apps are out there, 64 bit mode should be the preferred choice. Glad you have a system that works for you. I'll wait a bit longer before jumping ship, but as you say, the XBX2 has been a great system for everything up to Leopard.

[ntsmkfob]

My Q6600/BA2 overclocked to 3.0GHz just by changing the frequency - no voltage tweaks. To be fair, I think most people with BA2's had the same experience. It sounds like your BA2 had an extra helping of pain built in to it.

[Shaveblog]

My Q6600/BA2 overclocked to 3.0GHz just by changing the frequency - no voltage tweaks. To be fair, I think most people with BA2's had the same experience. It sounds like your BA2 had an extra helping of pain built in to it.

 

My experiece was identical to yours. Changed the magic numbers on the BA2 to 333/9, but what tripped me up was reclocking my 800MHz memory to 667MHz. Didn't get that memo till later, so I couldn't boot into an overclock until I learned about that extra step elsewhere.

 

The Q6600 is much happier and better behaved with the UD3P. I can squeeze performance out of this aged CPU that the BA2 simply isn't capable of under OSX, particularly Snow and especially the 64-bit kernel.

[JMM]

for Bad Axe 2 you only need 3 Kext ... it is so easy ... to install Snow to it ...

 

Can you point the guide or share your guide or your kexts??

 

Please share

 

Thankx

[themerk]

This is great news. I ran a BA2 with Leopard for a long time. I'm currently in the process of building an identical system as the Lifehacker build. Can't wait!

[Logicpro9_user]

R.I.P Bad Axe 2? I dont think so!

 

I have to stick up for the Intel bad Axe 2, I use it everyday for eveything, Editing sound, making music and its got HUGE power! I also have a Mac Pro, and my Bad Axe 2 osx system is right up there with it all the time!

 

Im in 32bit just now, no need for 64bit! whats the point... 32bit is more than enough.

The Q6660 might be a few years old now but it still kick ass! I test the Mac Pro againt the Hack I have and they are just about the same, the Mac Pro just wins and no more!

 

I use Logic pro and huge about of plug-ins and audio files! it don’t even flinch! the Q6660 is a beast! Infact the Mac Pro I have has trouble dealing with Logic Pro and lots of plugins! the CPUs get ultra HOT while the Q6660 does not! and stays rock solid all the time.

 

As I say, the only problem I have with the bad axe 2 is that is getting a bit old! But its right up there still to this day with the best of them.

 

The main problem I have is that the CPU doesn’t speedup when the CPU gets hot, that’s it!

 

I installed 1st time, 3 kexts, and its so stable! I have used Gigabyte mobos, ASUS Mobos, and the BX2 is the best of them all! Shame it cant fit an i7 CPU in it!

 

Why give up? Is it because you don’t know how to use Snow Leopard? Or you don’t know how to install?

[BJMoose]

This is a bit of a nostalgic post for me. I agree with many here that the BA2 was one of the best motherboards intel made and it worked/works amazingly well even today. Although I have now revamped my systems to gigabyte motherboards, until recently (just 6 months or so ago) I had Snow Leopard running with only a few kexts in my Extra folder and completely vanilla in my system drive. Can't speak about 6.3 or 6.4, because I pulled my systems before they appeared.

 

'Back in the day'...at least is seems like it's been a long time, I used to champion the BA2 and wrote a few tutorials on how to get everything up and running. I haven't been too active on the forums over the last couple of years because with the inception of the bootloaders like Chameleon etc., if you get the right board, everything just plain works.

 

Although I'm not using my BA2s any longer, I still have three of them in my workshop, complete with ddr2 ram, quad processors, and some of the earlier nvidia boards still intact (just no cases or hard drives). May still find a use for them in the future.

[kup]

Maybe an obvious suggestion but rather than lots of "well I got it working fine", maybe one of you folks could actually help the OP out with the required files?

[Logicpro9_user]

I will write a guide tonight. There is only a few steps. Aand a few files. Very easy!

This is the guide I used Its a hard one to do, I will make it 90% easier!

 

http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php...185823&st=0

[BJMoose]

That last request for assistance on this thread was almost 9 months ago. So I doubt if the original request is even valid anymore. I don't think I'd waste my time with another tutorial unless someone showed recent interest. Either they got the answer, bought a new motherboard, or gave up on the hackintosh. Unless the mods have discarded them, there were several good tutes out there for Leopard and Snow Leopard all the way through 10.6.2.

[Logicpro9_user]

Your right!

 

I didnt see the date on that, The guide is like 9 steps! if anyone needs help with the bad axe 2 mobo, give me a shout! I have it in a word file.

[kae]

Your right!

 

I didnt see the date on that, The guide is like 9 steps! if anyone needs help with the bad axe 2 mobo, give me a shout! I have it in a word file.

 

I'm shouting :-). I'm about to give up on it. Could you paste the steps in here or something ? As I wrote in another thread I only get a black screen after installing Ultimate BadAxe and trying to boot from SL install disc.

 

Thanks