i7 Hackintosh Build - Advice/Comments

[hcetech]

Dear all,

 

I've always owned Macs and loved OS X, but need a new one and feel like a bit of a challenge. I've finally got round to sitting down and preparing a list of components for a home-built Hackintosh. But before I drop £1200-odd on it, I was wondering if any of you could cast an eye over it in case there's anything wrong?

 

Motherboard: ASUS P6T SE

 

Processor: Intel Core i7-930 (2.8GHz)

 

Graphics card: AXLE NVidia 9500GT

 

RAM: Corsair 6GB triple-channel DDR3

 

HD: Seagate Caviar 1TB x2

 

Monitor: ASUS VH242H x2

 

Plus a standard Sony SATA DVDRW drive, a 650W PSU, a case and an ASUS BT-21 Bluetooth dongle.

 

From what I've read here it's a fairly simple matter to get 10.6 running with the help of a USB drive containing the installer and Chameleon on it... Can you guys just confirm this is the case?

 

Thanks for all your help,

 

hcetech

[geiman]

Looks like a good build; if you haven't bought the components yet, you might want to checkout the new Hackintosh build they are doing over at Lifehacker (www.lifehacker.com). Their build is very similar to yours, including the i7 processor and 9500 series Nvidia graphics card. Their motherboard also has the 6Gbs Sata and USB3.0 for future-proofness. Since they already have a guide (including a video tutorial) and all the software ready to go, it would probably be a good path for you to choose as it sounds like this is your first Hackintosh.

[hcetech]

Looks like a good build; if you haven't bought the components yet, you might want to checkout the new Hackintosh build they are doing over at Lifehacker (www.lifehacker.com). Their build is very similar to yours, including the i7 processor and 9500 series Nvidia graphics card. Their motherboard also has the 6Gbs Sata and USB3.0 for future-proofness. Since they already have a guide (including a video tutorial) and all the software ready to go, it would probably be a good path for you to choose as it sounds like this is your first Hackintosh.

 

Thanks geiman, great to hear. I'll pop over to Lifehacker before I get going with my build.

 

Thanks again,

 

hcetech

[geiman]

No problem; just a side note, don't buy the parts you've listed if you haven't found anyone else that is using them successfully, or until someone explicitly tells you that they are compatible with OS X. I didn't bother to actually look up the motherboard to try and gauge its compatibility because I'm a little under the weather today. I just know others have had success with similar boards, but whether they were that exact model or not I don't know of the top of my head.

 

Good luck, you'll love your Hackintosh

[maarten12100]

You might wanna add a more powerfull gpu since a 9500gt will give some bottlenecks(not for home entertainment but for thing like rendering video/audio editing modeling etc)

The rest of the system should be rock stable.

I addvice the instal method empire efi(its very good since its not complicated) + chameleon latest you can get.

Also if you dualboot dont use parallels it will give you an unbootable system

[hcetech]

Thanks guys.

 

maarten12100, what would you recommend as a better GPU? I'm looking for the best I can afford! I do need to power 2 1920x1080 monitors though...

 

I found a good P6T SE guide here, so no worries there.

 

Thanks,

 

hcetech

[geiman]

Not sure why Parallels gave you an unbootable system; I have the newest version of Parallels installed and everything still works fine for me. It even saw my Windows partition as a bootcamp partition. I tried to boot it out of curiosity in Parallels, but it failed (which is to be expected). Everything is still working fine though.