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Which Motherboard?


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I'm in the process of building an Ivy Bridge based hackintosh/Windows PC in a G5 case and although I've chosen the majority of the hardware, I'm having trouble choosing between two motherboards. I know that Ivy Bridge is still unsupported under OS X but as the primary purpose of this machine is for CAD (AutoCAD, Revit, 3DS Max) under Windows, this isn't an immediate problem. I would like to make things as easy as possible once support starts coming through (hopefully soon!).

 

The specs so far are:

- i7 3770

- 16Gb RAM

- NVIDIA Quadro 2000 (I know it's not a great gaming card, but for the main purpose of this machine its what I need)

- 120Gb Vertex 3 SSD boot drive

- 500Gb Western Digital Caviar Blue 7200RPM HDD storage drive

- Firewire card (exact card not chosen yet)

 

The two boards I'm looking at at the moment are the Asus P8Z77-V LX and the Gigabyte Z77-DS3H. What do you think would be best? I'm open to alternative suggestions.

 

Thanks.

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I'm in the process of building an Ivy Bridge based hackintosh/Windows PC in a G5 case and although I've chosen the majority of the hardware, I'm having trouble choosing between two motherboards. I know that Ivy Bridge is still unsupported under OS X but as the primary purpose of this machine is for CAD (AutoCAD, Revit, 3DS Max) under Windows, this isn't an immediate problem. I would like to make things as easy as possible once support starts coming through (hopefully soon!).

 

The specs so far are:

- i7 3770

- 16Gb RAM

- NVIDIA Quadro 2000 (I know it's not a great gaming card, but for the main purpose of this machine its what I need)

- 120Gb Vertex 3 SSD boot drive

- 500Gb Western Digital Caviar Blue 7200RPM HDD storage drive

- Firewire card (exact card not chosen yet)

 

The two boards I'm looking at at the moment are the Asus P8Z77-V LX and the Gigabyte Z77-DS3H. What do you think would be best? I'm open to alternative suggestions.

 

Thanks.

 

Take a look at the MSI Z77MA-GA45 as this is the MB that I have with an i7 3770k CPU and 16GB of memory. I have both 10.7.3 and 10.7.4 running without a DSDT.aml.

There are issues in that Apple has not provide IB support in Lion. My plan is to use this motherboard in a refresh of my 2008 Mac Pro hack.

 

neil

 

EDIT - I am currently having issues with Ethernet on the MSI-Z77MA-G45 and would like to retract my recommendation of it.

 

neil

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  • 5 weeks later...

Hello,

 

I'm in a similar situation as nufanec and would love some guidance. I'm going to pull the trigger on a hackintosh attempt due to both my desire to try some pc gaming (will also be running windows) and my wife's desire to purchase a new Apple computer for her film editing. Neither of these was a strong enough reason alone to take on what might be a headache but now I can justify my desire to squander money and time on building a gaming computer by the secondary purpose of seeing if I can come up with a hackintosh that would fit my wife's needs, especially after the lackluster WWDC '12 announcements. If I can't make her a hackintosh I can still play dayZ.

 

I'm having trouble finding the dirt simple 'here's how to proceed with the hardware' kind of info someone like me needs after coming from limited options Apple to 'holy {censored} how many motherboards are there!?' pc land. I'm sure there is no simple answers and the ton of options is a great thing, but a little daunting for starting out.

 

Asus seems to be a good bet, and the new thunderbolt capable motherboards seems good. I understand getting the latest/greatest pc hardware before apple has implimented the same features might leave some features unusable, but buying a motherboard that has the capabilities of what's coming out on Mac Pro eventually is a good idea I think. Searching for the motherboards on Amazon shows like 6 different versions with imperceptible (to me) differences though.

 

Is there any resource here that I haven't found that will A. give some good advice on how to proceed hardware wise, not just with a huge list of what has worked but maybe some recommendations and B. some primer on understanding the subtle differences between all the processors/motherboards, like a guide to pc's for mac users. I passed both those tests easy when I joined this morning so not a hopeless moron but certainly trying to climb a steep learning curve here.

 

Thanks for any and all advice. I'm sure this info is all here on this site. Any links or general advice is appreciated.

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