PC newbie - require advice on Snow Leo and Mountain Lion compatible hardware

[FasterMac]

Hi all,

 

I am using Macs at home, and with Xmas and a few free days coming up I'd like to give a Hackintosh a try. While I have Mountain Lion installed on my 24in iMac (2.8 GHz C2D) I much prefer Snow Leo and might actually downgrade my iMac.

 

Now my question is: what hardware should I use to run Snow Leo 10.6.8 AND Mountain Lion?

 

I read that Snow Leo does not support Ivy Bridge, so the newest PCs and Mainboards are out.

 

I was thinking of a Core i7 2700K or faster processor - any recommendations?

 

I also want to install a LOT of hard disks (probably eight 2 TB drives), preferably in a RAID 5 configuration. Optical drive is not important.

 

I have no interest in gaming but I do have an interest in programming (for Mac/Win/Linux) so as startup drive I'd like to use a partitioned 256 GB SSD so that I can start in MacOS 10.6.8, Mac 10.8.2, Win 7, or Ubuntu Linux.

 

Any advice on what I should get or where I could find that info? That Snow Leo does not support Ivy Bridge makes me a bit hesitant on what else I might not know which could throw a spanner in the works.

 

Thanks in advance!

 

Markus

[Mr.D.]

You can get 10.6.8 to run w/o legacy kernel on Ivy Bridge. I got it running in VirtualBox on my machine and I have a z77 board with i5-3570k proc. I am also using VMWare Player 5 to run 10.8.2 on the same machine.

 

You can sometimes get OSX to run on newer hardware by using the legacy kernel. If ya search around here, or osx86.net you'll find everything you need. If all else fails, you can read about my trials and tribulations with installing SL and ML in a VM environment here.