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Hey guys, its been a few years since I was here. The forum sure has changed. Anyway I'm looking into buying a new computer. I thought about getting a real mac then saw the price and for what it offers and now I'm back to the hackintoshing. The last system I did was an AMD system and it was nice back then but at the time wasn't something I would have used everyday. But then again that was Leopard and a slower system. However today I'm in the market for a newer system and I want to use Mountain Lion as my primary OS. But I also want to play a few games like the sims 3, sim city when it comes out next year and a few old games that can play on my current laptop. I've watched a few videos from Bob Roche and pretty much know what I want in a system. My only problem is finding the right components or ones that will both give me easy compatibility with OS X mountain Lion and be able to game with Windows 7 or 8. Also I've seen a few different guides on how to install mountain lion and all of which tell me to purchase mountain lion on the mac app store which i'm fine with doing, one problem.. I don't have a mac or know anyone that has a mac and apple doesn't sell it in there stores. on there support forums it says buy snow leopard which is an extra 20 bucks,if I absolutely have to go that route I will. anyway here is what I'm thinking of using in the system.

 

Intel Core i5 3570K 3.4GHz-3.8GHZ turbo

Gigabyte GA-Z77-DS3H

I'm thinking 8GB DDR3 1333 should be fine for my uses, if not I can always upgrade in the future.

I've never used SSD's before but I want to for Mac OS X so I'm going to get two Samsung 840 120GB SSD's and 2 1TB WD hard drives.

as for the Graphics card I want at least a 2GB card, 1GB would prob work but so one of these two cards I'm interested in:

MSI AMD Radeon 7750 2GB PCI express 3.0 x16 card

Gigabyte AMD Radeon 6750 1GB PCI express 2.1 x16 card

Also I would like to put a Blu-ray burner in it for windows mainly, I think I remember hearing someone say blu-ray support isn't very good in OS X?

Wireless card: I know this works as I've seen it work.

 

 

I think thats everything, thank you ahead of time for all your help!

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... Also I've seen a few different guides on how to install mountain lion and all of which tell me to purchase mountain lion on the mac app store which i'm fine with doing, one problem.. I don't have a mac or know anyone that has a mac and apple doesn't sell it in there stores. on there support forums it says buy snow leopard which is an extra 20 bucks,if I absolutely have to go that route I will.

 

Yup - you need to install 10.6.3 (retail DVD still sold thru Apple's phone fulfillment center) then upgrade to 10.6.8 to buy 10.8.2 if you don't have access to a 'real' mac. I am running 10.6.8 in a virtual machine, and I know a lot of people do this to get to the point where they can download the 10.8.2 upgrade from the App Store.

 

anyway here is what I'm thinking of using in the system:

 

Intel Core i5 3570K 3.4GHz-3.8GHZ turbo

Gigabyte GA-Z77-DS3H

I'm thinking 8GB DDR3 1333 should be fine for my uses, if not I can always upgrade in the future.

I've never used SSD's before but I want to for Mac OS X so I'm going to get two Samsung 840 120GB SSD's and 2 1TB WD hard drives.

as for the Graphics card I want at least a 2GB card, 1GB would prob work but so one of these two cards I'm interested in:

MSI AMD Radeon 7750 2GB PCI express 3.0 x16 card

Gigabyte AMD Radeon 6750 1GB PCI express 2.1 x16 card

Also I would like to put a Blu-ray burner in it for windows mainly, I think I remember hearing someone say blu-ray support isn't very good in OS X?

Wireless card: I know this works as I've seen it work.

 

The only thing I am unsure of is the wireless card. Not saying it wont work - I just don't know. My system is the same proc on a ASRock z77 uATX mainboard, also with 8 GB of RAM.I hear very good things about gigabyte boards and their hackintosh ability. I am using an ATI 6770 1GB PCIe 2.1 x16 card in my rig. With regards to Blu-Ray support - its the same as Windows - you gotta get a third party app to play or record. Neither Apple nor Microsoft are willing to pay for the codecs that would be required to support Blu-Ray. If you get an non-OEM drive, it'll probably come with all the software you need. if you use Windows 8 (ugh) then remember that you'll either need to get the media center add-on or a third party app to even play DVDs as they took that feature out from Windows 7.

 

Hope this helps some - feel free to ask anything more!

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Thanks for the response. I had just had that idea today although snow leopard is really slow in a VM environment on my current laptop but I'm sure it will run a bit better on the desktop. Thanks!

 

Lol I didn't see the last part of what you posted till after I posted above, Anyway yeah I've heard and have seen that Gigabyte boards work for the most part Out of the box with OS X. I may not go the Windows 8 route, I've grown tired of it the past month or two that I've had it as my primary OS. It works but it can be a little annoying at times. I think I'll be sticking to Windows 7 on my desktop hackintosh build. How does your system do with 8 gigs of ram? I remember a few years back it felt like I needed more than 4GB of ram for leopard on my last desktop. Lol another question I have is about the processor, not specifically about OS X and it but I have a Core i5 2500M 2.40-3.0GHZ in this laptop with 6GB of ram and sometimes it feels very slow but then again that could be caused by the Intel 3000 graphics that this thing is stuck with, how does the Ivy bridge i5 do?

 

Thanks again!

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I have never felt lag on my system when running windows natively. I have experienced some lag running 10.8.2 on my virtual machine, but that has everything to do with it running in a virtual machine. When I play an HD video in quicktime in the VM at full screen, its a tad jerky. The fact that I can play an HD video in my VM at all I think is pretty damn amazing. I have only 2GB RAM assigned to my VM, and with a little app I got to monitor my RAM allocation, I can see that I have never gone over 1.5GB used thus far. I'm not playing games or doing video encoding in the VM, so I really didn't need that much to start with.

 

I would be really surprised if you needed more than 8GB for now. You plan was the same as my plan - if I need more, I can double it for 50-60 bucks down the road. If you have extra money lying around, by all means, start with 16GB. If you are looking to save some cash now yet be smart about how you can upgrade in the future, then go for the 8GB now.

 

My proc comes with the HD4000 video. I cant use it because I cant get an HDMI cable to connect to it due to my placement of the MB in the case. I bought that 6770 card for 70 bucks on sale and have been quite pleased with it. If you are going to game with your machine - I recommend a video card. You can do HD video watching with the HD4000, but you'll never be happy with that if you play games.

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Yea my laptop now has 6GB and I'm doing just fine, I don't do a whole lot of video editing yet. I mainly want a hackintosh for iweb, iphoto and a few other apps. I know what you mean about the HD4000, I've been confined to gaming on my laptop with a HD3000 for the past year. It plays games like sims 3 at 40-50FPS on medium settings at native res and does battlefield 3 around 20 and low settings and low res. But other than that its only good for 720P HD videos, 1080P heats the system up a bit. But I want to have a system that I won't have to upgrade for at least a year or two without feeling like its slow or like I have with this laptop.

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  • 4 months later...

Hey guys, its been a few years since I was here. The forum sure has changed. Anyway I'm looking into buying a new computer. I thought about getting a real mac then saw the price and for what it offers and now I'm back to the hackintoshing. The last system I did was an AMD system and it was nice back then but at the time wasn't something I would have used everyday. But then again that was Leopard and a slower system. However today I'm in the market for a newer system and I want to use Mountain Lion as my primary OS. But I also want to play a few games like the sims 3, sim city when it comes out next year and a few old games that can play on my current laptop. I've watched a few videos from Bob Roche and pretty much know what I want in a system. My only problem is finding the right components or ones that will both give me easy compatibility with OS X mountain Lion and be able to game with Windows 7 or 8. Also I've seen a few different guides on how to install mountain lion and all of which tell me to purchase mountain lion on the mac app store which i'm fine with doing, one problem.. I don't have a mac or know anyone that has a mac and apple doesn't sell it in there stores. on there support forums it says buy snow leopard which is an extra 20 bucks,if I absolutely have to go that route I will. anyway here is what I'm thinking of using in the system.

 

Intel Core i5 3570K 3.4GHz-3.8GHZ turbo

Gigabyte GA-Z77-DS3H

I'm thinking 8GB DDR3 1333 should be fine for my uses, if not I can always upgrade in the future.

I've never used SSD's before but I want to for Mac OS X so I'm going to get two Samsung 840 120GB SSD's and 2 1TB WD hard drives.

as for the Graphics card I want at least a 2GB card, 1GB would prob work but so one of these two cards I'm interested in:

MSI AMD Radeon 7750 2GB PCI express 3.0 x16 card

Gigabyte AMD Radeon 6750 1GB PCI express 2.1 x16 card

Also I would like to put a Blu-ray burner in it for windows mainly, I think I remember hearing someone say blu-ray support isn't very good in OS X?

Wireless card: I know this works as I've seen it work.

 

 

I think thats everything, thank you ahead of time for all your help!

 

For the same price you can go for an Sapphire ATI HD 7770 , fully compatible and it works like a charm :)

http://www.amazon.com/Sapphire-Radeon-PCI-Express-Graphics-11201-17-20G/dp/B00A0HZOEA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1366434138&sr=8-1&keywords=ati+7770

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Is it working without sleep/rotation tricks?

 

Also, if he intends to use pro rendering apps, nVidia is still the better choice (despite the AMD 7970 GHz edition being by far the best consumer grade GPU out there) because many of the said apps require specifically CUDA for GPU computing, and the ones that support OpenCL usually works better with CUDA anyway.

 

All the best!

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