Doug the Impaler Posted April 26, 2007 Share Posted April 26, 2007 Alright, so here's my deal: I voided my Mac Mini's warranty by upgrading the RAM and the HDD myself. a couple weeks ago, a storm voided my Mac Mini's existence (the mobo has black marks and it doesn't even POST). I'm working under the assumption that no hardware is salvageable. No way to test if it's good, anyway. So I decided to take the opportunity to build an OS X box. I've done it with a Dell 4600 previously and it was marvelous. Now I want to build one from the ground up. I've decided on the following: Core 2 Duo Intel chipset mobo GMA 950 graphics This way, I figure it's just as good as my Mini, only the CPU is better because of the faster bus and presumably faster speed. I'm probably going to go with an E4300 and OC the bejesus out of it. I am here looking for the cheapest way to do this, also *more importantly* the fewest hacks required. I am thinking about this board, possibly this board. The wiki says "minor editing" but that shouldn't be a huge deal. I also see that if I elect to go with a Pentium 4, alot of the Intel-made boards are also very, very good. What do y'all suggest? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HexDump Posted April 26, 2007 Share Posted April 26, 2007 I´m pretty interested in this too. Why ont create a thread with configuration boxes woriking 100% win macos and no or almos no patches?. Thanks in advance, HexDump. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Doug the Impaler Posted May 7, 2007 Author Share Posted May 7, 2007 Well, I bought a Foxconn P965 motherboard (link) and I'm having a {censored} of a time - I get "/com.apple.Boot.plist not found" when booting from the 10.4.8 AMD/Intel + PPF1 and PPF2 ISO from Demonoid. The same disk installed on an nForce3 board I have, but I can't use that machine full time; it's my wife's. I've tried with a USB enclosure for my DVD-RW and with the JMicron controller (the patch for which I THOUGHT was included in the above ISO, but maybe not). If anybody has any ideas, I'd be glad to hear them. I think my next course of action will be VMWare and use dd to move it from my virtual HDD to a real partition and mark it active, and hopefully that will work. I'll post back if it does. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sarahbau Posted May 8, 2007 Share Posted May 8, 2007 I'm not saying that this is your problem, but why did you buy a board where 6 out of 23 people gave it a rating of 1 out of 5? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Doug the Impaler Posted May 8, 2007 Author Share Posted May 8, 2007 Because I give the one person I personally know with the board more weight than 100 people online. For Windows - its intended purpose - it's a very fast and stable board for me. It also overclocks my E4300 very nicely from 800MHz bus to 1066MHz bus. I shouldn't have bought a P965 board at all, as it seems hit-and-miss for OS X, but oh well. I need another motherboard to get my wife out of S754 Sempron land and into a real computer, anyway - maybe I'll give her this board and get myself something with more of an OS X track record. That is, if I can't get VMWare to work. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
marliwahoo Posted May 8, 2007 Share Posted May 8, 2007 Asus P5LD2-VM. A few kext changes....done. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hagar Posted May 8, 2007 Share Posted May 8, 2007 This topic comes up again and again, the reason it does so is because there is no real answer beyond checking your components against the wiki hcl and trying it for yourself. to save some time, this thread would typically receive: Someone saying "get a mac". Someone complaining that the information is already on the forum and you should use the search function. Someone saying "I got that motherboard & my install failed with b0 error/root device error/ grey spinny thing" PLEASE HELP... The possible permutations of motherboard, cpu, cards, chips/chipsets DVD, patches etc, not to mention user knowledge & skill level relative to bugs & pitfalls, is so mindboggling that trying to come up with "most compatible" "cheapest working" etc becomes meaningless. If everyone could just check against the wiki, add what works for them if it isn't there, use some common sense relative to hardware choice (such as finding out *exactly* what components are on a motherboard) and proceed methodically, it really is no harder than any other OS to set up, and easier than many IMO. Of course, who knows what apple will bring out next? There is no guarantee that any of this will work beyond 10.4.9, even if it does so today. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
moarfish Posted May 8, 2007 Share Posted May 8, 2007 Asus P5LD2-VM. A few kext changes....done. I know this is a great board but it become harder and harder to find as many shops only got P5L-MX now in Hong Kong. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Doug the Impaler Posted May 8, 2007 Author Share Posted May 8, 2007 Probably the easiest solution for me (since I also have a K8V-MX) is to just get an AGP nVidia card and use the Sempron. Interesting that VIA/nVidia chipsets seem to have an easier time of it than Intel ones. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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