mjaleo Posted May 29, 2007 Share Posted May 29, 2007 I'm trying to build a machine that is going to only run OSX86. I'm using the Wiki and trying to sift through threads to find out what the best hardware would be to run it without a ton of modification. I'm building it at New Egg and want to spend around $600. I'm looking for the best for the money in terms of performance and ease of installing/using OSX. Here's what I've got so far: See third reply for updated configuration! Can't figure out a video card. Are these good choices? I haven't built a machine in about four years... I'm not up on the latest stuff! Any help guys? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sarahbau Posted May 29, 2007 Share Posted May 29, 2007 While AMD processors with nForce motherboards can work, if you're looking for "the best hardware...optimized for osx86," I'd recommend getting an Intel chip and 945 or 965 chipset motherboard. CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E4400 (or E6320 for about $30 more) Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 RAM: 2x1GB DDR2 800. No reason to fill all four slots when you can spend less and only fill two. The GeForce 7 series works very well with very little effort (simply installing the driver in most cases). I don't know what kind of video performance you're looking for, but it seems the 7300GT, 7600GT, and 7950GT work best (I've seen a few people have problems with GS cards for some reason). Get a 256MB card if you want it working with the least effort (512MB cards need a firmware update I believe). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ximekon Posted May 29, 2007 Share Posted May 29, 2007 check my signature. this apparatus had a street price in decembre 2006 at about 650Euros (incl. case and ATI graphics card). Meanwhile prices haven't risen afaik ;-) I am pretty comfortable with it. This doesn't include a keyboard/mouse combo or a screen. kind regards, ximekon Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mjaleo Posted May 29, 2007 Author Share Posted May 29, 2007 I appreciate the input guys! Here's what I've modified the configuration to: CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E4400 $139 Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-965P-DS3 $95 RAM: WINTEC AMPO 2GB (2 x 1GB) $78 Hard Drive: Western Digital Caviar SE WD2500JS 250GB $65 Media: LITE-ON $28 Wireless: NETGEAR WG311T $60 PSU: Thermaltake TR2 W0070RUC ATX 430W $40 Video: SAPPHIRE 194L Radeon X1650 256MB $70 Total shipped: $592.76 Whew, things have come a long way. That's a smoking fast machine compared to the last one I built! That all look good? I'll probably be ordering this weekend. Oh this keyboard too, has ridiculously good reviews and is dirt cheap! http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16823107120 I've got a 22" Acer widescreen I just picked up over the weekend in Memorial Day sales. Have a case and a mouse too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sarahbau Posted May 29, 2007 Share Posted May 29, 2007 Don't forget a case! lol. The rest looks good, except for the keyboard. I'd get a USB one. But do note that on that motherboard, for some reason USB is disabled by default in the BIOS. You can still get to the BIOS settings using a USB keyboard to change it though, so it's not really a problem. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mjaleo Posted May 29, 2007 Author Share Posted May 29, 2007 I've got a case Whats the advantage to a USB keyboard over the standard plug? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sarahbau Posted May 29, 2007 Share Posted May 29, 2007 I've got a case Whats the advantage to a USB keyboard over the standard plug? In OS X, USB is the standard plug Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mjaleo Posted May 30, 2007 Author Share Posted May 30, 2007 Thats good to know Any other critique of my setup? I should be able to throw 10.4.9's latest revision from TPB in there and have no trouble, right? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mjaleo Posted May 30, 2007 Author Share Posted May 30, 2007 I'm worried about the video card with the more I read. Everything else seems to be okay, compatibility-wise, but the card has mixed reviews. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sarahbau Posted May 30, 2007 Share Posted May 30, 2007 I'm worried about the video card with the more I read. Everything else seems to be okay, compatibility-wise, but the card has mixed reviews. If you're worried about that card, you might want to look at an nVidia 7600GT. It's slightly faster, shouldn't cost much more, and they normally work very well for Hackintoshes (my boyfriend's worked out of the box with no hacking of kexts). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mjaleo Posted May 30, 2007 Author Share Posted May 30, 2007 Sarah, just the kind of recommendation I was looking for. Thank you! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mjaleo Posted May 31, 2007 Author Share Posted May 31, 2007 Placing my order for this machine tomorrow... Any advice or help on the config would be greatly appreciated. As I said before, my real goal is to put it together, slide in the latest 10.4.9 from TPB, and have it install without great issue or problems. I think the build resembles a similar configuration to most Intel Macs now so it should be okay... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sarahbau Posted May 31, 2007 Share Posted May 31, 2007 Good luck Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mjaleo Posted June 3, 2007 Author Share Posted June 3, 2007 Damn New Egg is fast! Everything but the wireless card will be here Monday... I ordered Friday afternoon!!! This thread is going to be my project thread Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DaveGee Posted June 3, 2007 Share Posted June 3, 2007 Damn New Egg is fast! Everything but the wireless card will be here Monday... I ordered Friday afternoon!!! This thread is going to be my project thread Congrats and good luck with the build-out, the hardware seems nice and from everything I've read **supported**... Just don't get discouraged if things don't go supper smooth on the OS install... It's fairly common to have a hiccup someplace or another - the people here should be able to help you out if/when needed - also make sure you have a nice installer (as current as possible) to get X installed. A dvd with 10.4.9 + lots of optional / required drivers is floating around, you might wanna look for that. D Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mjaleo Posted June 5, 2007 Author Share Posted June 5, 2007 I got everything but the DVD RW and wireless card today. Threw it in a case with another DVD-ROM I had laying around. I hit a huge snag when the SATA DVD wouldn't work. Rigged up a USB enclosure to work with the DVD-ROM and plugged it in... Success! This is a nice little work around for all of you who can't get it to work with your SATA-only board. The rest of the install went pretty well. The screen would load sideways and the mouse was totally sideways too. I restarted and it was right. I don't know. About five restarts since it's still fine. No idea what that was about. Most everything works great. There are two problems I'm having. #1 The HD is bound to the 128GB. Any way around this? Can I use disk utility to expand it to a second partition or something? #2 Everything is really, really fast. In Xbench I score really high, like 200+, until the disk test, where I score around 5-- with under 3 MB/sec. Any reason this is so slow? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sziggle Posted June 5, 2007 Share Posted June 5, 2007 hey mjaleo, congrats on getting it up and running so quick. i am currently running an AMD hackintosh but am ready to upgrade so i am piggy-backing on your research to put together my shopping list. i have a couple questions: 1) maybe i missed the resolution somewhere up in the thread, but which video card did you end up getting? 2) any reason you chose to install 10.4.8 instead of 10.4.9? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
john_st Posted June 5, 2007 Share Posted June 5, 2007 hi, congrats on your success i was just wondering, is your Harddisk SATA or IDE? I guess if your DVD was IDE it would have worked without a hitch, right? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mjaleo Posted June 5, 2007 Author Share Posted June 5, 2007 hey mjaleo, congrats on getting it up and running so quick. i am currently running an AMD hackintosh but am ready to upgrade so i am piggy-backing on your research to put together my shopping list. i have a couple questions: 1) maybe i missed the resolution somewhere up in the thread, but which video card did you end up getting? 2) any reason you chose to install 10.4.8 instead of 10.4.9? Thanks for the congrats. It did go pretty smoothly! I did end up with the EVGA e-GeForce 7600GT, 256MB, PCI-E. Everything worked right out of the box! I think there is a link to it in this thread. I did 10.4.8 mostly because I heard mixed things about if 10.4.9 ran quite as well yet, and it was more readily available. I actually couldn't find 10.4.9 patched and everything on TPB or anywhere. .8 was easily found. hi, congrats on your success :pirate2: i was just wondering, is your Harddisk SATA or IDE? I guess if your DVD was IDE it would have worked without a hitch, right? Thanks My hard drive is SATA and my DVD-ROM was IDE, but with the way this board works, they run through the same channel, so it thought it was SATA. I'm unsure if that was the real problem or not, but using the USB IDE enclosure, it worked great! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sziggle Posted June 5, 2007 Share Posted June 5, 2007 Thanks for the congrats. It did go pretty smoothly! I did end up with the EVGA e-GeForce 7600GT, 256MB, PCI-E. Everything worked right out of the box! I think there is a link to it in this thread. I did 10.4.8 mostly because I heard mixed things about if 10.4.9 ran quite as well yet, and it was more readily available. I actually couldn't find 10.4.9 patched and everything on TPB or anywhere. .8 was easily found. i ordered pretty much the same bunch of stuff that you did except that i ordered the ASUS EN7300GT GeForce 7300GT 256MB and no HD and wireless since i am going to use my existing ones. i recently upgraded to 10.4.9 on my AMD box (should update my sig) and it wasn't so bad. i followed this guide. if anything, performance since the upgrade has seemed a touch snappier and there have been no ill effects (reliability, etc) that i can see. if you haven't solved your slow HD issues by the time my stuff comes, i will dive in with you if i see the same thing, though i will be installing my existing seagate sata disks so maybe i will not have that same issue... but i hope you figure it out first for both of our sakes! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mjaleo Posted June 5, 2007 Author Share Posted June 5, 2007 Very cool. I appreciate your offer, if you're getting the same thing! Hopefully you're not and I fix it anyway :pirate2: Annoying to say the least, but everything seems to work very quickly. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mjaleo Posted June 5, 2007 Author Share Posted June 5, 2007 Posting from it! WG311T came in the mail. The Wiki is wrong when it says this card works out of the box as Airport. Search for the wireless kext that borrows from 10.4.5. The directions in that thread say that no restart is required, but you must restart with this card after Terminal tells you it is installed. Only thing left totally not working is audio. Starting on that now. The hard drive issue is annoying. Restoring stuff from my USB 2.0 external hard drive goes about 3 MB/s. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mjaleo Posted June 5, 2007 Author Share Posted June 5, 2007 ALC883 was solved from Skippy's driver. Easy install, restart, and it works! It's called ALC883Audio.mpkg.zip. Only down to the hard drive issues! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sziggle Posted June 5, 2007 Share Posted June 5, 2007 mjaleo, did you already see this thread? and take a look at this too if you haven't already seen it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mjaleo Posted June 6, 2007 Author Share Posted June 6, 2007 sziggle, thanks for the links. The plist edit is a little bit over my head. Posted for help in that thread. Thanks! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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