Can you help me build a machine that is optimized for OSX86?

[sziggle]

stuff arrived and i am starting my build today. i have to interleave with work so it may take a while before i have anything.

 

i have been following the various threads on the disk-related issues with the MB and i'm kinda wishing i had bought the DS4 board now .

 

anyway... once i get the thing booted and see what i am seeing, i will update.

[sziggle]

mjaleo,

 

here's where i am at so far:

 

 

amazingly to me, that is the result of just pulling my system disk out of my old box -- an AMD64 box on a mobo that has an nvidia chipset -- and dropping it into this new box with the GA-965P-DS3 and the intel core2duo. i plugged the disk into the top, orange sata port.

 

i didn't think it would work, but it just fired up. like you, disks were very slow though.

 

then i ran that ds3-4pack.1.2.dmg installer (i only applied the audio patch, the ethernet patch, and the jmicron patch) and i put the disk (a seagate barracuda sata disk) on the purple sata port [EDIT: this was with the BIOS set under integrated peripherals with "Onboard SATA/IDE Device" enabled and Onboard SATA/IDE Ctrl Mode set to IDE]. and that is what you see in the picture. to me, that is still too slow on the disk, but it's a workable starting point for doing research and tweaking until we get it optimized.

 

other things that might be different... as you can see in the screenshot, i had already upgraded to 10.4.9 on my old box. i am also running a very recent universal kernel that i got from irc irc.osx86.hu in the #1049 channel. i will probably try monkeying with the intel-only kernel soon now that my AMD days are about over for a while.

 

so far everything i have looked at seems to be working good. but i haven't gone in depth yet. i am posting from the new box right here, so on the net with my wireless card. listening to music and it sounds good in stereo and that's all i've got so i won't need or know about the multi-channel. i just looked in the sound preference pane and there is no input device found, so that probably means there is more to do on the audio.

 

guess i better be updating my sig pretty soon.

[juragan]

@mjaleo

i tried to setup 1 pc to run mac next to my lovely G5. i follow your hardware setup pretty much (or close to) yours hardware setup. check this link http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=53593.

 

sorry that i'm a newbie for this hackintosh thing but i have several questions before run the installation. here is the questions:

 

got my dvd installation 10.4.7, when the installation start i should select costumize. i skip the language translation and there are option 10.4.7 patch also SSE2 patch option and SSE3 patch option.

questions:

- should i select the SSE3 patch option ? or just skip it ? or skip it both SSE option ?

- i read somewhere in the forum that IDE harddisk wont run with 965P-DS3 series. can I use IDE to USB converter ?

- my dvd-rom also have PATA interface, again should i use IDE to USB converter ?

- what about audio on-board ? is some people manage to work with it ?

- is Marvel LAN on-board working good as well ?

 

thanks before

[sarahbau]

juragan,

 

I'd recommend getting 10.4.8 instead of 10.4.7 if you can. Choose only SSE3. I'm not sure if you have the same revision of the 965P-DS3 as my boyfriend, but his LAN worked out of the box, audio worked with the ALC883 drivers, and IDE and SATA both work (if I remember correctly, his boot drive is a 120GB SATA, and he has a 500GB IDE).

[juragan]

@sarahbau

thanks for your input.. will try tonight

[sziggle]

soooooooo.... i have this box more or less working now with the GA-965P-DS3 mobo. with my seagate SATA disks connected to the top two orange ports and the BIOS configured for those ports as AHCI and native, my disk-related xbench scores are in the mid-50's which still seems a little slow to me for new SATA stuff, but i can live with it and have been using it for the past 4 or 5 days.

 

what i can't live with however is something that i have actually never seen until now. it's this horrific transparent grey overlay that falls down over the screen like a waterfall of death and then pops up a message telling me that i need to reboot.

 

F--- that.

 

there seem to be a few very specific things that crash the box dependably, but it also happens at seemingly random times -- and at those times, always associated with some heavy disk activity. discounting possibilities like bad ram or a faulty mobo, that makes me think that the issue is related to the possibly flakey ICH8 SATA support that seems to give people fits with this mobo.

 

i have tried three different systems (jas 10.4.8 ppf1 clean install, jas 10.4.8 ppf1 upgraded to 10.4.9, uphuck 10.4.9 v 1.3) and a bunch of different kernels, and with and without the ds3-4pack.1.2 patch and i see the same crashes in all cases.

 

me, i'd rather switch than fight! [and i will be very suprised if there is anyone besides me old enough to remember that ad campaign around here... but apple should revamp and spin it and insert it into their current "switch" ad campaign]

 

so i ordered an asus P5B Deluxe mobo and i am going unbuild the box and rebuild on that mobo using Mistico86's package for that board and see if i can kiss the waterfall of death goodbye again. then i'll just return the gigabyte.

 

if no better, i'll take apart and rebuild again and return the asus since it is a more expensive board.

 

i guess i was very lucky when i first installed osx on my AMD box in nov/06. from then until now june/07, under heavy use, it never once crashed. i mean not once. i literally have never seen that waterfall of death thing until i got this new hardware. it was a total shock to me the first time i saw it. now i am too sickeningly familiar with it...