OSX86tester Posted July 21, 2007 Share Posted July 21, 2007 Lo, there m8s. We was wondering whats a good or I should say decent mainboard, thats easy to setup out of the box without painless kext editing. Mainboard: Im not sure what manufacturer, But I was leaning towards intel chipset since amd is problematic though I love AMD. CPU : Intel Core2Duo Memory: something I can throw in 4Gigs of DDR2 well 4 mem slots would be a Plus! Case: I have that DVDRW I have that too, Vid Card: Nvidia (something I can get QE. to work on it) 7900GT ? HD: I can get that , Though I would love sata2 Support and usb 2 because I might make this a file server + more... So just advice on a Vid card and a mainboard. The rest is cakewalk for me. Any hints or suggestions greatly appreciated. Im not a gamer. So I dont need a 500 dollar video card, well i hope not Cheerz Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sarahbau Posted July 21, 2007 Share Posted July 21, 2007 If you want 4GB, that rules out the Intel 945 chipsets since those seem to be limited to 3GB (or 3.25GB actually) with MacOS. A 965P would probably be the best to go with if you need 4GB and still want to have good compatibility. One of the most popular boards on this forum seems to be the Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3, which will work without much fuss. I've set one up before, and while I did have to install some drivers to get everything working, no editing of kexts was necessary. As for video card, a 7900GT will be good, but if you don't need that much power, a 7300GT or 7600GT will also work very well, and are both very compatible with OS X. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
apple apple Posted July 21, 2007 Share Posted July 21, 2007 I have an asrock, if I had to do it all over again I would go with a Badaxe for the overclocking. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BJMoose Posted July 21, 2007 Share Posted July 21, 2007 After trying a couple of other boards, I settled on the Intel Bad Axe 2 (975 chipset). It seems to run every version of OSX86 with very few tweaks. Mic in doesn't work on the MB with OSX86, but I easily overcame that problem by getting an inexpensive USB Creative Labs SB 24bit unit from eBay. Now, everything that is connected works perfectly. Sarahbau's advice on video cards is good too. Remember, if you get a card with over 256mb of memory, you'll have to flash the rom to make it work properly with OSX86. Check out the MacVidia site for more info on this. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OSX86tester Posted July 21, 2007 Author Share Posted July 21, 2007 Hey guys, thanks for the input, i'll respond in order. sarahbau: 4gigs isnt as critical as I thought but just for once I wouldnt mind setting up something thats sorta decked out . Gigabyte ive seen alot of threads in the hcl wiki I wasnt too impressed the out of box setups and I dont think ive seen anyone with a 100% working system on a gigabyte, well from what ive seen I could be wrong. apple apple: Ive seen asrocks too, but I dont know which model to hunt down, and some are extinct if you know what i mean. Newegg doesnt sell a certain perfect board. As for the Badaxe board. I have seen mixed reviews and I am unclear since some things work and some dont. Hehe, yes overclockable, it will be a windows osx hybrid. I wouldnt mind it to be a killer box for osx, but not on the super high end but upgradeable when the time comes. BJMoose: Looks like you have a killer rig going by your sig . my questions is how hard was it load osx 10.4.10 ?. Ive been testing it out on a crappy dell laptop so 10.4.8 is as high as it go. any issues with processors on the badaxe?. like with core2duo and detection?. You have caught my interest in this badaxe board now. i remember its around 200 bucks or so. As for processors whats the recommendations? no Celerons, . core2duo vs quad core or hyper threading?. BTW how is parallels running on your system. As far as resources go??? Thanks everyone for the replies / feedback. X86 Tester Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BJMoose Posted July 22, 2007 Share Posted July 22, 2007 BJMoose: Looks like you have a killer rig going by your sig . my questions is how hard was it load osx 10.4.10 ?. Ive been testing it out on a crappy dell laptop so 10.4.8 is as high as it go. any issues with processors on the badaxe?. like with core2duo and detection?. You have caught my interest in this badaxe board now. i remember its around 200 bucks or so. As for processors whats the recommendations? no Celerons, . core2duo vs quad core or hyper threading?. BTW how is parallels running on your system. As far as resources go???X86 Tester First, let me say that the Bad Axe 2 board, although somewhat expensive (it's starting to come down a bit now though), will easily install just about any installer I've tried since 10.4.6 (and believe me, I try just about everything that comes down). My latest is uphuck's v1.4i. I updated using KoolKal's 10.4.10 installer. Worked like a charm. You may have to reload your video kext file after the update. I used Diabolik's dual Natit. Everything works out of the box with the exception of the mic input and the onboard Marvell controller. So you need to use the 4 drives on the ICHR7 controller. I use a front loaded backplane so all my drives are easily swappable. I only use the Marvel controller for long term external storage as I have all 4 of them connected to eSATA connectors. The mic input situation was solved by purchasing a cheap USB Creative Labs 24bit External sound module. Works great. Ethernet works out of the box too, but depending on the OSX installer you choose, you may have to edit the networkinterfaces.plist to change en2 to en0. FCS2 likes to see the ethernet as en0 in order to operate perfectly.As for recognizing Core2Duo chips, it shows my quad core as 4 cores, 1 processor, 8mb cache per core. All four core are recognized and used during resource intensive processes like video editing and rendering. Parallels runs amazingly well on my system...not as quick as the real thing...but still very usable. I use it to run all those little video editing assistance programs for everything from subtitle editing to audio enhancement (Sony SoundForge). I just recently installed MS Office 2007 into Parallels and it's quite responsive. When setting up Parallels, I allotted the maximun 1.5gb of ram to it...since I have 4gb altogether. I also chose to have as many resources as possible shifted to Parallels while it's in use. That's how I use Parallels. I still have dual boot if I want to do something more intensive in Windows. I have the cpu meter visible during operation and depending on what I'm doing, Parallels doesn't draw unusual resources. Hope this answers some of your questions. Edit: I should edit this last post to say that I used Taruga's audio patch to get the audio working...so not really out of the box on that one. Sorry I wasn't as precise as I should have been. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vlad1966 Posted July 22, 2007 Share Posted July 22, 2007 I'm selling my Hackintosh, if you're interested. See my sig for specs. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OSX86tester Posted July 24, 2007 Author Share Posted July 24, 2007 not bad BJMOOSE how much did it cost you to setup your rig?. btw when you mean audio driver you mean there's finaly a fix for the onboard issue?. as mentioned prior?. not bad vlad why for sale?. thanks OSX86TESTER Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BJMoose Posted July 24, 2007 Share Posted July 24, 2007 Audio out works fine with Taruga...still no mic in. I'm now using a USB Creative Labs 24bit Live board for all my Hack audio needs. No drivers necessary and works as soon as it's plugged in. I've got over $2600 invested in my system, but that includes I think 8 new 500gb drives. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts