Many Thanks, and a P5K3 report.

[potuz]

Well, this post is just for those guys out there about to buy a P5K3-Deluxe-Wifi. I didn't find much on this board before installing, and today, after a week of building my Rig, I have a decently working Mac OS X. So I wanted to post here some results on this board. But mostly, I wanted to thank all the guys in the dev teams... your work is awesome!

 

The System is

 

Processor: Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 @ 3GHz (recognized as Q6850)

Mobo: ASUS P5K3 Deluxe-WIFI

Chipset: P35/ICH9R

VIDEO: EVGA GeForce 7600GS 512 Mb (working thanks to gotoh from macvidia)

 

 

I'm running 10.4.10 thanks to PascalW's update on 10.4.9 (thanks to the turk team, uphuck 1.4i r2 DVD). My Kernel is

uname -v
Darwin Kernel Version 8.10.1: Wed May 23 16:33:00 PDT 2007; Sochi2014:VoteForUs/RELEASE_I386

 

Well, now on the board, Networking is almost out of the box, the Marvel 88E8056 works with this tip fron Rammjet. The Realtek 8187 works using the latest Realtek driver. Visit this thread to find out more info.

 

 

HD Audio (I only tested 2-ch audio out, since I use an iSight for the audio in I need) worked with this tip.

 

 

As for the rest of the board, I'm not sure what people mean when they say that it won't wake from sleep... I didn't have problems there, but you wake it pressing the power button (and no, it's not rebooting). I can't wake it from Ethernet or USB if that's what they mean. I didn't have any problems with the SATA drives, though I have them configured as AHCI (two hard drives and the optical burner), if you have them in the BIOS as IDE, things are much slower, and I didn't try RAID.

 

The one thing that's quite bad with 10.4.10 is that there's no speedsteping (as far as I know) and each of my cores is running 10 degrees Celsius more than in Windows... I think in the instalation section in the Wiki, there should be a big warning on each upgrade, saying what are the things that you should expect to loose if you upgrade.... CPUthrottling would've enough for me to stay on 10.4.9.

 

The Video card was the only real pain in the installation. First because it is a 512Mb video card. I needed to flash this card's rom following this tip from gotoh (I can't stress enough how much I owe this guy!). Just follow his instructions as if it was a 7900 card. After that, the driver that worked for me was natit dual v.0.1. Needed to add my device id on NVDAResman.kext, Geforce*, IOGraphicFamily.kext and NVDANV40Hal.kext, and now QE/CI works flawlesly:

 

 

Finally, for some xbench results, running Xbench 1.3, a score of 153 with disk test and 256 without it, well, I have to say, after just one week of building this one, I'm quite happy with this... We'll see what this baby can do with some overclocking and some optimization on the OS side....

 

xbench_disk2.txt

xbench_nodisk2.txt

 

Well, I'm sorry for the long post... but somehow I think this mobo will be quite popular (when DDR3 go down in price) and a post like this would've helped me decide a week ago... Again, to all the people like the turk team, goto, np_, PascalW, Rammjet, etc... you made my year, and several others years!!!, My deepest Thank you!.

 

P.

 

EDIT: The Wiki is locked, so if one of the mods wants to add this mobo and the video card, at least I can vouch for both!

 

EDIT2: We now have speedstep for 10.4.10 and at least it doesn't panic with the new kernel (that I got from the usual IRC places) this baby's working beautifully so I doubt I'll be installing Leo anytime soon (probably just to play a little).