[HowTo] Building my first OSx86 box...

[stelriah]

edit

[leaf]

Hey Bofors, I'm moving my posts into your thread since it seems like the thread for issues based on setups similar to mine. I wanted to post some recent bench tests. They're rather unimpressive. I'm looking for feed back on how to get this up. I did do this bench test with the Beam Sync diasbled using the terminal command and it seems to be 10 points lower than the test I did when I fist installed 10.4.5. But here it is:

 

Results 79.61

System Info

Xbench Version 1.2

System Version 10.4.5 (8G1454)

Physical RAM 1024 MB

Model ADP2,1

Drive Type WDC WD2500KS-00MJB0

CPU Test 66.70

GCD Loop 91.39 4.82 Mops/sec

Floating Point Basic 77.78 1.85 Gflop/sec

vecLib FFT 47.59 1.57 Gflop/sec

Floating Point Library 65.98 11.49 Mops/sec

Thread Test 169.37

Computation 153.96 3.12 Mops/sec, 4 threads

Lock Contention 188.19 8.10 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads

Memory Test 104.05

System 91.44

Allocate 57.62 211.61 Kalloc/sec

Fill 130.75 6357.30 MB/sec

Copy 128.12 2646.36 MB/sec

Stream 120.69

Copy 115.16 2378.65 MB/sec

Scale 119.63 2471.42 MB/sec

Add 124.57 2653.71 MB/sec

Triad 123.86 2649.59 MB/sec

Quartz Graphics Test 65.56

Line 60.39 4.02 Klines/sec [50% alpha]

Rectangle 47.52 14.19 Krects/sec [50% alpha]

Circle 48.69 3.97 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha]

Bezier 80.13 2.02 Kbeziers/sec [50% alpha]

Text 176.94 11.07 Kchars/sec

OpenGL Graphics Test 202.26

Spinning Squares 202.26 256.58 frames/sec

User Interface Test 50.47

Elements 50.47 231.64 refresh/sec

Disk Test 57.44

Sequential 98.24

Uncached Write 120.55 74.02 MB/sec [4K blocks]

Uncached Write 107.84 61.02 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Uncached Read 72.09 21.10 MB/sec [4K blocks]

Uncached Read 107.77 54.17 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Random 40.59

Uncached Write 14.50 1.53 MB/sec [4K blocks]

Uncached Write 85.49 27.37 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Uncached Read 92.67 0.66 MB/sec [4K blocks]

Uncached Read 141.08 26.18 MB/sec [256K blocks]

[stelriah]

bofors, do you plan on installing 10.4.6?

[StickyDigits]

Hi guys,

 

Good news (sorta). I managed to get RAID 0 working using my 2 SATA drives.

 

After trying to set up the RAID using 10.4.3 - 10.4.5 off the CD install (which never worked, I can't seem to be able to drag the drives to the RAID window during the initial setup routine) I decided to take an other approach.

 

I setup 10.4.3 and an old IDE drive I had on hand. After rebooting off this drive, I was able to see my SATA drives. I had to trash all off my current partition info off the 2 SATA drives. Even though I make a living writing Windows software, I have yet to use Windows off my home system since OSX has been installed so why waste space for XP on this box. And my OSX partiotions were just to small to be usefull.

 

Once I had 2 clean virgin drives, I was able to drag both drives to the raid window, setup a new Name for the RAID and specify type 0. Click on create and voila - A 280gb RAID 0.

 

Granted, this is a software RAID versus a hardware one, but the performance should still be interesting. I'll let you know in a day or so once I get 10.4.6 setup completly.

 

I still can't get the new 10.4.6 video drivers setup correctly, which is annoying me to no end.

[simisimisimi]

bofors,

 

i have a similar setup to yours and i am thinking about buying 2 benq 1680x1050 widescreen display. they are also similar to your dell displays. i also have intel 945 onboard graphics and an add2 card.

 

is there a possibility i may never get these to work? because i'm thinking about buying them tomorrow. may there be any problems getting them to work?

 

thanks

 

simon

[cararllo]

Hi!

I've got an issue i hope somebody can help me with. After using my system and not being turned off for about 2 days, performance starts to go down. I can also see that my VM is more than 10 Gb. big.

Is this normal??

Thanks a lot!

[doggyworld]

Quick question for those with GMA 950 video.. do you guys experience the mouse and screen artifacts found with other video options? Or does this work perfectly like in a regular Mac OSX?

[Bearcat]

Quick question for those with GMA 950 video.. do you guys experience the mouse and screen artifacts found with other video options? Or does this work perfectly like in a regular Mac OSX?

 

I have no issues with mouse or screen artifacts. I am using the myzar 10.4.4/5 install

[stelriah]

bofors are you up to 10.4.6 yet? if you are could you give us a little walkthrough for the steps, ie. kext you had to back up and other configuring.

[pluggulp]

Just updated to 10.4.6 on my test partition.

Starting from a myzar 10.4.5 installation I used the myzar 10.4.6 package updater (Version 3) that can be found on pirate bay.

Everything still seems to work except for the sound which presumably can be fixed in the same way as for 10.4.5 (i.e. by copying AppleHDA.kext from 10.4.3).

 

QE & CI are supported so no probs with the graphics drivers.

 

Haven't noticed any significant increase in speed and xbench score stayed more or less the same.

I think there might be some improvements for Rosetta but I can't measure that objectively.

 

I will wait for more reports coming in before I apply the upgrade to the productive partition.

[pluggulp]

To add:

 

1.) Sound can indeed be fixed using 10.4.3 AppleHDA.kext

2.) Aperture 1.1 runs natively in this setup despite GMA 950 not being listed as one of the supported Graphics Cards ...

[stelriah]

To add:

 

1.) Sound can indeed be fixed using 10.4.3 AppleHDA.kext

2.) Aperture 1.1 runs natively in this setup despite GMA 950 not being listed as one of the supported Graphics Cards ...

 

are you using the infamous bofor setup?

[vfilby]

I recently updated to 10.4.5 using the myzar image on almost the exact same hardware as bofors. I know that bofors is taking the "if it isn't broken don't fix it" philosophy but I am wondering about sse3. Everyone seems to think that the "sse3 ss" in the system profiler means that sse3 is there but I looked at this:

 

$ cat /mach_kernel | strings | grep -i -a "Maxxuss"

MAXXUSS CPUID Panic Patch

MAXXUSS RTC Panic Patch

MAXXUSS Kernel (v0.4)

MAXXUSS AMD Enabler

MAXXUSS SSE3-Emulator v5.0-8G1165

 

This seems to indicate that I am really only using sse2! Bofors and others with this hardware profile, have you updated your kernel? I remember reading that bofors had problems getting a minimally patched kernel to work. If there is a minimally patched kernel what patches are needed (looking to save trial and error work).

 

Also, what is the verdict on the amd_enabler. Is it necessary for intel cpus to or can I overlook it?

 

Cheers,

V

[pluggulp]

stelriah: I'm using the same motherboard as bofors, with less RAM and less CPU power. For all practical purposes of compatibility it is the motherboard features that matter.

 

vfilby: what you're describing is a side-effect of the myzar install DVD which has been discussed earlier in this thread and in more detail in other threads (which are referenced by this thread). In summary: the myzar DVD isn't super-clean in terms of minimal patching as myzar tried to create a DVD that works on as many systems as possible .Some of the information in the system profiler will be displayed wrong. However, there's no performance penalty.

[Bearcat]

"if it isn't broken don't fix it" philosophy but I am wondering about sse3.

This has been discussed over and over again, there is no performance penalty, regardless of what some people believe. If they suffered a performance penalty, it was from something else. The SSE2 emulator only gets invoked when an SSE3 instruction throws an invalid op code, and SSE3 CPUs do not throw this for SSE3 instructions.

vfilby: what you're describing is a side-effect of the myzar install DVD which has been discussed earlier in this thread and in more detail in other threads (which are referenced by this thread). In summary: the myzar DVD isn't super-clean in terms of minimal patching as myzar tried to create a DVD that works on as many systems as possible .Some of the information in the system profiler will be displayed wrong. However, there's no performance penalty.

Like pluggulp said.

 

There are always non-believers.

 

I was running the 10.4.5 Myzar DVD, and my profiler didn't show SSE3, but my xbench score was 105, which didn't change from 10.4.3.

 

I recently installed the Jas 10.4.6, which allows a little more customization of the patches, not much, but a little more.

 

I selected the 10.4.6 updates, and selected my CPU as SSE3. and also selected the Sigmatel 9220 audio, then upgraded my 10.4.5 system.

 

After adding 0x27dc8086 to the AppleIntel8255x.kext (info.plist) networking was working again, and I made no changes to the audio, it worked fine.

 

My xbench score is 106, and my profiler shows my CPU as having SSE3.

 

With this I conclude that with or without the SSE3 emulator patch installed, if your CPU has SSE3 then there is no performance penalty, hence the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".

 

 

about.tiff profiler.tiff

[vfilby]

My apologies, I was getting some mixed answers from different places. Once I thought about it (strangly after I posted) I realized that the SSE3 emulation traps a bad instruction call, if there are not bad instructions than there is no use of the SSE3 emulation. I will get around to installing 10.4.6 soon.

 

With 10.4.5 I need to use the 10.4.3 audio kext, it sounds like JaS's patches can handle that automagically. Did you install 10.4.6 from a clean install or an update? I just installed this so there is not much to lose if I need to do a 10.4.6 install.

 

Any big advantages to upgrading to 10.4.6? (perhaps a forum redirect?)

 

V

[pluggulp]

I used the myzar package updater to update a myzar 10.4.5 systems to 10.4.6

 

Haven't noticed much difference. However, if you want to run Aperture 1.1 you

purportedly need to upgrade 10.4.6.

 

I expect another upgrade soon as there have been some major security holes

with image handling in OS X publicised, which can be used to execute code:

 

http://www.security-protocols.com/modules....rticle&sid=3231

 

Apple'd better fix these soon ... otherwise they will have some very bad publicity if

someone creates a working exploit.

 

correct link:

 

http://www.security-protocols.com/modules....rticle&sid=3233

[Bearcat]

With 10.4.5 I need to use the 10.4.3 audio kext, it sounds like JaS's patches can handle that automagically. Did you install 10.4.6 from a clean install or an update? I just installed this so there is not much to lose if I need to do a 10.4.6 install.

I upgraded the Myzar 10.4.5 system with Jas 10.4.6. I did not repartition or erase the drive, as I wanted to keep everything I had installed there. I haven't investigated it fully yet, but it may be that Jas includes the 10.4.3 HDA Audio. It seemed to work just fine, other then the normal problems with HDA Audio (audio coming out of the wrong port).

 

Make sure you select customize, so you can select the 10.4.6 upgrade and the patches for your CPU.

 

I don't think there is anything really new in 10.4.6, other then fixes. I think there are Rosetta fixes which help more PPC apps run correctly, though.

 

Also, sorry if my post sounded harsh, it was not intended that way.

[shaughn]

I upgraded my system to 10.4.6 using Jas's new ISO. Everything works except my system hangs at the Apple logo when i have AHCI turned on in the bios. How can i get my system working with AHCI turned on? Do I need to copy AppleAHCIPort.kext and IOAHCIFamily.kext from 10.4.4 like Bofors did? Also, my hard drive shows up in the system profiler as serial ATA when i have IDE turned on in the bios. Thanks.

[bofors]

Hi guys,

 

Good news (sorta). I managed to get RAID 0 working using my 2 SATA drives.

 

After trying to set up the RAID using 10.4.3 - 10.4.5 off the CD install (which never worked, I can't seem to be able to drag the drives to the RAID window during the initial setup routine) I decided to take an other approach.

 

I setup 10.4.3 and an old IDE drive I had on hand. After rebooting off this drive, I was able to see my SATA drives. I had to trash all off my current partition info off the 2 SATA drives. Even though I make a living writing Windows software, I have yet to use Windows off my home system since OSX has been installed so why waste space for XP on this box. And my OSX partiotions were just to small to be usefull.

 

Once I had 2 clean virgin drives, I was able to drag both drives to the raid window, setup a new Name for the RAID and specify type 0. Click on create and voila - A 280gb RAID 0.

 

Granted, this is a software RAID versus a hardware one, but the performance should still be interesting.

 

This is great news. So the trick is to boot off an IDE hard drive? Has anyone else been able to reproduce these results?

 

bofors, do you plan on installing 10.4.6?

 

No, not for a while, I have other things that I need to work on. Furthermore, my 10.4.5 installation is working perfectly. I have had ZERO kernel panics or spontaneous reboots with it.

 

i have a similar setup to yours and i am thinking about buying 2 benq 1680x1050 widescreen display. they are also similar to your dell displays. i also have intel 945 onboard graphics and an add2 card.

 

is there a possibility i may never get these to work? because i'm thinking about buying them tomorrow. may there be any problems getting them to work?

Sorry to reply so late, but this board was becoming too much of a distraction for me so I took a break for a few weeks.

 

Any ways, there is no reason why you should not be able to run dual 1680 x 1050 displays too. There are a lot of discounted panels on the market now to choose from, but make sure that you have one VGA panel and one DVI panel, or get ones that do both my Dells or this 20" BenQ for $295 after rebate from NewEgg:

 

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16824014105

 

In other bargain hunting new, NewEgg has a variety of refurbished motherboards, including many Intel boards, availible at serious discounts. The Intel D945GTPLKR (microATX) is availible refurbished for $78:

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...82E16813121292R

[stelriah]

bofor, i am using your setup along with the dell 200fpw. when i boot up and also when i go into full screen mode with the itunes visualizer i can only see a partial image, the screen is shifted to the far right. do you know of a way to address this?

[bofors]

What versions of iTunes are you running? What version of OS X? I just installed 6.0.4 and the visualizer seems to work perfectly on my 10.4.5 system.

 

Full screen runs fine on my both DVI and VGA display (depending on which one I have set to be my main screen).

 

Do you have problems running say QuickTime in fullscreen mode too?

 

Does iTunes' visualizer work fine when it is not in fullscreen mode?

 

What happens when you change the visualizer size in fullscreen mode?

 

When you go to fullscreen mode does the Dell panel "auto-adjust" itself?

[stelriah]

What versions of iTunes are you running? What version of OS X? I just installed 6.0.4 and the visualizer seems to work perfectly on my 10.4.5 system.

 

Full screen runs fine on my both DVI and VGA display (depending on which one I have set to be my main screen).

 

Do you have problems running say QuickTime in fullscreen mode too?

 

Does iTunes' visualizer work fine when it is not in fullscreen mode?

 

What happens when you change the visualizer size in fullscreen mode?

 

When you go to fullscreen mode does the Dell panel "auto-adjust" itself?

 

I am running itunes 6.0.4 (3)

I am running 10.4.5

I am using the onboard video connected via VGA

Quicktime runs fine in fullscreen mode. (im pretty sure this is because it does not adjust the screen resolution)

When i change the visualizer size in fullscreen mode the image is still shifted to the right.

When i go into fullscreen mode the Dell panel does not auto adjust itself. i used to see it do that at the intel splash screen when i would boot up but it has been awhile since it has done that.

 

i believe this problem to be the failure of the auto adjust feature. there have been several times when i try to go into the bios menu and the image would be so far to the right that i would have to turn the monitor off and let it readjust so that it wasnt so far to the right or sometimes i would just reboot.

[bofors]

i believe this problem to be the failure of the auto adjust feature. there have been several times when i try to go into the bios menu and the image would be so far to the right that i would have to turn the monitor off and let it readjust so that it wasnt so far to the right or sometimes i would just reboot.

 

Ok, so I sounds the problem is with the Dell panel. Just to confirm, you have the same 2005FPW that I have right?

 

I think I have had some minor image shifting on boot, slightly to the left, but never had anything affecting the BIOS menu.

 

Are you running at 1680 x1050? Does lowering the resolution have any affect?

 

What happens if you manually trigger the "auto-adjust" by pushing the "+" button on the panel, which is second from the right (next to the power button)? Interestingly enough, my current VGA panel auto-adjusts but my current DVI panel does nothing when I push that button (I have yet to try switching VGA<->DVI to see that is the issue).

 

If you go into the Dell on screen menu, can you move the image so it is properly positioned in your display? What is your "Positioning" set at? My horizontal/vertical is at 50/50. Check to make sure you Picture-In/By-Picture (PIP/PBP) is off. Have you tried the "Factory Reset"?

[stelriah]

Ok, so I sounds the problem is with the Dell panel. Just to confirm, you have the same 2005FPW that I have right?

 

I think I have had some minor image shifting on boot, slightly to the left, but never had anything affecting the BIOS menu.

 

Are you running at 1680 x1050? Does lowering the resolution have any affect?

 

What happens if you manually trigger the "auto-adjust" by pushing the "+" button on the panel, which is second from the right (next to the power button)? Interestingly enough, my current VGA panel auto-adjusts but my current DVI panel does nothing when I push that button (I have yet to try switching VGA<->DVI to see that is the issue).

 

If you go into the Dell on screen menu, can you move the image so it is properly positioned in your display? What is your "Positioning" set at? My horizontal/vertical is at 50/50. Check to make sure you Picture-In/By-Picture (PIP/PBP) is off. Have you tried the "Factory Reset"?

 

thanks. pushing the + button fixes the problem for the itunes visualizer. im gonna see if it will fix the boot up problem too.

 

does anyone know how to change the fullscreen visualizer to anything higher than the highest it offers.

 

also, im pretty sure this unrelated but i somehow lost support for quartz extreme and core image. i think i might have messed with some settings at some point and i hadnt restarted my computer in a long time. how can i get this back without reinstalling osx?