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8-core motherboard for hackintosh?


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Nah, I can get a 2.3ghz quad-core Xeon for around $300. The motherboard is what's giving me trouble. Has anyone had experience with this?

 

Look for server boards (intel have some good models). But they are very expensive. I think buying a MacPro is more cheaper too...

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buy to cores of them ( 1000 euro each) and you realize you come cheaper buying an apple

 

 

Look for server boards (intel have some good models). But they are very expensive. I think buying a MacPro is more cheaper too...

 

I'm starting to realize what I've spent could have been towards building the perfect Mac Pro hack would cost just as much or even more than a legitimate Mac Pro, especially what they have now, it's hard to beat...8-Cores is what I'm looking for. If anyone has any motherboards that can benchmark and match a Mac Pro, that'd be nice....but I'm slowly raising my flag up.

 

The best video editing machine would be the Mac Pro...find benchmarks that convince me to turn back... :,( (I'm hoping i'm not regretting this route quite frankly)

 

ON the contrary, I already own a MacBook Pro an, iMac and a Mac mini...so yeah.

 

 

Closest thing right now? (not too sure):

Intel® 5000X Chipset

http://www.intel.com/products/chipsets/5000x/index.htm

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16813121044

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Hi, I've got an Asus motherboard that supports up to 2 quad core.

The model is DSBV-DX (server motherboard), it costed me around 250€.

The things I don't like about this motherboard, it has no sound, and no PCIe x16. I've got to by an adaptor (PCIe x8 to PCIe x16).

 

 

These are the specs for my hacintosh:

CPU Intel Core 2 Quad Xeon 5300

MOTHERBOARD Asus DSBV-DX

MEMORY 4 x 2gb Kingston FB-DIMM

GRAPHICS XFX nVIDIA 5200

AUDIO Creative 5.1 usb

DRIVES 500gb seagate sata, HP 212 DVD-R

OS Mac OS X 10.5.1 Leopard // Windows XP x64-Edition

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I'd like to get more info on motherboards for 8-core hackintoshes.

 

I am getting 2 8-core mac pros, but I am also building a NAS raid box and I have to get a server motherboard for the PCI-X slot needed for the raid card. It would be nice if I could get it to run OSx86, but if it won't I have an unused copy of Windows Server 2008 laying around.

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Hi, I've got an Asus motherboard that supports up to 2 quad core.

The model is DSBV-DX (server motherboard), it costed me around 250€.

The things I don't like about this motherboard, it has no sound, and no PCIe x16. I've got to by an adaptor (PCIe x8 to PCIe x16).

 

 

These are the specs for my hacintosh:

CPU Intel Core 2 Quad Xeon 5300

MOTHERBOARD Asus DSBV-DX

MEMORY 4 x 2gb Kingston FB-DIMM

GRAPHICS XFX nVIDIA 5200

AUDIO Creative 5.1 usb

DRIVES 500gb seagate sata, HP 212 DVD-R

OS Mac OS X 10.5.1 Leopard // Windows XP x64-Edition

 

what kind of x8 to x16 pci-express adapter are you talking about? I've never heard of one before, please share. Also, i was eying this motherboard for awhile, do you know if the Mac Pro still uses that intel chipset (5000v)? I'd love to get my hands ona Mac Pro Logic motherboard :D

 

nice sig :D

 

 

I'd like to get more info on motherboards for 8-core hackintoshes.

 

I am getting 2 8-core mac pros, but I am also building a NAS raid box and I have to get a server motherboard for the PCI-X slot needed for the raid card. It would be nice if I could get it to run OSx86, but if it won't I have an unused copy of Windows Server 2008 laying around.

 

 

Yes, i hope this thread opens up more 8-core possibilities. For a NAS Raid box, how many hard drives are you using? Why don't you just buy a NAS Raid box external unit, and sell that PCI-X RAID card, in that way, it can run externally, or backed up however, and be compatible in both Mac Pros you'll have as well as compatible with PCs depending on what kind of hard drive format you choose, but since it's a NAS Raid, shouldn't the drives be available via network? I'm in the process of building a server RAID box myself, and realized it might be cheaper to buy an external solution...let's keep this thread going! :)

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I think with the newest macpros, theres no real way to beat apple with 8 cores.

Asus Board about 350.- Euros here

2 x Intel Xeon 5440 CPU Quad 2.83 GHz about 1200.- Euros

8 GB RAM about 280.- Euros

Videocard (possible with 8x PCIe? Adapter?) about 100.-

Harddrive (if only one) about 100.-

DVD Drive about 40.-

External USB Sound, FireWire Card and so about 50.-

And, not to forget, a good, silent Case with a good PSU, about 250 Euros.

Add a Copy of Leo for 130 Euros and you have 2510.- Euros.

 

 

Get a Mac Pro with 8 GB RAM and you have about 2640.-.

Thats only 130.- Euros more than the Self-Built Machine. And you have to built it, fiddle around with the install and have a LOT of woprk to have it work well.

No go, i think. No sense.

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Here's the spec's on the latest build I've come up with:

-2x e5405 ($500)

-MBD-X7DAL-E-O ($360)

-PC-V2100BPlus II ($350)

-RocketRAID2240 ($335)

-PC P&C 750w ($170)

-6x 2GB DDR2-667 ($445)

-2600XT ($100)

-16x Seagate 1TB ($4400)

 

Total = $2260 + $4400 (HDDs)

 

I suppose I could use a PCI-E raid card and a standard LGA775 mobo, except the PCI-E cards that support this many HDDs are 2x as expensive and don't work with OSx86.

Either way I end up going, it'll still be much cheaper than an xServe RAID + server.

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Hi, I've got an Asus motherboard that supports up to 2 quad core.

The model is DSBV-DX (server motherboard), it costed me around 250€.

The things I don't like about this motherboard, it has no sound, and no PCIe x16. I've got to by an adaptor (PCIe x8 to PCIe x16).

These are the specs for my hacintosh:

CPU Intel Core 2 Quad Xeon 5300

MOTHERBOARD Asus DSBV-DX

MEMORY 4 x 2gb Kingston FB-DIMM

GRAPHICS XFX nVIDIA 5200

AUDIO Creative 5.1 usb

DRIVES 500gb seagate sata, HP 212 DVD-R

OS Mac OS X 10.5.1 Leopard // Windows XP x64-Edition

 

Do 8 cores work just fine it it though? What is not working on board?

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I have an 8 core Xeon workstation I just built a couple of months ago, I would be willing to try and get hackintosh to work on it if I thought it were doable.

 

Here is the mobo I used: Tyan S-2696 (i5000XT)

I have 2 Xeon X-5365 (Clovertown) processors which came directly from Intel (yes these are the ones they put in the Mac Pros)

I also have 8 gigs of fully buffered Crucial Ram

and a nice RAID-0 array consisting of 4 WD RE2 500GB drives for a total of 2 TB (roughly).

Topped off with a BFG 8800 Ultra.

 

All of this is in an Antec P-190/1200 Chassis which is easily the nicest eatx case I have ever used, it includes 2 seperate power supplies linked together for a total of 1200 watts, very nice setup and insanely good cable management.

See the Case Here

 

The boot drive is a Raptor-X 150 and I have a nice DVD-r/rw drive installed as well.

 

I would seriously consider doing a hackintosh with this machine just for benchies if nothing else.

But I would also love to have it as an FCP workstation if it could be made stable enough.

 

Where does one begin? and how do we know the chipset can be made to work?

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I have an 8 core Xeon workstation I just built a couple of months ago, I would be willing to try and get hackintosh to work on it if I thought it were doable.

 

Here is the mobo I used: Tyan S-2696 (i5000XT)

I have 2 Xeon X-5365 (Clovertown) processors which came directly from Intel (yes these are the ones they put in the Mac Pros)

I also have 8 gigs of fully buffered Crucial Ram

and a nice RAID-0 array consisting of 4 WD RE2 500GB drives for a total of 2 TB (roughly).

Topped off with a BFG 8800 Ultra.

 

All of this is in an Antec P-190/1200 Chassis which is easily the nicest eatx case I have ever used, it includes 2 seperate power supplies linked together for a total of 1200 watts, very nice setup and insanely good cable management.

See the Case Here

 

The boot drive is a Raptor-X 150 and I have a nice DVD-r/rw drive installed as well.

 

I would seriously consider doing a hackintosh with this machine just for benchies if nothing else.

But I would also love to have it as an FCP workstation if it could be made stable enough.

 

Where does one begin? and how do we know the chipset can be made to work?

 

/drool...

 

It'd be great if you could try your hackintosh with that rig and report back to us :P I'm in the middle of building mine...I want to finish soon, just need to top it off with a motherboard.

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Someone was running an 8-core Supermicro motherboard here, you may want to check those out. Boards are around $500 iirc.

 

 

So I found this Supermicro server motherboard that is quite convincing, it fits ATX as well:

 

SUPERMICRO MBD-X7DAL-E-O Dual 771 Intel 5000X ATX Server Motherboard - Retail

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16813182101

Manufacture info: http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherb...0X/X7DAL-E+.cfm

 

 

^ Could it be that one?

 

 

*Also, I stumbled upon your thread regarding the Bad Axe 2, that too, seems quite convincing for me as well, have you read or thought about the Intel BOXDX38BT motherboard? Aren't the hardware pretty close to BX2?

 

 

EDIT: A more recent Intel Chipset: 5400

 

 

SUPERMICRO MBD-X7DWA-N Dual 771 Intel 5400 Extended ATX Server Motherboard

http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherb...400/X7DWA-N.cfm

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...icro-_-13182130

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So I found this Supermicro server motherboard that is quite convincing, it fits ATX as well:

 

SUPERMICRO MBD-X7DAL-E-O Dual 771 Intel 5000X ATX Server Motherboard - Retail

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16813182101

 

^ Could it be that one?

*Also, I stumbled upon your thread regarding the Bad Axe 2, that too, seems quite convincing for me as well, have you read or thought about the Intel BOXDX38BT motherboard? Aren't the hardware pretty close to BX2?

 

Well, I've given quite a bit of thought to dual-processor and quad-processor motherboards. The main reason for going multi-processor is to improve render and compile times of audio, video, cg, and code. However, it's not a very cost-effective approach. You can build a quad-core single-processor Hackintosh starting at $800, while a dual-processor motherboard starts at $500 alone and requires the more expensive Xeon processors ($1200 for the 3ghz quads, and you need two!). Apple has a great program called Qmaster that allows you to pipe material to be rendered via Terminal, Maya, Compressor, etc. to a network "render farm"...you can build a complete 2.4ghz Quad + 8 gigs of ram render node for about $1,000 in a rackmount case (just use my guide, then get a cheap video card, small hard drive, and rackmount case). Compare that to $3,000 minimum for the dual-processor model and you'll quickly realize that it's just not very cost-effective - you can do $1,000 for a single-processor quad-core workstation plus two render nodes with the remaining $2,000!

 

It is, however, a very neat concept and if you have the cash and don't want to mess with network rendering then it's definitely a good way to go. If I had oodles of money I would get the quad-processor machine and build myself a monster 16-core workstation and simply not deal with any network render farm setup. The dual-processor model is, of course, a lot cheaper than the quad-processor model and you could save at least a little bit of money over Apple while retaining customization. But then you run into the problems that Hackintoshes have, such as lack of support for dual video cards. You can blow $3,000+ on a nice dual-processor 8-core machine but you can't run 8 monitors like the Mac Pro can, you can only run two. There are a lot of things to think about when spending that kind of money!

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Get a Mac Pro with 8 GB RAM and you have about 2640.-.

Thats only 130.- Euros more than the Self-Built Machine. And you have to built it, fiddle around with the install and have a LOT of woprk to have it work well.

No go, i think. No sense.

 

Where did you get that price from? With 8 gigs RAM I'm seeing more like Eur 3200.- without taxes. I'd get the standard 2gb RAM and then buy some compatible sticks for more reasonable prices though. For example here: http://www.transintl.com

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Well, I've given quite a bit of thought to dual-processor and quad-processor motherboards. The main reason for going multi-processor is to improve render and compile times of audio, video, cg, and code. However, it's not a very cost-effective approach. You can build a quad-core single-processor Hackintosh starting at $800, while a dual-processor motherboard starts at $500 alone and requires the more expensive Xeon processors ($1200 for the 3ghz quads, and you need two!). Apple has a great program called Qmaster that allows you to pipe material to be rendered via Terminal, Maya, Compressor, etc. to a network "render farm"...you can build a complete 2.4ghz Quad + 8 gigs of ram render node for about $1,000 in a rackmount case (just use my guide, then get a cheap video card, small hard drive, and rackmount case). Compare that to $3,000 minimum for the dual-processor model and you'll quickly realize that it's just not very cost-effective - you can do $1,000 for a single-processor quad-core workstation plus two render nodes with the remaining $2,000!

 

It is, however, a very neat concept and if you have the cash and don't want to mess with network rendering then it's definitely a good way to go. If I had oodles of money I would get the quad-processor machine and build myself a monster 16-core workstation and simply not deal with any network render farm setup. The dual-processor model is, of course, a lot cheaper than the quad-processor model and you could save at least a little bit of money over Apple while retaining customization. But then you run into the problems that Hackintoshes have, such as lack of support for dual video cards. You can blow $3,000+ on a nice dual-processor 8-core machine but you can't run 8 monitors like the Mac Pro can, you can only run two. There are a lot of things to think about when spending that kind of money!

 

Hmm...video rendering seems to be one of my priorities in considering a dual-socket processor workstation, how can I go about setting a 'network render farm'? Simply through Qmaster and set it to utilize the per say 8gb ram? I'dl ike to know more info, and am interested (i hope others are as well), I look forward to hearing more about this. And yes, you are definitely right about many points. It's definitely a whole new budget if I were to turn dual-processor and whatnot, though, they've become more affordable...

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OK Guys, I am ABSOLUTELY BLOWN AWAY.

News FLASH.

This may not be a big deal to you but it is HUGE to me so here goes:

 

As I mentioned in my post above I have a working 8 core monster which I dual boot to XP32 and XP64, the system is ROCK SOLID STABLE with Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 which is what I use it for.

 

I also have a perfectly stable Hackintosh which has been up for 2 days straight since I installed Kalyway 10.5.1 on Saturday.

 

Just on a whim I decided to try something tonight.

I had a brand new 250GB external USB drive so I installed Kalyway on that drive after booting the Kalyway DVD.

I selected a couple of extra things that were different from my working hackintosh, mainly the nvInject driver since the octa has the 8800 Ultra.

After the installation I plugged the USB drive inot my octa and booted from that USB drive AND IT WORKED!

I got a working Leopard desktop running!

Now, the sound does not work, nor does it see my big RAID-0 but it sees all the other drives, it sees the 8800 even though it only reports as 256MB ram for the video card and it sees all 8 cores.

 

Now this system currently has a very important project on the RAID-0 so I was really apprehensive about going any further and testing anything out so I played around for a bit and got the hell outta there but it worked, it booted and it seemed stable.

 

WTF am I going to do?

I really want to try and get this beast up on Final Cut as an 8 core power house but I need help here, I am lost, I would not even know where to begin with trying to figure out onboard sound or anything else.

 

One other thing that was weird I will mention, is that when I went to shut down I got a panic with the big square screen taking over my display which said I needed to power down my computer by pressing the power button which I did and my system started back up into XP no problem so all is well there.

 

Start shelling out the ideas brothers, I will risk it and try to make it work, but I should say that this is a very good start that it even booted into Leopard wouldnt you say?

 

Graymarye

 

have owned this mobo: Intel S5000 XVN

And I did not like it as a workstation mobo, it was limited for my needs, I found it to be finicky at best, it was the first board I used to build my octa as an XP workstation. I ended up trashing a few of the pins on one of the sockets and I actually threw the board in the trash believe it or not, $500.00 in the freaking trash.

 

I also have an AMD dual Opteron 285 workstation that sits gathering dust right now believe it or not.

My point to all of this is that I also have at least 2 and perhaps 3 eATX server chassis that are like brand new which I would be willing to sell cheap just to get them out of my attic.

 

Here is what I have:

(1) Antec Titan 650

(1) SuperMicro 745

(1) Intel 5299E

 

The Intel Chassis is absolutely brand new, both it and the SuperMicro chassis come with built in power supplies, I modded the Intel chassis PSU cable to accomodate the Tyan S-2696 because of the placement of the 8 pin power connector (I made it longer) and it worked perfectly.

The Antec will take whatever PSU you want to use.

The SuperMicro chassis has an 8 bay hot swappable SATA unit which is pretty cool.

All of the chassis are black and still in the boxes the came shipped in.

 

As an added note I also have a $500.00 PC Power & Cooling 1KW PSU which is arguably the baddest ass PSU on the planet, it is just a little loud for my liking, it is also damn near brand new and for sale.

 

Let me know where you are and I will gladly make this worthwhile for you if you want any of these items, I am done with them and any one of them would make a nice chassis for your project.

The PSU is second to none and comes with certification papers which boast of it's accuracy and stability.

PC P&C TurboCool 1KW-SR

 

Check it out, let me know and let me know where to beging with my octa....I wanna roll.

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I have an 8 core Xeon workstation I just built a couple of months ago, I would be willing to try and get hackintosh to work on it if I thought it were doable.

 

Here is the mobo I used: Tyan S-2696 (i5000XT)

I have 2 Xeon X-5365 (Clovertown) processors which came directly from Intel (yes these are the ones they put in the Mac Pros)

I also have 8 gigs of fully buffered Crucial Ram

and a nice RAID-0 array consisting of 4 WD RE2 500GB drives for a total of 2 TB (roughly).

Topped off with a BFG 8800 Ultra.

 

All of this is in an Antec P-190/1200 Chassis which is easily the nicest eatx case I have ever used, it includes 2 seperate power supplies linked together for a total of 1200 watts, very nice setup and insanely good cable management.

See the Case Here

 

The boot drive is a Raptor-X 150 and I have a nice DVD-r/rw drive installed as well.

 

I would seriously consider doing a hackintosh with this machine just for benchies if nothing else.

But I would also love to have it as an FCP workstation if it could be made stable enough.

 

Where does one begin? and how do we know the chipset can be made to work?

 

So what is working and what is not working now? This board can be had for 280$ on new egg open box right now. So thats not a bad price at all! The audio is ACL888 which many many people have gotten working and there are plenty of patches for *search skippyretard*

 

Does the networking work though? How is everything running? Give us the skinny.

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Ok right now I am doing a major backup of all of my digitized video content to my external MyBooks, it is going to take a couple of hours to get 300 gigs backed up, it was already backed up to one of the MyBooks but I need to make sure I have everything completely safe before I start testing so I am backing it up to another MyBook as well as to my Windows Home Server so it will be in 3 places safely in case the worst happens.

 

I will then boot back into the USB drive and start some tests.

 

I can tell you this, Leppard recognized my Firewire 800 card right off the bat because I could see the MyBooks which are connected Firewire 800 so thats a good thing.

 

Give me an hour or so to get this stuff safe and I will dive in.

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Hello all, this is my first post. I have been lurking for a while reading up on what I'd like to build. After going an Apple sponsered Leopard demo for work I got the MAC PRO bug even worse than before. I immeadiately priced an 8-Core system on their website and it was close to $4000.00. I then thought about building my own and that is how i found this forum. My research indicates that a Greencreek 5000x chipset board should be fairly close to what Apple sell. I went about looking for such a board and found a Supermicro Workstation board that someone has already mentioned. Here is the system I priced out on Newegg.com

 

 

1-SUPERMICRO MBD-X7DAL-E-O ATX Server Motherboard $360.00

2-Intel Xeon E5410 2.33GHz LGA 771 80W Processors $592.00

2-SAMSUNG SpinPoint T Series 500GB 3.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive $218.00

4-mushkin 1GB 240-Pin DDR2 FB-DIMM Server Memory $331.96

1-BFG Tech GeForce 8800GT BFGE88512GTOCE Video Card $279.00

1-Antec True Power Trio TP3-650 ATX12V 650W Power Supply $109.99

Modded G5 Case (free from work) $0.00

 

Total $1,890.95

 

Does anyone know if this combo will work? I would like to build this with my tax return this year. I will watch this thread to see how others do until I buy my hardware.

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Hello all, this is my first post. I have been lurking for a while reading up on what I'd like to build. After going an Apple sponsered Leopard demo for work I got the MAC PRO bug even worse than before. I immeadiately priced an 8-Core system on their website and it was close to $4000.00. I then thought about building my own and that is how i found this forum. My research indicates that a Greencreek 5000x chipset board should be fairly close to what Apple sell. I went about looking for such a board and found a Supermicro Workstation board that someone has already mentioned. Here is the system I priced out on Newegg.com

1-SUPERMICRO MBD-X7DAL-E-O ATX Server Motherboard $360.00

2-Intel Xeon E5410 2.33GHz LGA 771 80W Processors $592.00

2-SAMSUNG SpinPoint T Series 500GB 3.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive $218.00

4-mushkin 1GB 240-Pin DDR2 FB-DIMM Server Memory $331.96

1-BFG Tech GeForce 8800GT BFGE88512GTOCE Video Card $279.00

1-Antec True Power Trio TP3-650 ATX12V 650W Power Supply $109.99

Modded G5 Case (free from work) $0.00

 

Total $1,890.95

 

Does anyone know if this combo will work? I would like to build this with my tax return this year. I will watch this thread to see how others do until I buy my hardware.

 

Right now someone is messing with the Tyan board and we will see how that goes. Its basically the same setup except it doesnt support the processor you chose. If all goes well it could open the door to 1/2 cost Macpro's which would be nice!

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Ok here we go, I am actually writing this post from the Octa machine right now.

Obviously Networking is fine.

This thing boots extremely fast even from the USB drive so I can only imagine what it would do with a good install on a fast SATA drive!

Ethernet is only working on one of the ports so far but I am sure there is a way to fix that hopefully.

Both Firewire 800 ports of my add in PCI-X card are workng perfectly, the MyBook 1TB drives are mounted and show as Firewire drives.

I have both monitors lit up right now @ 1280x1024 as these are 19" 4x3 LCD's and that is native max resolution for these monitors.

My DVD drive (IDE) is working perfectly, I can burn a DVD with Toast and DVD's mount just fine.

Aslo the built in Firewire works, I just plugged in a small FW drive I have and it mounted fine.

 

 

The hardware tab in System Profiler shows the following.

 

Model Name: Mac

Model Identifier: Mac Pro

Processor Speed: 2.66 GHz

Number Of Processors: 2

Total Number Of Cores: 8

L2 Cache (per processor): 4 MB

Memory: 4 GB

Bus Speed: 100 MHz

Boot ROM Version: Hack.int.0sh

Serial Number: YM8659M6W0A

 

 

 

Heres the GPU stuff:

 

GeForce 8800 GTS:

 

Chipset Model: GeForce 8800 GTS

Type: Display

Bus: PCIe

PCIe Lane Width: x16

VRAM (Total): 256 MB

Vendor: NVIDIA (0x10de)

Device ID: 0x0193

Revision ID: 0x00a2

ROM Revision: NVinject 0.1.5

Displays:

SENERGY 714:

Resolution: 1280 x 1024 @ 60 Hz

Depth: 32-bit Color

Core Image: Hardware Accelerated

Main Display: Yes

Mirror: Off

Online: Yes

Quartz Extreme: Supported

Rotation: Supported

SENERGY 714:

Resolution: 1280 x 1024 @ 60 Hz

Depth: 32-bit Color

Core Image: Hardware Accelerated

Mirror: Off

Online: Yes

Quartz Extreme: Supported

Rotation: Supported

 

SAS (Serial Attached SCSI)

 

SAS Domain 0:

 

Vendor: LSILogic

Product: S2696

Revision: Firmware 1.10.5.0

Initiator Identifier: 63

 

 

I have a Creative Audigy sound card in here right now and onboard Audio turned off in Bios but I will pull the Audigy and test the onboard unless someone knows how to get the Audigy working?

 

At this point I am over my head guys, so heres a little history on me.

 

I owned my very first Mac which was a IIc back in 1986 or whatever.

From then until roughly 2004 I owned every single new Mac that came out, my last brand new Mac purchase was a G4 dual 1.24Ghz MDD, at that point I became so pissed that I could not upgrade my Macs more than buying a processor add in card that I gave up on Apple unless they were given to me to use at work (which they were a lot) in favor of PC hardware which I could build to suit my needs.

 

So suffice it to say, I have very little real world experience in OSX.

I have been into video work for almost 15 years now, and back in 2000 I was actually sent a letter from the (then) head of the QuickTime team at Apple congratulating me on being the first person to acheive full screen 640x480 streaming video online as I was the head of a major television stars web video efforts, Apple was happy with me, and I still have that letter, and people still give me free stuff to play with as a result of those efforts back then.

 

Now, I am going to need some serious help here if you want to know anything about this system.

I am willing to guinnea pig my pride and joy to help the collective but you need to be willing to help me through this, you also need to assume I know absolutely nothing about the unix kernel, nor do I know anything about code or how to do codec dumps or anything of the sort....I need to be guided.

 

I did root through the manula for the 2696 and also called tech support to ask a few questions and what I discovered is that virtually everything on the board is controlled by the Intel ESB2 chip, everything except one of the PCI slots and the processors. so the fact that my massive RAID is not showing up may have something to do with the fact that it is a RAID that OSX cant see for some reason?

There are 5 hard drives in this machine that dont show up under Leopard right now, everything else seems to work.

The onboard Audio is a Realtek w/ALC888 as was mentioned.

 

Let the games begin, and at some point maybe we should do this via chat or some other faster form of communication .?.

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Quadros Anyone?!? http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=83090

 

 

Ok right now I am doing a major backup of all of my digitized video content to my external MyBooks, it is going to take a couple of hours to get 300 gigs backed up, it was already backed up to one of the MyBooks but I need to make sure I have everything completely safe before I start testing so I am backing it up to another MyBook as well as to my Windows Home Server so it will be in 3 places safely in case the worst happens.

 

I will then boot back into the USB drive and start some tests.

 

I can tell you this, Leppard recognized my Firewire 800 card right off the bat because I could see the MyBooks which are connected Firewire 800 so thats a good thing.

 

Give me an hour or so to get this stuff safe and I will dive in.

 

Which Firewire 800 Card do you have?

 

 

Hello all, this is my first post. I have been lurking for a while reading up on what I'd like to build. After going an Apple sponsered Leopard demo for work I got the MAC PRO bug even worse than before. I immeadiately priced an 8-Core system on their website and it was close to $4000.00. I then thought about building my own and that is how i found this forum. My research indicates that a Greencreek 5000x chipset board should be fairly close to what Apple sell. I went about looking for such a board and found a Supermicro Workstation board that someone has already mentioned. Here is the system I priced out on Newegg.com

 

 

1-SUPERMICRO MBD-X7DAL-E-O ATX Server Motherboard $360.00

2-Intel Xeon E5410 2.33GHz LGA 771 80W Processors $592.00

2-SAMSUNG SpinPoint T Series 500GB 3.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive $218.00

4-mushkin 1GB 240-Pin DDR2 FB-DIMM Server Memory $331.96

1-BFG Tech GeForce 8800GT BFGE88512GTOCE Video Card $279.00

1-Antec True Power Trio TP3-650 ATX12V 650W Power Supply $109.99

Modded G5 Case (free from work) $0.00

 

Total $1,890.95

 

Does anyone know if this combo will work? I would like to build this with my tax return this year. I will watch this thread to see how others do until I buy my hardware.

 

as much as this might be going against the thread, For a couple hundred difference, I'd still go for a real Mac Pro... :angry2:

 

Ok here we go, I am actually writing this post from the Octa machine right now.

Obviously Networking is fine.

This thing boots extremely fast even from the USB drive so I can only imagine what it would do with a good install on a fast SATA drive!

Ethernet is only working on one of the ports so far but I am sure there is a way to fix that hopefully.

Both Firewire 800 ports of my add in PCI-X card are workng perfectly, the MyBook 1TB drives are mounted and show as Firewire drives.

I have both monitors lit up right now @ 1280x1024 as these are 19" 4x3 LCD's and that is native max resolution for these monitors.

My DVD drive (IDE) is working perfectly, I can burn a DVD with Toast and DVD's mount just fine.

Aslo the built in Firewire works, I just plugged in a small FW drive I have and it mounted fine.

 

 

The hardware tab in System Profiler shows the following.

 

Model Name: Mac

Model Identifier: Mac Pro

Processor Speed: 2.66 GHz

Number Of Processors: 2

Total Number Of Cores: 8

L2 Cache (per processor): 4 MB

Memory: 4 GB

Bus Speed: 100 MHz

Boot ROM Version: Hack.int.0sh

Serial Number: YM8659M6W0A

 

 

 

Heres the GPU stuff:

 

GeForce 8800 GTS:

 

Chipset Model: GeForce 8800 GTS

Type: Display

Bus: PCIe

PCIe Lane Width: x16

VRAM (Total): 256 MB

Vendor: NVIDIA (0x10de)

Device ID: 0x0193

Revision ID: 0x00a2

ROM Revision: NVinject 0.1.5

Displays:

SENERGY 714:

Resolution: 1280 x 1024 @ 60 Hz

Depth: 32-bit Color

Core Image: Hardware Accelerated

Main Display: Yes

Mirror: Off

Online: Yes

Quartz Extreme: Supported

Rotation: Supported

SENERGY 714:

Resolution: 1280 x 1024 @ 60 Hz

Depth: 32-bit Color

Core Image: Hardware Accelerated

Mirror: Off

Online: Yes

Quartz Extreme: Supported

Rotation: Supported

 

SAS (Serial Attached SCSI)

 

SAS Domain 0:

 

Vendor: LSILogic

Product: S2696

Revision: Firmware 1.10.5.0

Initiator Identifier: 63

 

 

I have a Creative Audigy sound card in here right now and onboard Audio turned off in Bios but I will pull the Audigy and test the onboard unless someone knows how to get the Audigy working?

 

At this point I am over my head guys, so heres a little history on me.

 

I owned my very first Mac which was a IIc back in 1986 or whatever.

From then until roughly 2004 I owned every single new Mac that came out, my last brand new Mac purchase was a G4 dual 1.24Ghz MDD, at that point I became so pissed that I could not upgrade my Macs more than buying a processor add in card that I gave up on Apple unless they were given to me to use at work (which they were a lot) in favor of PC hardware which I could build to suit my needs.

 

So suffice it to say, I have very little real world experience in OSX.

I have been into video work for almost 15 years now, and back in 2000 I was actually sent a letter from the (then) head of the QuickTime team at Apple congratulating me on being the first person to acheive full screen 640x480 streaming video online as I was the head of a major television stars web video efforts, Apple was happy with me, and I still have that letter, and people still give me free stuff to play with as a result of those efforts back then.

 

Now, I am going to need some serious help here if you want to know anything about this system.

I am willing to guinnea pig my pride and joy to help the collective but you need to be willing to help me through this, you also need to assume I know absolutely nothing about the unix kernel, nor do I know anything about code or how to do codec dumps or anything of the sort....I need to be guided.

 

I did root through the manula for the 2696 and also called tech support to ask a few questions and what I discovered is that virtually everything on the board is controlled by the Intel ESB2 chip, everything except one of the PCI slots and the processors. so the fact that my massive RAID is not showing up may have something to do with the fact that it is a RAID that OSX cant see for some reason?

There are 5 hard drives in this machine that dont show up under Leopard right now, everything else seems to work.

The onboard Audio is a Realtek w/ALC888 as was mentioned.

 

Let the games begin, and at some point maybe we should do this via chat or some other faster form of communication .?.

 

Again, if it doesn't take too much out of your time, List all your hardware, or you can just update you sig :)

 

I'll read more and give feedback when I have time late, good luck with the whole process, this is loooking very good and thanks for sharing this knowledge with us, very appreciated!

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