So how far are we?

[tehnick]

Assuming you buy all compatible hardware, intel 915 chipset, etc. Would everything run smooth as it would on an Apple branded x86 mac?

 

From what I know, the only difference hardware and compatibility wise from it would be BIOS (since the new intel macs use EFI), and whatever TPM modules the Intel Macs may have (which is easily patchable). With those 2 out of the way, am I right to assume everything would run smooth and just like it does on a "real" mac?

[R. Bear Helms]

My mom's gateway (which is not at all similar to the 915 based reference platform) boots, installs, and natively runs OS X. Its speed actually is nice - but there's a big slowdown with PPC software that needs Rosetta (hers has no SSE3 instruction set). This discouraged me from doing much of any additional OS X testing.

 

Now I *do* have a 915 based system, P4 with SSE and hyperthreading, 2mb L2 cache, yadda yadda. I can't even install OS X on it with the full set of patches that made this possible on my mom's Gateway.

 

So smooth is completely out of the question. Loading and working reasonably fast is sort of iffy - I think it better to use a Celeron D than P4 right now. Or whatever AMD has SSE3 instructions and only 1 core (no hyper).