NeilM Posted April 28, 2009 Share Posted April 28, 2009 I've been getting really excited about buying one of the Acer Aspire Revos when they are available. I was curious how easy or difficult do you think it would be to get OS X running nicely on it. It looks like it uses the NVIDIA 9400 chipset that the most recent macbooks use. What do you guys think? Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/164051-nvidias-ion-platform-and-os-x/ Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nick14 Posted April 28, 2009 Share Posted April 28, 2009 The wifi might not work and the sound but the rest should Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/164051-nvidias-ion-platform-and-os-x/#findComment-1143649 Share on other sites More sharing options...
NeilM Posted April 28, 2009 Author Share Posted April 28, 2009 Do you know what chip the soundcard is supposed to have? I couldn't find it anywhere online. I figured the wifi was going to be luck of the draw, but I plan to have this thing sitting by my TV where there is ethernet anyways. Also, Dell 1390 express cards are pretty cheap. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/164051-nvidias-ion-platform-and-os-x/#findComment-1143744 Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nick14 Posted April 28, 2009 Share Posted April 28, 2009 The Enthernet might not also work Never know Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/164051-nvidias-ion-platform-and-os-x/#findComment-1143756 Share on other sites More sharing options...
NeilM Posted April 28, 2009 Author Share Posted April 28, 2009 dang. Well at least having a USB device constantly plugged into a desktop is less of an issue than if it were a laptop. Still sucks though. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/164051-nvidias-ion-platform-and-os-x/#findComment-1143759 Share on other sites More sharing options...
Geist Posted May 1, 2009 Share Posted May 1, 2009 hopefully they will sell these itx boards to customers. the intel essential itx boards with 945gc chipset are awesome for osx, i`m running 10.5/vanilla on a D945GCLF, probably the most compatible board out there. everything works out of the box, and a decent performance aswell atom 330 (dual core) + 9400M would be some great bang for the buck (considering the 9400m can decode h.264 1080p on the fly and the has a nice gaming performance) Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/164051-nvidias-ion-platform-and-os-x/#findComment-1145988 Share on other sites More sharing options...
NeilM Posted May 3, 2009 Author Share Posted May 3, 2009 Theres been a couple of announcements of some Ion nettops with a dual core Atom N330. Don't know if these will be available in the US or not, but surely someone will release a similar one over here. http://www.ionbased.com/2009/04/two-new-io...ttops-unveiled/ Theres also been a couple of Ion motherboards announced by Zotac. http://en.expreview.com/2009/04/20/zotacs-...-the-works.html Another concern I have is will OS X be able to make use of the 9400m the same way windows does? Windows offloads the video decoding to the GPU and thats why it is able to decode such high res video, but will OS X do the same thing? Also, what about Linux? I guess we will have to wait and see. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/164051-nvidias-ion-platform-and-os-x/#findComment-1147429 Share on other sites More sharing options...
Geist Posted May 4, 2009 Share Posted May 4, 2009 Another concern I have is will OS X be able to make use of the 9400m the same way windows does? Windows offloads the video decoding to the GPU and thats why it is able to decode such high res video, but will OS X do the same thing? it should work, mainly because the 9400M in the current mini does indeed support h.264 encoding (works for me - 1080p with as little as 5% load on both cores). the zotac board looks sweet, i want one atom 330 and 9400m + 2 gigs`o`ram = kickass budget hackintosh Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/164051-nvidias-ion-platform-and-os-x/#findComment-1148425 Share on other sites More sharing options...
nightalon Posted May 7, 2009 Share Posted May 7, 2009 Ion platforms such as the Acer Aspire Revo seem like a great fit for OS X. While the Ion reference board didn't have WIFI, or had it on-board, the Revo has a full-height MiniPCI-E slot so you can use the WIFI card of your choosing. I think I can see the audio chipset in the hot hardware review (includes tear-down/disassembly) but the text on the IC is illegible since it's out of focus. I wonder if the chipset will prove fully compatible just like the Intel ones are. (there were x86 Development test-beds for the Intel chipsets, so support might be grandfathered in, (way back from 10.3.9) but the answer to this question may be in the forums somewhere) The cool thing about the Ion platform is that unlike on netbooks, the desktop chips will do 64-bit. That doesn't matter much today, but Snow Leopard will use 64 bit kernel and extensions for systems that support it. Also, the Ion's 9400 GPU does CUDA/OpenCL, and I imagine Snow Leopard will have heavy OpenCL integration. Unfortunately the 230 Atom CPU on the Revo is not dual-core, and it also won't do SSE4 or VT, so Parallels performance would be a bit iffy, I think. Still, it would be great for an always-on Mac system, assuming the 10.5.6 OS X install DVDs play nice with the NVidia chipset, and I think they probably will. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/164051-nvidias-ion-platform-and-os-x/#findComment-1150114 Share on other sites More sharing options...
derko Posted May 7, 2009 Share Posted May 7, 2009 I tried getting OSX Leopard to start up.... but it does not Boot132 simply restarts without errors and iatkos gets a kernel panic even before i can get into the installation process... Maybe, some kext´s have to be modified for the Nvidia Ion chipset ? Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/164051-nvidias-ion-platform-and-os-x/#findComment-1150660 Share on other sites More sharing options...
Geist Posted May 9, 2009 Share Posted May 9, 2009 where did you get the board? i want one Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/164051-nvidias-ion-platform-and-os-x/#findComment-1151967 Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nick14 Posted May 11, 2009 Share Posted May 11, 2009 I would recommend : Point of View ION330 Best preformace Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/164051-nvidias-ion-platform-and-os-x/#findComment-1152918 Share on other sites More sharing options...
derko Posted May 13, 2009 Share Posted May 13, 2009 In Germany, you can get it at: http://www.notebooksbilliger.de/advanced_s...words=acer+revo or by searching: www.geizhals.at Last but not least: www.amazon.de Did anybody else try Leopard on that ? Do you know something about additional kext´s ? Thanks! Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/164051-nvidias-ion-platform-and-os-x/#findComment-1155188 Share on other sites More sharing options...
vorchan Posted May 13, 2009 Share Posted May 13, 2009 I got a Acer Revo R3600 Vista version last weekend and having been trying to get OS X working since then. I have tried all the distro's I can find and only one appears to get anywhere and that is iDeneb v1.4 10.5.6 It installs but when it reboots and starts up for the first time it hangs. Booting it with ths -v command shows it stops at: "using 9175 buffer headers and 4096 cluster buffer IO headers" and I have idea why. I have also tried booting into safe mode and single user mode and all do the same thing. I have also done several reinstalls with different kernel's and extra kexks added (such as graphics, chipset etc) but they all do the same thing. Open to suggestions if anyone has any. To answer the question earlier about audio it uses the ALC662 audio DAC from Realtek. Wifi is from Atheros and is a removable mini PCIe card Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/164051-nvidias-ion-platform-and-os-x/#findComment-1155195 Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nick14 Posted May 14, 2009 Share Posted May 14, 2009 Your DVD is bad Burned or is a Bad brand so reburn the disc or use an other distro Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/164051-nvidias-ion-platform-and-os-x/#findComment-1155767 Share on other sites More sharing options...
vorchan Posted May 14, 2009 Share Posted May 14, 2009 Your DVD is bad Burned or is a Bad brand so reburn the disc or use an other distro Thanks for the suggestions. I did not actually use a DVD to install from. Since I was trying lots of distro to save disks I retored them to a USB hard drive with Chameleon 2.0RC1 and booted from that. For iDeneb I have tried both DVD and hard drive install and they both give the same result. As for other distro's I have tried: Retail install - kernel panic custom distro for MSI Wind U100 iPC Kalyway 10.5.1 and 10.5.2 versions Leo4All v3 iAtkos 5i XxX v2 all the above either kernel panic or reboot the PC for you get to the install screen. Are there anyother distro's you can suggest? Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/164051-nvidias-ion-platform-and-os-x/#findComment-1155787 Share on other sites More sharing options...
Geist Posted May 15, 2009 Share Posted May 15, 2009 In Germany, you can get it at: http://www.notebooksbilliger.de/advanced_s...words=acer+revo or by searching: www.geizhals.at Last but not least: www.amazon.de Did anybody else try Leopard on that ? Do you know something about additional kext´s ? Thanks! cheers mate, but that`s only the revo and single core. i think i will wait for the itx boards with the 330 atom (dual core) Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/164051-nvidias-ion-platform-and-os-x/#findComment-1157188 Share on other sites More sharing options...
NeilM Posted May 15, 2009 Author Share Posted May 15, 2009 Here are some high-ish res photos of some of the chips on the Zotac board. There are more on my blog: http://www.ionbased.com/2009/05/tons-of-ne...ttops-pictured/ Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/164051-nvidias-ion-platform-and-os-x/#findComment-1157280 Share on other sites More sharing options...
derko Posted May 15, 2009 Share Posted May 15, 2009 I guess that the Kernel crash is because of the NVIDIA Chipset. So i maybe a "problem" of any ION based PC. I dont know how to get along with this, but if you have anything for me to test, tell me please Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/164051-nvidias-ion-platform-and-os-x/#findComment-1157539 Share on other sites More sharing options...
vorchan Posted May 16, 2009 Share Posted May 16, 2009 I have made a bit more progress at getting OS x running on my Ion based Acer Revo. I have found that the reason most of the distro and my successful install of iDeneb either rebooted or stopped at: "using 9175 buffer headers and 4096 cluster IO buffer headers" Can be fixed by going into the BIOS and turning off hyperthreading for the Atom CPU. Since doing this I have been able to get the iDeneb install to boot past the above problem but it stops later on. I have been able to do a retail install and get this to boot into OSX by using this command on the Darwin boot option point "Graphics Mode"="640x480x32" -v It did take a LONG time to boot though.Since OS X in such a low res there is not much you can do but at least it boots. Upon a reboot and with out the above command I got a kernel panic caused by the AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement kext which I have since removed. It now gets further but into OS X it appears to stop at different places according to the debug when using -v. From the debug that scrolls past when using -v on retail I have found that OS X does not reconise the GPU but it does reconise the Ethernet, this is one of the places it hangs. Anyone have any suggestion for me to try? Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/164051-nvidias-ion-platform-and-os-x/#findComment-1158162 Share on other sites More sharing options...
NeilM Posted May 16, 2009 Author Share Posted May 16, 2009 I don't know a ton about osx86, but maybe natit or titan may help with the GPU? I honestly don't know enough to help past that. Sucks that the GPU doesn't work out of the box, because I was expecting that to be the easiest. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/164051-nvidias-ion-platform-and-os-x/#findComment-1158214 Share on other sites More sharing options...
leonowski Posted June 4, 2009 Share Posted June 4, 2009 Is the BIOS for the Acer Revo Award or AMI? If so, try patching it with DSDT patcher: http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=142434 That should fix the issue. I have made a bit more progress at getting OS x running on my Ion based Acer Revo. I have found that the reason most of the distro and my successful install of iDeneb either rebooted or stopped at: "using 9175 buffer headers and 4096 cluster IO buffer headers" Can be fixed by going into the BIOS and turning off hyperthreading for the Atom CPU. Since doing this I have been able to get the iDeneb install to boot past the above problem but it stops later on. I have been able to do a retail install and get this to boot into OSX by using this command on the Darwin boot option point "Graphics Mode"="640x480x32" -v It did take a LONG time to boot though.Since OS X in such a low res there is not much you can do but at least it boots. Upon a reboot and with out the above command I got a kernel panic caused by the AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement kext which I have since removed. It now gets further but into OS X it appears to stop at different places according to the debug when using -v. From the debug that scrolls past when using -v on retail I have found that OS X does not reconise the GPU but it does reconise the Ethernet, this is one of the places it hangs. Anyone have any suggestion for me to try? Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/164051-nvidias-ion-platform-and-os-x/#findComment-1169318 Share on other sites More sharing options...
derko Posted June 4, 2009 Share Posted June 4, 2009 Hi ! Nice to see some progress. We will need a Bios file for that right ? I´ll have a look at Acer´s Supportpages, maybe i can find a Bios File to check this one out EDIT: I found a new Bios Update File. Could you please explain to me what i have to take care of ? Meanwhile, i will read the Link you gave to us... Thanks a lot ! Is the BIOS for the Acer Revo Award or AMI? If so, try patching it with DSDT patcher: http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=142434 That should fix the issue. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/164051-nvidias-ion-platform-and-os-x/#findComment-1169832 Share on other sites More sharing options...
derko Posted June 4, 2009 Share Posted June 4, 2009 The DSDT Patcher says: "No DSDT Module found in ACPI Table"...I have no idea what i have to do, sorry for that but i am really excited... Maybe i can try several things, but i need some Help from you ! Biosfile is attached.... Thanks ! Hi !Nice to see some progress. We will need a Bios file for that right ? I´ll have a look at Acer´s Supportpages, maybe i can find a Bios File to check this one out EDIT: I found a new Bios Update File. Could you please explain to me what i have to take care of ? Meanwhile, i will read the Link you gave to us... Thanks a lot ! Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/164051-nvidias-ion-platform-and-os-x/#findComment-1169858 Share on other sites More sharing options...
raypou Posted June 5, 2009 Share Posted June 5, 2009 I've got one of the Zotac boards that I'm trying to get Leopard going on. No success yet with boot-132 and 10.5.6 Retail DVD... Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/164051-nvidias-ion-platform-and-os-x/#findComment-1170685 Share on other sites More sharing options...
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