[HowTo] Building my first OSx86 box...

[Bearcat]

Thanks Bofors,

 

At a little over $400, I am not sure the Viewsonic VX2025 is cheap enough to bet the Dell 2005FPW on value as they are about the same price in my mind. I really like the Dell's adjustable height and extra features.

 

Given the choice I would have chosen the Dell 2005FPW. Different countries have different prices. Here the DELL was the equivalent of $699, and the Viewsonic was the equivalent of $500, I'll probably regret it, but I opted for the cheaper one.

[stelriah]

is it possible to rewrite the bios for the intel board he chose and flash it so that the screen is blank until the apple symbol appears, just like a real mac?

[bofors]

I think Intel has a program whereas computer manufacturers can customize the start-up screen to display their graphics instead of Intel's. So it certainly is possible to do this, but I think working to use Apple's EFI on these Intel boards which support EFI would be alot a more fruitful. Not only would you get a cleaner startup but all kinds of other benefits like target disk mode and the use of EFI drivers.

[stelriah]

I think Intel has a program whereas computer manufacturers can customize the start-up screen to display their graphics instead of Intel's. So it certainly is possible to do this, but I think working to use Apple's EFI on these Intel boards which support EFI would be alot a more fruitful. Not only would you get a cleaner startup but all kinds of other benefits like target disk mode and the use of EFI drivers.

 

is this something that you are working on?

[Hitesh]

Got my Syncmaster looks lovely .... Im posting my Xbench results now ....Also im trying to find how to Disable Beam sync but cant get the folder .... right now the score is 81.67..hopefully crosses 100 after Disabling Beam sync .... Can youll explain which folder to go to for that ? Or do i need some tools installed for it ?

[bofors]

is this something that you are working on?

No, I really do not have time to seriously work on OSx86 projects and still am behind on finishing my update to 10.4.5.

 

Also im trying to find how to Disable Beam sync but cant get the folder .... right now the score is 81.67..hopefully crosses 100 after Disabling Beam sync .... Can youll explain which folder to go to for that ? Or do i need some tools installed for it ?

You need to install the Xcode tools, they should be on your installation disk. The easiest way to disable Beam Synch. is to run Quartz Debug. It will be in /Develeper/Applications/Permorance Tools/ . Turn it off and than Force Quit the Quartz Debug to make the change "stick".

[simisimisimi]

hey bofors,

 

do you have mouse tearing with your graphics?

would you do the dual monitor setup with add-2 card again, or would you add another graphics card with 2x dvi? if so, which graphics card would you buy?

 

after all, would you even do the whole osx86 box thing again, or is it too much of a hassle?

 

thanks, simon

[bofors]

do you have mouse tearing with your graphics?

No, aside from a rare kernal panic which I think is graphics related, that aspect of the system is pretty much perfect on 10.4.3 (I plan to run 10.4.5 once I have a minimally patched version running).

would you do the dual monitor setup with add-2 card again,

Absolutely, I got this part right. It works prefectly, it is cheap, and real graphic cards do not work 100% yet.

or would you add another graphics card with 2x dvi?

if so, which graphics card would you buy?

Otherwise, I would certainly look at ATI x1600's.

after all, would you even do the whole osx86 box thing again, or is it too much of a hassle?

For me, taking the plunge into the OSx86 box world was definitely a good decision and by choosing the right set of hardware I have kept the hassle to a minimum. However, it is not quite the same experience as just buying a Mac off the shelf.

[xerxes1358]

hi Bofors,

 

once you are done with the 10.4.5 install could you make a step for step plan what you did to make your

config work? Or could you make a complete install dvd?

[bofors]

I certainly can post a step by step guide for 10.4.5 once I have it done. I have already downloaded 10.4.4 so I can Maxxuss' guide and minimally patch, which probably would the best way to go. However, "unpatching" the AMD enabling parts of the of pre-patched 10.4.5 install may be faster and achieve the same result. I want to note that my pre-patched 10.4.5 install appeared to work fine, I am just striving for perfection here and in particular I need to know that any kernal panics or other problems are not the result of excess patching.

[Bearcat]

I'd be inerested to know, if there is any reproducibility in the kernel panics.

 

I have now had the myzar system running on this hardware for a week now, light load, but on for the whole time, and currently have had no kernel panics.

[bofors]

I have yet to dig through any crash logs after a kernel panic, but I suppose I should. As far reproducibility goes, these panics are fairly rare and not every day. They used to happen regularly with the Screen Saver, like I would come to the machine and find that it had paniced. That problem went away weeks ago. Now, I think I could reproduce them by playing movies. Ether way, I think is graphic related and could be related to the stress of driving dual 1680 x 1050 displays.

 

However, I am more concerned about the spontaneous reboot problem. This seems clearly to be a hardware problem and I wondering if anyone has experienced this phenomena. Again I think this is graphic related and am swtiching from Intel DVMT to the "fixed" mode of memory allocation for the GMA 950 in BIOS. DVMT dynamically allocates and deallocates main memory to the GMA 950 as needed, while I have the "fixed" mode set to just use a static 128 MB, which I can easily spare.

 

On a related note, I still am wondering why OS X shows that I have only 3.25 GB of RAM. Even after the GMA 950 takes a piece (which should always be less than 256 GB), I still seem to be missing about half a GB. I have yet to look at that issue under 10.4.5.

[Ben22]

Bofors,

 

First off, Thanks for the time you've taken to describe your buid experience. I've built basically a copy of your system and it's working out quite nicely. I'm using an ATI X1600 instead of the built in video (I have a Dell 24" comming in this week). I was hoping to get good compatibiliy with the current iMac ATI drivers but I get the ocational mouse artifacts like every one else I guess.

 

If you don't mind I have a quick question with regards to disabling Beam Sync. You describe forcing a quit of quartz debug to make the settings stick. Could you please describe what you mean by a forced quit. All my attemps at this point to make it stick on restart have failed misrably. The only quit I can find is the obvious Quit from the Quartz debug menu.

 

Thanks..

[bofors]

Force Quit is like using Control-Alt-Delete in Windows. In OS X you can do it two ways:

 

(1) Select "Force Quit" from the Apple menu item in the main menubar (top left of your screen).

 

or

 

(2) Hit Command-Option-Escape (or their equivalents on a PC keyboard).

 

This brings up a window in which you select applications to Force Quit and a button to exectue the command.

[shaughn]

I found this note in the online manual. It's a better manual than what I got with my motherboard, same motherbaord as you, minus two pci slots. Anyway, this might or might not be relavant to your memory problem.

 

ftp://download.intel.com/support/motherbo...d1047101_en.pdf

 

NOTE:

System resources (such as PCI and PCI Express) require physical memory address locations that

reduce available memory addresses above 3 GB. This may result in less than 4 GB of memory

being available to the operating system and applications.

[bofors]

Thanks Shaughn, I think that explains it. Although the processor has 64-bit extensions, it looks like we are dealing with a 32-bit chipset limited to addressing only 4GB of "system resources".

[bofors]

 

I just read a review of the Antec P150 case/PSU: http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?pageID=210...bmit=Go&cID=892

 

Because I dislike the Antec Sonatta II's drive bay front door and blue LED / silver front IO port cover, I would much rather have the Antec P150 which can be had for not too much more in price ($101.43).

[Bearcat]

Looks like a nice case.

 

I agree with the hinged front door.

 

I didn't even know it had blue leds next to the silver cover on the ports, they didn't work for me, until I opened the case to put in a Belkin FW card, then I noticed a power connector from the front of the case, which I plugged in, then I had blue leds.

 

lol, think I'll disconnect it, next time I'm inside the case.

[swag01]

I just reinstalled my environment after upgrading my hard disk. As before, my network was working from the start. Its odd that everyone else has to update the network .kext.

 

One thing I did notice is that once I put the device id for my X1600, the network connection started having timeout issues. I'll try to update the device id for the network to see if this fixes the problem.

 

Other than the graphics issues, the system is running great. I can only run Doom in the windowed mode because the os doesn't know about the resolutions. Also, I still get the mouse problem.

 

I'm usually an AMD guy and was wondering how old the 930 chipset is? The machine seems slower than my AMD 64 3200+ 754 which I purchased over a year ago. I purchased the Intel for compatibility with Os x, but really notice a difference in performance between the two machines.

 

An example where I know it is slower is I have music software on both machines and the latency on the AMD was 5 ms but 6 ms on the intel chip. Just interesting that my over year old machine out performs a machine I just purchased (and paid a lot more for).

[bofors]

how old the 930 chipset is?

I assume you mean the 945 chipset, it looks like it less than a year old. I think the Pentium is more likely to be the source of the problem than the chipset. Either way we should expect to the Conroe and Woodcrest chips and their new chipsets to meet or beat AMD in about six months. I expect to be building a quad-core (dual-chip) Woodcrest system about September.

[simisimisimi]

bofors, have you ever thaught about overclocking your pentium d 920? i heard it may go up to 4 ghz or so.

 

simon

[bofors]

Overclocking has been suggested a number of times, but these Intel motherboards offer no such features while other motherboard vendors do. I have no experience and little interested in overclocking because my workload can be distributed. When I need more computing horsepower, I will likely just build more boxes. However, considering that Intel prices seem to increase exponentially with clockspeed, I think overclocking makes sense for some people who want to play games.

 

I had another spontaneous reboot today, right now I am much more concerned about system reliability than performance.

[StickyDigits]

Hi Bofors

 

Well the Dell 24" came in today. Tried setting it up using the DVI output of my ATI X1600 but could not figure out how to change the resolution setting.

 

For the hell of it, I plugged in the monitor using the VGA output off the built in GMA card -- and I must say except for my refresh rate stuck at 60 - I am very pleased. I guess I got the ATI for nothing because the intel card works fine. (for anyone wondering - I hit 121.12 in XBench1.2 with beamsync deactivted - I'm not a gamer so at this point I don't think I'll notice the diffrence. Wonder if I can find a standalone GMA950 with a DVI-D port?)

 

Did you manage to change the refresh rate with your Dell monitors? If I drop my resolution to about 1280x1024 the 75 Hertz is available -- otherwise it's greyed out at a higher resolution. Tested in XP and it work fine at 1920x1400 at 75 hertz. Just wondering if there is a way of poking it in the right place.

 

My build seems quite stable at this point - I'm almost ready to turn this box into my main workstation so i should be able to let you know it's stable system wise. Our build at this point is almost exacly identical - my processor is the Intel D940 and my ram - I bouht OCZ 667 4-4-4-8 but the intel board seems to detect it as 5XX 4-4-4-10 -- The board flipped when I put it in aggresive mode but if I manually set it to 667 4-4-4-10 seems to work fine. I'll have to play around with it a bit to see how fast I can tweak it.

 

I'm running the patched MYZ iso 10.4.5 and it seems fine except for memory reporting and SSE3. I should try to learn doing a full manual build the Maxxuss way just to get a feel for it and see if the AMD patches slow anything down.

 

Thanks again for shareing.

[pluggulp]

I have yet to dig through any crash logs after a kernel panic, but I suppose I should. As far reproducibility goes, these panics are fairly rare and not every day. They used to happen regularly with the Screen Saver, like I would come to the machine and find that it had paniced. That problem went away weeks ago. Now, I think I could reproduce them by playing movies. Ether way, I think is graphic related and could be related to the stress of driving dual 1680 x 1050 displays.

 

However, I am more concerned about the spontaneous reboot problem. This seems clearly to be a hardware problem and I wondering if anyone has experienced this phenomena. Again I think this is graphic related and am swtiching from Intel DVMT to the "fixed" mode of memory allocation for the GMA 950 in BIOS. DVMT dynamically allocates and deallocates main memory to the GMA 950 as needed, while I have the "fixed" mode set to just use a static 128 MB, which I can easily spare.

 

On a related note, I still am wondering why OS X shows that I have only 3.25 GB of RAM. Even after the GMA 950 takes a piece (which should always be less than 256 GB), I still seem to be missing about half a GB. I have yet to look at that issue under 10.4.5.

 

 

Hmm .... I'm not experiencing any stability problems on my 10.4.5. setup, no spontaneous reboots or kernel panics whatsoever. Because everything is nice and stable I've given up on the idea of unpatching the myzar install.

Having said that, my setup is simpler as I don't have the ADD2 card and dual screen (I got a 1440x900 widescreen panel instead, which I like very much) or an accelerated graphics card (onboard is fine for me as I'm not a gamer ... in fact ... I don't want to burn more energy than necessary or have additional noisy fans for graphics performance which I don't need).

 

This setup is already great to work with and will become better as more universal binaries are released.

Just installed Garageband 06 ... very fast and fun to play with.

 

In terms of hassle building it: no hassle at all. Just get a 945G.... board, a Pioneer DVD-burner, some RAM and a SATA disk. Using the myzar CD (which works fine if you don't mind the unecessary patches) you're ready to go in less than an hour.

[bofors]

Did you manage to change the refresh rate with your Dell monitors?

I am running at 1680 x 1050 at 60Hz, I have not messed with the refresh rate because the display quality is good.

 

Thanks for the report.