Quad Core Hackintosh.. Any problems?

[vineswingman]

Does any of this hardware look like it may be problematic? Only thing I'm concerned with is the P5W's compatibility with the Q6600 in Leopard. I plan to run the SAMSUNG drives in raid-0.

 

LIAN LI PC-A59A Silver Aluminum ATX Mid Tower Computer Case - Retail

ePOWER EP-520XP-C1B ATX12V 520W Power Supply - Retail

ASUS P5W DH DELUXE/WIFI-AP LGA 775 Intel 975X ATX Intel Motherboard

GIGABYTE GV-NX88T256HV1 GeForce 8800GT 256MB

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Kentsfield 2.4GHz 2 x 4MB L2 Cache

2x G.SKILL 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)

2x SAMSUNG SpinPoint T Series HD321KJ 320GB 7200 RPM SATA

Pioneer 111D DVD-R

 

All comes out to $850!!!

[insomnimac]

I'd go for a P35 mobo, apart from that it looks good.

[zarac]

it seems like a great choice.

btw, if the motherboard supports quad-core processors osx should run them all (intel, of course - not sure about amd penryns).

alternatively, you can flash your motherboard's bios by following instructions from kabyl's post.

 

also, you might want to check this post - raid0 setup with the same motherboard.

[iamjero]

I kind of winged it on my quad core setup, hoping for the best, and so far, so good.

 

I run this:

 

Asus P5B Deluxe

4gb ram ocz ddr2 gold gamers edition

msi 8800gt G92 OC

5 x 500gb western digital caviar

1 x 500gb western digital external

intel Q9450 quad core processor

 

 

Onboard sound works, video works, everything else works, and it works great. The only problem i had prior to running osx on this setup was actually the install, which i got around with by using a ide to usb connector, and taking an old dvd writer i had laying around and installing it via usb.

 

So the only thing you gotta make sure of is that the dvd drive your using is SATA, or that you have a usb adapter like I did.

 

Your setup looks good however, but i would go by the wiki compatibility page and cross reference to make sure everything looks good.

[knewsom]

Don't a lot of ASUS boards have 3.5 GB RAM max limits, and IDE DVD drive issues? I seem to keep seeing that, but I also seem to keep reading about a LOT of people basing their builds on ASUS Mobos.

 

I'm considering a Gigabyte GA-EX38-DS4 - I like the fast bus and ram speeds, as well as the onboard audio and lots of expansion slots... but I'm concerned with compatability since I haven't seen many (read: ANY) people here using them.

[vineswingman]

Insomniac: The reason I'm leaning towards the ASUS board, is the fact that it supports RAID-0 right out of the box! As far as I know, there are no P35 mobos that do this. Am I mistaken?

 

Zarac: thanks for the info! very helpful, indeed! I will look into flashing the bios, and the raid results are very encouraging!

 

iamjero: I think I will pick up a sata DVD-R drive, to use along with my pioneer IDE (that I can put in my external USB enclosure, which seems to work for people). Your setup looks very similar to the one I am working on, good to know!

 

knewsom: I have read about that 3.5 gig limit! It worries me in that, I want to be able to use what I have... But at the same time, will I notice a difference between 3.5 and 4 gigs of ram anytime soon? No, lol. I'm running OSX on a mac mini right now with 2gb of ram, and I don't know if I've ever maxed it out (other than when sharing with parallels..) I will research this more. But again, kind of want to stick with the ASUS board for Raid-0!

[LAbyOne]

I had an Asus P5B deluxe with the same processor and worked pretty good even overclocked to 3.02 it worked very stable

for many other incompatibility reasons I'm now on an Abit P35. which in my opinion is far better then any other asus around.. (probably the IX38 Quad GT is actually the best you can find on the market)

Everything works out of the box except audio which can be enabled in/out by using the HDA_ICH9_ALC888 kexts and then u'r done.

The performances are even better, now it supports overclocking to 3.2ghz (my proc is an Intel 2.4 quad) so if you i'll go for that.. maybe u will spend a little more money then choosing asus, but frankly its really worth it.

And yes it fully support Raid 0

[geekdad]

Vineswingman..

That all sounds good. You might want to go with the P35 as mentioned earlier. Look at my sig. I am have a quad core build as well with no issues and all works.....

[vaporATX]

I usually avoid Asus boards because their bios updates are slow to come out and of poor quality. Their build quality ain't what it used to be, either. They live on their past glories, imho. The only reason I'm using this P5K-E is I got it used and cheap. I suggest an Abit or Gigabyte mobo. Rest looks good, but you can probably get those prices down if you shop around.

[Deomitrus]

ASUS motherboards rock. I'm building a OSX86 setup with the P5W DH and a Q6600. I've seen a bunch of people that have this setup with good success, plus it's the only board that has hardware RAID; which is a must for me.

[vaporATX]

ASUS motherboards rock. I'm building a OSX86 setup with the P5W DH and a Q6600. I've seen a bunch of people that have this setup with good success, plus it's the only board that has hardware RAID; which is a must for me.

 

And how many systems have you built this year? I've built over 75, and have been doing this for over 15 years. Asus motherboards are nothing like they used to be, believe me.

 

And many compatible boards have hardware raid. Please know what you are talking about before you post. Thanks

[vineswingman]

Wow, I used to be a huge ABIT fan, but noticed a decline in their boards, and switched to ASUS. This was about 3 years ago.. I've since moved to mac, so it is amusing to see they've apparently swapped status quo.

 

While, I would love to use the ABIT P35-PRO or ABIT IX-38 QUAD GT, I just cannot find any other sources that say the integrated hardware raid works! In fact, when I looked up the IX-38 on the hardware compatibility of the osx86wiki it said " SATA & IDE: SATA works in AHCI mode. Does not work in RAID mode."... Although that is in reference to the "roadster edition," which I'm not sure is the same board.

 

I have heard that the P35 chipset is the most compatible, but cannot find a board with hardware raid confirmed working.

 

LAbyOne: What kind of compatibility issues did you have with the ASUS board? As far as my research shows, the P5B works 100%.. What did you do to get raid functioning on the P35-PRO? Do you have any sources that prove the IX-38 QUAD GT's raid working? And, what makes this such a fantastic board? The upgraded sound would be a huge plus over basic AC 97', however I am curious as to if this works in osx, as well.

 

VAPOR ATX: what are some more of these raid-compatible boards? The OSX86WIKI lists the p5b as the only motherboard working "out of the box," with raid.

[Deomitrus]

And how many systems have you built this year? I've built over 75, and have been doing this for over 15 years. Asus motherboards are nothing like they used to be, believe me.

 

And many compatible boards have hardware raid. Please know what you are talking about before you post. Thanks

 

I've built about 40 systems, but I guess you've got me beat.

 

I don't know about the whole ASUS thing though, I've always had positive results. What's the problem?

[vaporATX]

I've built about 40 systems, but I guess you've got me beat.

 

I don't know about the whole ASUS thing though, I've always had positive results. What's the problem?

 

I build custom systems as a sideline business hence the large number.

 

Problems? Lots of doa boards and partially bad boards. Badly written bios' with bugs that they take forever to correct, especially on their low to mid range boards. Poor quality control such as poorly attached heatsinks sometime with missing thermo compound, poorly attached and aligned input/output risers, bent and broken power connectors. I see a lot of Asus boards because customers request them because of their name. I'd say at least 10% of them have some problem and have to be returned. I rarely see any issues with Gigabyte, DFI, and Abit boards. As another poster said Abit used to be real garbage, but they seem to have really boosted their q/c. I guess it goes back and forth, and when they don't have an issue Asus boards are top notch... especially for over clocking.

[vineswingman]

Well, placed the order today.. went with:

 

ASUS P5W DH DELUXE motherboard

Intel Q6700 Quad-Core 2.66ghz CPU

Kingston Hyper-X 4x 1gb DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500) RAM

ASUS 8800GT NVIDIA 256MB GDDR-3 PCI-E graphics

CORSAIR 520-WATT MODULAR powersupply

LIAN-LI PC A59A case

Pioneer 20x DVD-R SATA DVR-215DBK

2x SAMSUNG 360GB T-series HD321 Sata hard drives (16MB cache/each)

 

looking forward to putting it all together! I'm sure it'll smoke my 1.66ghz core duo mac mini =)

[vineswingman]

Got OSX 10.5.2 Kalyway installed last night!

 

Took a while to get everything working, but I found some useful sites to help with bios settings (especially: http://lifehacker.com/348653/install-os-x-...acking-required -- although my bios settings had to be slightly tweaked for raid and to be recognized by disk utility on the install disc, I'll check them out and post them here for other people to see.) Had to update the bios (to the latest beta release) on the mobo to get kalyway to install. After that, it was fairly smooth sailing. OSX installed in approx 15 mins! Installed with the onboard raid-0, osx sees approx 600GB, and the xbench is wicked fast, I'll post some benchmarks after I tweak it a little.

 

HD Sound, network, usb worked right away. Nvidia graphics update installed without a hitch. Initial Xbench score was 185, however it'll go up after some tweaks.. Ram is only running at DDR 667 (it's DDR 1066!), I haven't even tried tweaking ram/cpu settings in the bios yet.

 

The front USB ports don't seem to be showing up in OSX. UPDATE: they seem to work when i plug something in, then restart. Weird, anybody else experience this?

 

WOW! USB actually transfers at USB 2.0 speeds. That's something even a real mac can't do.

 

Thinking about dual booting vista or xp on a third hard drive.. I'm not a huge PC gamer. but I love RTS games and the occasional shooter; it'd be a shame to waste such a fast machine / graphics card!

 

I'll keep updating as I go along, so somebody else can read this for future reference!

[vineswingman]

XBench Score: 227. Ok. CPU is now running at 3.2ghz X 4. Ram is running at DDR-2 1000mhz, I know XBench, isn't completely reliable, but a 25% improvement after oc/tweaks.. Not bad! =)

[knewsom]

Run Geekbench, then post your score in the other thread! She sounds like a beast, yo!

[vineswingman]

Initial Geekbench score was around 5930, then I had a kernel panic!

 

Might need to play with some voltage settings? Hmm..

Turned off the "turbo" option on the bios under CPU settings (still at 3.2/1066), and I scored 5700...

 

I wonder why your machine is scoring around the same speed at 2.4ghz / 1066? Any idea why this might be? OSX is still reporting my ram at 667mhz, even though my bios (and ram scores on benchmarks agree) is reporting around 1066mhz...

[knewsom]

could have to do with FSB or video card..?

[vineswingman]

Hmm.. We both have 8800 GTs though.. I'm sure the 256 / 512 wont make that big of a difference.... I'm currently at a 1266mhz FSB. I can hardly complain though, this computer is blazin'!

 

What "other thread" were you referring to, when you said to post my geekbench scores?

[knewsom]

I started a "post your geekbench scores here" thread last night, it'd be cool to build the list of different configs and how fast they are there.

 

edit: here's a link

[vineswingman]

Turns out the system was under-voltage'd! It was set to only 1.20v, I set it at 1.3v and it has been running rock-solid for over 6 hours so far!

 

BTW, shutdown / restart / sleep / standby all work perfectly!

[knewsom]

righteous! That system voltage thing was one of my big concerns about OCing, but my Mobo made it easy and had an "automatic" volatge setting... hehe.

 

Glad to hear power off works for ya - it doesn't always work for me (I ususally have to hit the power button after it's all shut down), but everything else is just fine.

 

'grats on the great build, and report back with FCP performance!

[vineswingman]

knewsom: Yeah, the auto voltage setting worked great at stock speeds, but I imagine it caused the kernel panics when I started to overclock. Luckily, 1.3 is still below the max of 1.375, so cpu still isn't running too hot (which I guess q6700s are notorious for). What do you mean by FCP?

 

And an update... Installed vista ultimate to a third dedicated hard drive (for gaming). Installed great, just have to choose which HD to boot to in my bios. OSX sees the windows hard drive, however it cannot write to NTFS by default. Installed a program called macfuse ( http://code.google.com/p/macfuse ) and NTFS 3G ( http://www.ntfs-3g.org/ ) but haven't tested yet. It'd be nice to drop files right into the windows partition, then restart when I needed to access them! [edit: tested--verified, works!]

 

Installed Parallels 3.0. Recognized my windows hard drive (as a "boot camp" partition) but would not boot it. Installed a separate windows installation for parallels. Installed the Doom 3 demo, and ran at over 60fps with high settings. Sweet! Gonna use this partition to play old'ish PC games.

 

vista doesn't seem to recognize the hub on my apple keyboard. Gonna look for a driver to fix that.

 

After installing vista, there is a discrepancy with my system clock. Looks like http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=31198 should fix it. Going to try that..

 

Also, is there a way to set a startup sound in Mac OSX ? I miss the "tada" my mac mini gave when I turned it on =)