My hackintosh rig

Jul 22, 2008

I recently bought a PC for two big reasons: Playing AoC which I didn't like much and for playing around with Mac OSX in a PC. I tried to choose my rig parts based on the list at the OSX86 Project. This is what I got:

Motherboard: ASUS P5K-VM $114.95
Ram: Corsair 1GB x 2 800Mhz $59.95
Case: Cooler Master Elite 330 Chassis: $49.95
CPU: Intel Core™2 Duo Processor E4500 2.2GHz w/ 2MB Cache : $129.95
Hard Drive: Hitachi 160GB Deskstar 7K160 SATA II $52.95
Video Card: THE FAIL! nVidia EVGA 9600GT Superclocked $159.95
DVD Drive: I had one.

Ok, I was going to buy a GeForce 8600GT but the 9600GT was too cheap. The problem was that I didn't know the 9600GT was almost the only nvidia GPU not supported in OSX. At the end I switched video cards with my girlfriend computer. Now she has a 9600GT and I have a GeForce 7600GT. I plan to get an 8800GT soon, though.

Installation

I used Kalyway 10.5.2 DVD (you can get it from the green demon). When the DVD was booting it didn't find a hard drive (" Waiting for a root device "). I don't know why this happens but I fixed just plugging in a external HD just to let it find something. It worked! I didn't have to install in the external HD. You can use the SATA Drive After the Leopard installation loads you have almost the same options that a retail Leo disk, except that you need to choose a few packages. In my case I choose ALC883 for audio, NVinject 256 for the 7600 video card I'm using and Vanilla Kernel. After the installation is done, the system just boots like any real mac. On this motherboard you can press F8 at the boot process to choose the hard drive you want to boot if you have XP or Vista installed in another hard drive.

Problems

When I say I have problems, I don't say they can't be fixed. I haven't even looked for a way to fix them.

If the computer goes to sleep the screen is corrupted, only way to fix it is restarting.
The DVD drive goes to sleep and doesn't wake up until I reboot.
Front USBs are not working. But I have like 6 or 8 in the back.

Performance

I used Xbench to run benchmarks both in my hackintosh setup and my Core2Duo Macbook Pro.

My Macbook Pro C2D: 105.87
My Hackintosh: 142.03

Average from Xbench site:

Macbook Pro C2D Average: 108.02
Mac Pro C2D average: 156.23

Conclusion

As you can see I'm almost at the performance of a Mac Pro (I bet an 8 Core Mac Pro gets a lot more). So far I spent around $568 + GST. Not bad at all. My machine is completely usable. I've been using Adobe Suite CS3, VLC, Adium, Firefox, Office 2008, etc. I do have an Apple keyboard and all the special keys works so it really feels after some time that you are using a real Mac.

Future plan

Get 4GB 1000Mhz RAMs
Try to make it run in a RAID setup
Get an 8800GT or 9800GTX

Tags: Apple

Xethorn on Jul 23, 2008 Good job, but for the price I bet those are not really good ram sticks.

Ivan on Jul 23, 2008 Indeed, That's why I plan to get faster RAMs that work at 1000Mhz.

Albert on Aug 24, 2008 Hey, found your post on MacRumors. I was hoping you could help answer some questions for me? I'm really interested in installing OS X, so that I only have to use Windows for gaming. Does the Kalyway DVD include all of those driver packages? I'm using a Gigabyte G31 and an ATI Radeon X1950 Pro. On InsanelyMac it says I need some patches, but it's a bit confusing as to what to do with these. Do I download them and burn them onto the DVD or install them afterwards? Also, are you dual-booting into Windows or another OS? Can you select the boot upon startup? And finally, if you are dual-booting, can you see multiple partitions (ie. those that Windows manages: NTFS) while in Mac OS X? I know that Mac OS X can't write to NTFS, but it can read it. Thanks man. Keep up the good work.

Ivan on Aug 24, 2008 Go looking into InsanelyMac and see what people with your motherboard is using. In my case I used Kalyway once and found out that most of the drivers I need can be found there. In iATKOS I have to manually install most of them. It all depends on which motherboard you are using. I'm dual booting with Windows but I'm using another hard drive and my motherboard let me choose the hard drive at the beginning. Yeah, If you want compatibility stick with FAT32 since OSX can read that perfectly but you have the problem from files bigger than 4GB. Windows can't nativaly read OSX partitions so a good way to share stuff is a FAT32 or NTFS if you plan to install ntfs3g.

Lucas on Sep 29, 2008 For your case of booting up finding drive, try to DISABLE your floppy drive in the BIOS.

sarah on Oct 11, 2008 help , i need the drive for Nvidia Geforce 9600 GT for Mac Os X Kalyway, Thanks

Ivan on Oct 11, 2008 there's no driver for that video card AFAIK. Go for a 8800GTS

Matt on Mar 15, 2009 hi there, so i really want to do this. I have an old Dell that i want to try it on. It's a Pentium 4 3.0ghz, 2.5 gigs ram, ... Will it run Leopard or do i need to build something more up to date?

Freddy on Jul 03, 2009 Just so you know, the 9600GT is fully supported by Mac 10.5.6 update. All you need is to edit the EFI string for it to work with no extra drivers required. Previous versions of Mac require NVdarwin and Nvidia 9000 series driver V2 Sorry for bumping but it's in case anyone else reads this

Ivan Soto