Hackintosh 10.5.5 Retail Rig - Starting at $305

[Kaido]

NewEgg had a special deal on these when I set up my MSI system, buy 3 at a special price, so this is what I bought:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814127412

They are out of stock/deactivated now, but you can at least see what worked for me.

Nice, thanks! How does that card work? Pick any 2 ports?

And if you happen to know - does the DVI work with an HDMI adapter, and the HDMI work with a DVI adapter? Does DVI to VGA work? I need a new "standard" card since the el-cheapo 7200GS is on the outs thanks to 32-bit-only mode!

 

[Kaido]

I have a new blog post up:

http://pcwizcomputer.com/weaksauce12/2011/02/07/pro-tip-create-a-naked-image/

It's about creating a stock OS X disc image - a neat tool for your Mac toolbox. The basic idea is that you install Snow Leopard to a bare drive, then run updates on it (the latest combo update and all of the minor updates after that). Then, clone that installation to a compressed DMG image file. Thus the entire Snow Leopard operating system (with latest updates) is encapsulated in a single file that you can restore to any machine you want, without having to actually spend hours doing a complete reinstall (including installing 10.6, doing the initial setup, installing the combo update, download and installing the minor updates, etc.).

This enables you to plug in a bare drive, restore the image file to that drive, and be ready to boot OS X with the latest updates without any effort, saving you hours of doing a fresh install & running updates. The best part is, the restore only takes about 5 minutes, even over USB! Also, the compressed image weighs in at less than 5 gigs, so it's actually smaller than a full install and even smaller than the actual Snow Leopard disc! And you can use it on a real Mac OR a Hackintosh! If it's a drive for say a Macbook Pro, you'd just plug it in and boot it right up afterwards, and if it's a Hackintosh, you'd just install your bootloader and Extra folder and boot that up instead!

Create 5-gig restore file -> Restore to any drive in 5 minutes -> Zero wasted time

 

[mosslack]

Nice, thanks! How does that card work? Pick any 2 ports?

And if you happen to know - does the DVI work with an HDMI adapter, and the HDMI work with a DVI adapter? Does DVI to VGA work? I need a new "standard" card since the el-cheapo 7200GS is on the outs thanks to 32-bit-only mode!

Yeah, pretty much. I did try it with 2 ports and they both work fine. As far as the adapters I never tried those. Should work though.

You might give the 8400GS a run if you are looking for a cheaper card. These work fine with DVI/HDMI/VGA as well and do 64 bit also. Just the 7000 series cards are the ones having problems. I've used Gigabyte and EVGA cards, both work well.

I have a new blog post up:

http://pcwizcomputer.com/weaksauce12/2011/02/07/pro-tip-create-a-naked-image/

It's about creating a stock OS X disc image - a neat tool for your Mac toolbox. The basic idea is that you install Snow Leopard to a bare drive, then run updates on it (the latest combo update and all of the minor updates after that). Then, clone that installation to a compressed DMG image file. Thus the entire Snow Leopard operating system (with latest updates) is encapsulated in a single file that you can restore to any machine you want, without having to actually spend hours doing a complete reinstall (including installing 10.6, doing the initial setup, installing the combo update, download and installing the minor updates, etc.).

This enables you to plug in a bare drive, restore the image file to that drive, and be ready to boot OS X with the latest updates without any effort, saving you hours of doing a fresh install & running updates. The best part is, the restore only takes about 5 minutes, even over USB! Also, the compressed image weighs in at less than 5 gigs, so it's actually smaller than a full install and even smaller than the actual Snow Leopard disc! And you can use it on a real Mac OR a Hackintosh! If it's a drive for say a Macbook Pro, you'd just plug it in and boot it right up afterwards, and if it's a Hackintosh, you'd just install your bootloader and Extra folder and boot that up instead!

Create 5-gig restore file -> Restore to any drive in 5 minutes -> Zero wasted time

Way cool idea! Can't wait to give that a try. Always thought there should be an easier way to do this. Just never really thought it out.

 

[Kaido]

Yeah, pretty much. I did try it with 2 ports and they both work fine. As far as the adapters I never tried those. Should work though.

You might give the 8400GS a run if you are looking for a cheaper card. These work fine with DVI/HDMI/VGA as well and do 64 bit also. Just the 7000 series cards are the ones having problems. I've used Gigabyte and EVGA cards, both work well.

Ordered a 1GB 8400GS off Newegg for $39 - sports VGA, DVI, and HDMI. I'll give both digital ports a shot with the converter. I just need a cheap default card that does 64-bit for new builds...most people don't need or want high-power, expensive cards in their systems, so $40 for a highly capable card is right around the right price :thumbsup:

 

[Kaido]

Way cool idea! Can't wait to give that a try. Always thought there should be an easier way to do this. Just never really thought it out.

Yeah - it's really nice in a lot of situations. My buddy just picked up a brand-new white 13" Macbook and a G.Skill SF-1200 SSD, but it wouldn't read the drive. I did some googling and discovered that Apple's current systems don't play nice with some of the newer SSD's initially, but if you install OS X on it from another system and THEN install it, it would work just fine. So I popped in his SSD, threw Snow on it in a couple minutes, threw it back in the laptop - boom, good to go!

I was rebuilding my buddy's UD3P the other day and did the same thing - he got a new 1TB drive, I popped it into my USB SATA reader, restored the image, and ran the Lifehacker installer (bootloader + drivers). Voila - bootable hack in 5 minutes!

 

[Zaap]

Dammit, Kaido! Where's the fun in making all of this stuff so easy?

 

[Zaap]

That eVGA SR2 board has been calling my name for awhile too...unofficially it supports 96GB RAM, which is just ludicrous, and they have Snow working on it already. Dual 6-cores, mmm.

I didn't know the SR2 was hack-able! That would make one awesome machine!

I'll wait for a vanilla kernel before jumping over to Sandy Bridge.

Ah, same here. If it's not vanilla, I'm no longer interested in hacking it.

A bit after I posted, the Gigabyte P67 board I ordered was removed from my order, but I still had the option of choosing another brand of motherboard. I ended up with an ASRock P67 Extreme4- actually a better board than my original choice, for less $. I just wanted the Gigabyte originally if there was even the slightest chance of Hacking it.

I'm not worried about the 3GB SATA bug in the least, as this has plenty of 6GB SATA ports, and the timeline of affecting devices on the 3GB ports is over such a long time, it hardly matters anyway. My client is giddy to have his Sandy Bridge system 'early', and then in a month or two he'll be getting the brand new replacement board. Win/win.

This board is awesome! And I'm digging the speed of this thing! A real shame Intel blundered so far with the Sandy Bridge rollout, cause for the intended purpose of this machine- crunching video- it kicks ass.

Assembled with GTX 460 card and rack-mount case.

If anyone wants an absolute awesome case, rackmount is a great way to go. This Habey RPC 410 is one of the sturdiest I've ever seen. IMHO, a really nice rackmount case puts all but the absolute best consumer cases to shame. When mounted or put in an entertainment cabinet, they look hella-expensive, but they tend to cost less than the average 'decent' consumer case.

 

[mosslack]

Nice, if you need some help with the DSDT on the ASRock system, our (HQ-A) resident DSDT expert has been doing some neat things with the Ami BIOS boards.

@Kaido: Yeah I think the 8400GS is a good replacement for the 7200GS as an entry level card for hacks. Of course I never use it with adapters so it will be interesting to see how well that works.

And as for the cloner, I know OS X installs are mostly monolithic, but aren't some things installed for certain boards that are not installed on others, or is every install the same no matter what you install it on?

 

[Zaap]

mosslack- no more BIOS, it's UEFI all the way! I'm assuming this could mean no more DSDT-hacking?

The UEFI has a nice GUI interface and you can actually use a mouse. You can even take screen shots in the setup utility and save to flash drive, IE:

(Yes, the auto DDR3 frequency was detected wrong at 1333 and yes, I set it to 1600)

I've got no idea how the UEFI will work for Hackintosh. Since Macs use EFI, I'm guessing this is eventually going to simplify things even more? It definitely should be interesting!

I'm not even going to bother trying to hack this machine- it can't be a vanilla install, so I'm not interested. Too much like going backward to the old-school 'distro' days for me. I'll wait til there's a vanilla Sandy Bridge Hackintosh solution- I'd guess when there are actual Sandy Bridge Macs and OSX has the support built in.

 

[Aikouka]

Seeing UEFI makes me sad that I went with Gigabyte... who chose the lazy way and provided UEFI with an old BIOS skin .

 

[Kaido]

Where's the fun in making all of this stuff so easy?

Yeah, you're right. I guess I'll hold off on more kits for awhile then :whiste:

 

[Kaido]

I didn't know the SR2 was hack-able! That would make one awesome machine!

Yes, and apparently extremely compatible. You can rock dual 6-core Xeons, each with 6-cores of hyperthreading, for a total of 24 cores if you've got the green. Also - unofficially - it supports 96 gigs of RAM (no BIOS mods required afaik). You can use regular DDR3 if you'd like too - the desktop stuff. A 4GB stick currently goes for about $37 in Hot Deals, or an 8GB stick is around $215 for the lowest priced Wintec stuff. Less than $500 for 48GB, or around $2500 for 96GB. Pretty ridiculous.

I honestly don't know if there'd be much of a return on investment past 50 gigs. I mean, an 8-gig machine with an SSD flies pretty nicely. Due to the 32-bit App architecture, stuff like FCP7 won't use more than 4GB, so even if you use every app under the sun at the same time (Photoshop, Illustrator, Final Cut, Logic, Color, Motion, After Effect, etc.). I can see using 96GB if you're running some crazy virtual machines, custom Renderman stuff, or just a ton of apps in general, but the modern solid-state drives act as a pretty dang quick virtual memory tool, so you might be better off throwing that money into a striped RAID array of SSD's.

I dunno. It's awesome to think about though :awe:

 

[Kaido]

And as for the cloner, I know OS X installs are mostly monolithic, but aren't some things installed for certain boards that are not installed on others, or is every install the same no matter what you install it on?

The kexts are all there, it auto-detects your system and switches it based on the model. Or you can force it in the SMBios Plist in the Extra folder, like if you have a Hackintop you can add the Trackpad prefPane by switching it MacbookPro6,2 for example. So yeah, it's just monolithic, then there's minor related updates per system (like I just did a 13" MB, it had an EFI firmware update for that specific model in updates, although that's more hardware-related).

 

[Kaido]

@Kaido: Yeah I think the 8400GS is a good replacement for the 7200GS as an entry level card for hacks. Of course I never use it with adapters so it will be interesting to see how well that works

Mine just arrived today, I'll give it a shot tomorrow after work & report back.

Also I will be reviewing the 4-port Highpoint RAID card when it shows up later this week (I'm hoping it's Hack-bootable!). It's on sale at Newegg for $79!!!

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816115050

 

[Emulex]

cowboom had the 8400gs for $7.99 i got a metric ton of them. the good ones that drive 2560x1600 not the cheapo ones that are 1920x1200 limited. they might have some leftovers at 14.99 in both pci and pci-e flavor still

 

[Kaido]

Not having much luck with the 8400GS I ordered:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814500178

Did the usual bit - 10.6.6 + latest updates, latest Chameleon (699), stock & modded Boot Plist with flags (GraphicsEnabler=y, PCIRoot=1, PCIRootUID=1), VGA, DVI...looks like I'm going to have to get in there and do some editing :\

Edit: Negative on the EFI string as well. I'm guessing here, but it may be due to the 1GB card size instead of the 256mb or 512mb. Usually 512mb cards are the funky ones (at least older models), but this may be the opposite case?

 

[mosslack]

Hmmm, have never had any problems with an 8400GS. Did you verify that the card is good? I can't say I've ever used a Zotac before, but my friend here locally just bought a Zotac 9800GT 1 Gb card and put it in his old GA-945GCMX-S2 hack and it took right off just using graphics enabler. Keep us posted on what you find out.

 

[leglez]

Is there any newer up to date builds + guides out? With my tax return coming it feels like it is time for an upgrade. Wouldn't mind going Core i5 or i7

 

[Kaido]

Is there any newer up to date builds + guides out? With my tax return coming it feels like it is time for an upgrade. Wouldn't mind going Core i5 or i7

I've got a beta kit out somewhere for the MSI X58 Pro-E (an i7 board), but shutdown & sleep don't work (shutdown just reboots the computer & it never wakes from sleep). Everything else works pretty well. I'm sure there are some more compatible boards out now though.

 

[mosslack]

I've got a beta kit out somewhere for the MSI X58 Pro-E (an i7 board), but shutdown & sleep don't work (shutdown just reboots the computer & it never wakes from sleep). Everything else works pretty well. I'm sure there are some more compatible boards out now though.

The MSI boards seem to have a problem with shutdown/restart, I saw a forum on this (Russian I believe) and the solution is in the DSDT. My MSI P55-GD80 will restart just fine, but will not shutdown under SL at all. Works just fine in Windows 7.

As for compatible boards, stick with Gigabyte and can't go wrong. MSI still has a ways to go before they are good hackintosh boards. There are also some ASRock boards that work pretty well, the P55 series in any board seems to be the safest route to travel.

 

[Kaido]

Had some free time tonight and got to tinker a bit. Here's my progress:

Highpoint 2640x4 RAID card:

Highpoint makes a 4-port RAID card called the "2640x4" (uses a 4x PCIe interface) and offers 4 SATA ports (they also make a 1x PCIe model called the "2640x1"). It includes cables (a single, long combo data/power cable that terminates in a data cable and Molex connector, 4 total - really nice!). Currently going for $129 on Newegg:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816115050

This card supports Hardware RAID 0/1/5/10/JBOD. Drivers are built into Snow Leopard; the card is recognized natively from 10.6.0 on up and no software installation is required to make it work (even on a Hackintosh!). It can be used as a secondary or boot drive. It is recognized by the Snow Leopard DVD. You can clone your existing install to it as well. It shows up in BIOS as a boot order device, so you can set it to be the first boot device, if you'd like. The boot order goes like this on my Gigabyte UD3P board:

1. BIOS
2. AHCI BIOS (built into the Gigabyte)
3. RAID BIOS (the Highpoint card's BIOS)
4. Verifying DMI pool...Chameleon boot selection screen...OS X

You hit CTRL + H to get into the RAID BIOS; it scans the disks after the AHCI BIOS loads and sits there for 5 or 10 seconds (spinning up the disks, I believe), which gives you plenty of time to get into the RAID BIOS if you need to.

I tested it as a SATA controller and as a RAID controller. If you don't do any configuration of the drives in the RAID BIOS, then the drives just show up as individual drives, as if it were a SATA controller. So if you just need to add more drives to your system and can't find a cheap SATA card, this can definitely do the trick. I tested a pair of drives in a stripe and it showed up just fine as a secondary set, cloned fine, and booted fine. Showed up in Disk Utility on the Snow Leopard DVD (via USB and using a DMG to restore my pre-formatted 10.6.6 disk image from another drive).

Worked like a champ all around. Zero fuss. Fwiw, I've heard that Highpoint's customer service stinks and that their hardware can be iffy. Mixed reviews on most of their hardware. Also as a note, this requires a 4x PCI Express slot, so your DS3L will not work with this, but your UD3P can. I haven't tried the 1x PCIe version, but it's probably worth a shot. Just note that on a PCI Express 1.0 bus, you are going to be limited to 250 MB/s max on a 1x connection (one-way), whereas a 4x connection will give you 1000 MB/s max.


Naked image:

Tinkered around with my pre-formatted 10.6.6 disc image I created in SuperDuper. I wanted to see if (1) I could restore it from Disk Utility, and (2) if I could restore it from the Snow Leopard DVD. The good news is "yes" to both. Not really bad news per say, but it does take 5x as long to restore (15 minutes with Disk Utility vs. 3.5 minutes with SuperDuper).

Using SuperDuper from an internal SATA hard drive to an externally-docked USB-connected SATA hard drive, it takes approximately 3.5 minutes to do a full restore. Using Disk Utility, it takes roughly 15 minutes. Still much faster than doing a full fresh install either way. The nice thing about the Disk Utility method is that you could use a Snow Leopard DVD to restore the image if you needed an emergency installation disc, or even a USB stick with the Snow Leopard DVD restored to it.

Or if you really wanted to get crazy, you could restore a Snow Leopard DVD to a USB stick and then copy the 10.6.6 preformatted DMG over, boot up the stick to the Snow Leopard installer, open Disk Utility, and restore from there. Not sure how long that would take (slow USB to fast SATA), but you could do it!

 

[compman25]

The MSI boards seem to have a problem with shutdown/restart, I saw a forum on this (Russian I believe) and the solution is in the DSDT. My MSI P55-GD80 will restart just fine, but will not shutdown under SL at all. Works just fine in Windows 7.

As for compatible boards, stick with Gigabyte and can't go wrong. MSI still has a ways to go before they are good hackintosh boards. There are also some ASRock boards that work pretty well, the P55 series in any board seems to be the safest route to travel.

My current hack is using an MSI P55a-GD55, it doesn't sleep, but it will shutdown and restart just fine. Not using a dsdt at all.

 

[Emulex]

the 8400gs comes in two versions. one is the older chipset 1920x1200 max dvi the newer chipset is totally different and drives 2560x1600 - you can get the newer ones at cowboom for $8 to 16 (pci or pci-e). this newer chipset is rare imo. i've mostly only seen the older ones. matter of fact it might be the only pci video card that can drive 2560x1600 i've ever seen.

any idea how to get a 2nd video card (GTX460/580) to work on a real mac pro if its a PC one? i figure you guys might have some thoughts. if its just robbing the flash bios from the apple product and hitting it on the PC product or what. Since it's not the primary card i don't care if it doesn't start until the o/s starts up which i hear is a common issue.

thanks in advance for any advice.

 

[mosslack]

My current hack is using an MSI P55a-GD55, it doesn't sleep, but it will shutdown and restart just fine. Not using a dsdt at all.

Unfortunately, I am forced to use DSDT for my 3 video cards. I had shutdown working prior to adding the DSDT for the video cards as well, but given the choice, I'll stick with the 3 cards.

 

[mosslack]

Had some free time tonight and got to tinker a bit. Here's my progress:

Naked image:

Tinkered around with my pre-formatted 10.6.6 disc image I created in SuperDuper. I wanted to see if (1) I could restore it from Disk Utility, and (2) if I could restore it from the Snow Leopard DVD. The good news is "yes" to both. Not really bad news per say, but it does take 5x as long to restore (15 minutes with Disk Utility vs. 3.5 minutes with SuperDuper).

Using SuperDuper from an internal SATA hard drive to an externally-docked USB-connected SATA hard drive, it takes approximately 3.5 minutes to do a full restore. Using Disk Utility, it takes roughly 15 minutes. Still much faster than doing a full fresh install either way. The nice thing about the Disk Utility method is that you could use a Snow Leopard DVD to restore the image if you needed an emergency installation disc, or even a USB stick with the Snow Leopard DVD restored to it.

Or if you really wanted to get crazy, you could restore a Snow Leopard DVD to a USB stick and then copy the 10.6.6 preformatted DMG over, boot up the stick to the Snow Leopard installer, open Disk Utility, and restore from there. Not sure how long that would take (slow USB to fast SATA), but you could do it!

I have a long weekend starting tomorrow after work, I want to try your new approach to this and see just how well it works. I was going to ask you about using SD, but you have already answered that. Any special specs to set when making the image with SD?