Enter the SkyBox
***The following is part blog, mostly tutorial, and entirely long and geeky. It pertains to building and setting up computers. Read at your own risk!***
Last month, my old computer died. In actuality, this was likely long overdue. It was a computer I built in the neighborhood of 6 years ago, and it wasn’t even top of the line then, really more of a cheap bang-for-buck machine. But I made it with top quality parts, and as such it continued it’s trouble free operation after a few generations worth of computer parts have come and gone. This machine has served me extremely well, despite the fact that for the most part, I’ve pretty much beat the crap out of it lol.
Now, I had kinda told myself that I really wanted to build a new machine for myself this year, for numerous reasons.
One, I hadn’t built a machine in quite some time, and I was feeling the itch. I get a kick out of building computers, so I just wanted to do it again.
Two, my machine was pretty outdated, and finally beginning to show it’s age. It worked fine for basic stuff, but when doing video or music rendering, recording, etc, you could tell it was old.
Three, I really wanted to have a good fast solid computer for recording. My Mac laptop is awesome, but even that was showing it’s limitations when it came to high power mixing and whatnot. As cool as it is, it’s also a few years old. In exporting music tracks for recording, mixdowns, etc, I was truly wasting a lot of time with either machine.
Now again, my current PC was old enough that an ‘upgrade’ wasn’t gonna work. Pretty much EVERYTHING was outdated. But with my schedule the way it’s been, coupled with the fact that the PC WAS still working, it was hard to justify this change.
Then finally, a few weeks ago it hit. Power went out in our house for a few moments one night, and after it returned, I could not get my PC to properly boot up no matter how hard I tried. I later discovered what was probably the primary reason for this, One of the capacitors on the motherboard seemingly popped. It may have been from the power out, age, or who knows what else. Needless to say though, the computer was done.
The victim:
The Final blow:
In addition to all of this, in the past few months I had stumbled across some interesting information in the form of what they call “OSX86” or a “Hackintosh”. This is a PC that is capable of running OSX or I should specifically say Mac OS. In the past few years Macs are made with Intel processors, as opposed to the previous proprietary ‘PowerPC’ processors. This means that at the heart of it, new Macs run on the same hardware as PCs do. This has opened up possibilities for those who want to run Mac without having to fork out the huge amounts of cash to do so. It’s really for the underground, ubergeeks, and those who are willing to try something new and different, associated risks and issues accompany it as well.
It was one of those things that the more I read, the more I wanted to see if I could do it. It seemed that the people who got it working well loved it. And for as much as I would never have thought it just a few years ago, I love Macs. Newer ones that is. I love my laptop for what it is, as well as Mac OSX in general. And while, I could never completely abandon PCs, because I like the flexibility of both, as well as the fact that both Windows and Mac are not without their respective faults and strengths, to be able to get high end performance out of either system sounded like a win/win to me.
There was specific hardware that would work to pull this off, so I figured I’d follow that path in getting parts for my new machine. My logic being if the whole Mac thing failed, I could just still run it as just a Windows box. But the prospect of a dual boot Windows/Mac computer just seemed awesome. Basically the performance of a Mac Pro, but without having to pay $3000. With the information provided by the Hackintosh/OSX86 web presence, I ran to geek central (ie Newegg) to piece it all together. Luckily I found some good bargains, and away I went.
Let’s talk about the parts:
Motherboard:
Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS3L $60! (open box)
One of the darling motherboards in Hackintosh circles, as well as among standard PC users. Solid and stable, good for overclocking, and not a bad price. Not as feature laden as some other boards, but a solid performer, and super compatible for my project. Plus, open box….price was definitely right! I didn’t want to venture away from an Asus board, but this board was a lot cheaper than an OSX86 compatible Asus. The only real departure I made in this build. That being said, it came with a bunch of accessories, and so far I am very impressed with it.
Processor:
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Kentsfield 2.4ghz $190
This actually was a last minute choice. I was gonna go with a 3ghz Duo. But this was only 10 bucks more. I weighed the pros and cons of a faster Duo, or a slightly slower Quad. In essence, much software is just beginning to address dual cores, and even less supporting quad cores. At least in the PC world. But Mac has been addressing Quad for quite some time. Not to mention that in either realm, music software (specifically what I use, Steinberg Cubase) addresses Quads, it seemed the better choice. It would be siginificantly higher performing for music, and for the Mac end of it. Plus, with my RAM and motherboard choices, it would be easy to overclock to probably 3ghz as well. The prices on quad cores has significantly dropped just in the past few months (I think in like the spring this very CPU was in the neighborhood of 400 bucks-ish if I’m not mistaken). It also seemed like a good way to help prevent the inevitable being obsolete a little more.
RAM:
OCZ Platinum 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2 1066mhz $105 (but $30 rebate on the way)
I wanted fast, solid performing RAM. OCZ makes great RAM, and this is some of their better stuff. Also, I wanted to be able to use the maximum amount of RAM in this computer I could, and the maximum supported by the motherboard was 8GB in 4 slots. So I figured this was a good start, and I’ll get another pack of these down the road. Mac will address 8GB of RAM, though Windows (XP) will not. That’s why I figured, well, 4GB was a good start lol. And the price? Just bonus ☺
Power Supply:
Antec Basiq 500w OEM $40
This was a pretty easy choice. I wanted at least 450w, preferably higher. I didn’t necessarily need silent, but I wanted strong and reliable. Antecs are top performers in this regard. Plus, this model had dual 12v rails, and 18 amps on each of them to boot. Some of the power supplies that cost 2-3 times this one didn’t meet that. My only gripe was that it only has 2 SATA connectors; I would’ve preferred 4. Other than that, this thing was a perfect choice, and at a ridiculous price as well.
Video Card:
Asus EN7300GT Silent 512MB $32! (open box)
The 7xxx series nVidia cards are standard offerings (or at least had been) in Mac Pros, so this would be a solid choice for this project as well. Not to mention a card of this caliber for this price! Keep in mind I’m not a gamer, so the top performing video cards aren’t necessary for me. That being said though, the visual effects in Mac OSX rely on at least decent graphics, so I figured the standard offering should get me there. Not to mention the standard offering in a Mac Pro would be 256MB, and this doubled that. Should be beyond plenty for my needs.
Firewire:
Syba PCI card $12
PCPartsAndCables front FireWire header to standard FireWire plug contraption $16
I like firewire, as do Macs. For extended file transfers, external hard drives, and audio interfaces, firewire is so much better than USB. This was a must for me, so I picked this up. It has one internal port, because I wanted a front mounted firewire port as well as the rears. The cool thing was that the bundled 6-4pin firewire cable was worth the price alone (I think I paid $20 for the one with my camcorder!).
The clincher was that even though this card had the internal plug, and my case had a front port, the front port had the type of plug that would plug onto a firewire equipped motherboard. This is not the same type of plug as a standard firewire plug. This plug from PCPartsAndCables in the UK was basically able to mate these 2 plugs. Yay for scouring the net to see that at least ONE other person experienced this and made a solution. Go PCPartsAndCables!
DVD burner:
Samsung 22x DVD+/-RW LightScribe SATA drive $26!
The price of internal DVD burners is absolutely ridiculous. Just in mechanisms alone, these current prices must just barely cover cost of parts. I went with the SATA for solid transfer speeds, and LightScribe just to check it out. I chose Samsung because they tend to make solid stuff all around, and along with that, this particular drive seems to be very highly touted.
Case:
Cooler Master Centurion 5 Black/Silver $40 (on sale)
This is quite possibly the piece of the puzzle that got the most scrutiny. My qualifications I thought were quite simple, but in essence not at all. I wanted a case that looked semi-decent, was built fairly well, had enough drive bays to hold the multiple drives I’d have, have good cooling and air flow in terms of intake and exhaust fans, an intake fan that would blow across the hard drives, have front mounted USB AND FireWire ports, fit in the 17.25” spot I had for my tower, and most importantly, not cost some ridiculous amount of money.
I literally scoured through 100s of cases, even over the past few months, and often came up short. I finally discovered this one. Really, it was obvious fairly quickly, it pretty much met all the requirements. I wanted the one with blue trim, not silver. But the silver was on sale for 20 bucks less, so that was a no brainer.
Hard Drives:
Western Digital 36gb 10k RPM Raptor $40 (used on ebay)
Western Digital 320GB 7200RPM 16MB cache $15!!!! (NEW! On ebay)
I got both hard drives on eBay, a bit of a fluke but wow. The Raptor was a buy it now of a lot of 12, and it’s also a few years old (but still under warranty). It was more curiosity for that. I wanted the small one for a Windows system drive, and specifically to keep Windows on a completely separate drive for wipe/reinstall purposes, as well as to aid in the dual boot factor.
Now the 320gb, THAT was the fluke. New, sealed, and no reserve. I was just watching it to see what these were going for on ebay. I knew they were $50-75 new. I got the email saying that this one was ending and was only at $9!!! I figured, what the hey, I’ll bid $18 bucks. I won it at $15! Absolutely ridiculous.
Both drives are awesome and fast. The Raptor is a little noisy, but that seems to be a common issue. However, the Raptor being older it still has the old 4 pin molex connector, so the 2 SATA connectors on the power supply is just enough.
Keyboard:
Apple A1243 Aluminum full size keyboard $50 (Best Buy)
(not mine, but a better example of how it looks than my photo)
Well, ever since I saw and tried one of these out I was in love. And when my install got to a point where I needed a USB keyboard, this was the one I decided on.
Carried over items from previous machine:
Keyboard
(Originally, but soon realized it was not going to work. Replaced with Apple aluminum keyboard)
Logitech Track Ball
I have had this for ages, probably like 7-8 years. It still works perfect, and it still fits me like a glove. It’s USB, so no need to replace it. If/when it breaks, I’ll buy the exact one again lol.
Western Digital 250GB IDE drive
Initial setup was done with this drive, but it was removed as soon as the new ones came. After that, I bought an external enclosure for it, and I now use it as a backup drive for this machine.
Sony 16x DVD+/-RW drive IDE
This drive doesn’t like to eject a lot of the times, but it does still work well. It’s nice to be able to do disc copies with a source and a record drive, so I decided to keep using this.
Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Platinum.
Now I knew I wouldn’t get this working in Mac, but I would in Windows. It was gonna have to do until I get my FireWire recording interface.
So that covers the choice of parts. The motherboard was ordered first, and thus arrived first by itself. Everything else, except the hard drives and firewire contraption, all arrived the following Tuesday. 7 boxes, it was early Christmas for me! After a long day of lessons, I finally came home and began constructing. I took my time so I could be sure it was done right, as well as I wanted to relish in the computer building process. Initially I used my old hard drive, and upon very first power up, it worked just fine!
Within the next week or so, I got my new hard drives, as well as began to fiddle and tweak with the Mac installation, as well as dual booting and getting it all to work in the new configuration. Now, a Windows install is pretty much no biggie, but the Mac install is. I used a version of Mac OSX made by Kalyway, and I used two different ones, the 10.5.1 and 10.5.2 versions. I started with the 10.5.1.
On the first run, I literally just ran the disc and wanted to see if it would take. This was without following any of the install guides, changing settings or anything, just ran the setup disc. The bad thing about this particular install is that it takes probably in the neighborhood of 10-15 minutes just to get to the beginning of the install. I got a little tingle seeing the apple logo on my display though ☺ So I just let the install run and I was off to lessons. When I came back, it said install had failed. D’OH!
Alright, so I went online, did a little research, and changed some motherboard BIOS settings. I also made some specific choices in the installation, and let it go. It worked! Upon reboot after setup, I discovered that it needed to be using a USB keyboard to enter my information. Unfortunately, my keyboard wasn’t USB, so I had to run to the store and get one. I’m kinda fussy about keyboards, button feel and placement, etc, so I didn’t like most of the standard offerings, not to mention most of the standard stuff is way expensive and wireless. I don’t need wireless, it’s just gonna sit on a desk. So I decided to go with the keyboard I’ve really liked from the first time I saw/tried one; the new aluminum Apple keyboard. Seemed appropriate for such a build too. I picked up from Best Buy, and it was back home to the Hackintosh.
I put in all my info and boom I was running Mac OSX. The only thing that needed patching was a quick audio fix. Also, the graphics were supposed to work, but they didn’t. I guess the 512MB card wasn’t supported, but some searching found a fix for that as well. Networking worked fine as well. So I went and installed a bunch of apps to see how it worked. The only problem I encountered was that my version of Toast (CD burning app) liked to crash. That, and the machine wouldn’t restart or shutdown from the menu, it had to be done with the reset and power buttons on the case. Not the worst situation. Bootup and shutdown were very quick, and everything else was super stable.
So this was very successful, and the level of ability needed to get it working was in actuality a lot less than a Windows install and all the drivers needed. But it still wasn’t exactly what I wanted. In the next few days when I got my new hard drives, I got to experiment a little further. I downloaded the next newer version of Mac OSX, Kalyway 10.5.2. I decided to see if it would simplify the process, see how it compared. This one booted up to install a whole lot faster which was welcomed.
After the install, I rebooted it up, and this time it did recognize my graphics card. So the only thing that required a patch was the audio (basically like a driver install). That, and I was having some weird issue with it seeing external drives, which was another patch. And that was it. Two patches, one for external devices, one for sound. This install also addressed the shutdown and reboot issue as well.
Tack this on with the no problem Windows XP install (I’ll shoot myself in the foot before I let Vista touch this machine…..maybe if they actually make any steps to make Vista decent I’ll reconsider, but in 2 years they haven’t, so the odds don’t look too good), and I have a serious performing, decently priced computer that runs both XP and OSX flawlessly, quickly, and I got to build it all myself! Talk about win/win! ☺
It uses a small patch on the Windows install to let Windows give you the option for dual booting, and a Darwin Boot Loader to select Mac or Windows, and voila…a dual boot XP/OSX machine ala new Macs with BootCamp. But for a whole lot less money.
So for those of you who were adding, it was $610 in parts. All of the shipping came out to about $100. So roughly a $700 computer. For the record Mac Pros (desktop Macs with competive specs to this) start at $2800!!! I mean, I admit Mac Pros are awesome machines but uh…4 times the price? And…my machine is pretty awesome too ☺
I haven’t gone through the trouble of benchmarking or anything, but lets just say everything runs REALLY fast. And some of the audio exporting that I would do that would take 4-5 minutes to do, gets done in 15-45 seconds. I’ll let you decide if that seems like a decent upgrade ☺
Welcome my new machine….the “SkyBox”. ☺
R.I.P. "Blackbox" (2002-2008)
As a final note (and testament to true geekiness), I setup my ancient laptop as a Linux SAMBA print server, so that the Windows and Mac machines can all use my printer. So my *gulp 11 year old Dell Latitude CPi 300D laptop with a 300mhz Pentium II, 192MB of EDO SDRAM, and 6GB hard drive has actually gone to use. It also allowed me to change around my dining room area a little bit to incorporate this and also put my internet/networking stuff out there instead of my room.
That’s the lastest in the always changing world of my geekiness. PHEW. Ok, now that that’s finally done, on to other stuff.
(I can’t believe I wrote all of this…
…I can’t believe you read all of this :-p)
Last month, my old computer died. In actuality, this was likely long overdue. It was a computer I built in the neighborhood of 6 years ago, and it wasn’t even top of the line then, really more of a cheap bang-for-buck machine. But I made it with top quality parts, and as such it continued it’s trouble free operation after a few generations worth of computer parts have come and gone. This machine has served me extremely well, despite the fact that for the most part, I’ve pretty much beat the crap out of it lol.
Now, I had kinda told myself that I really wanted to build a new machine for myself this year, for numerous reasons.
One, I hadn’t built a machine in quite some time, and I was feeling the itch. I get a kick out of building computers, so I just wanted to do it again.
Two, my machine was pretty outdated, and finally beginning to show it’s age. It worked fine for basic stuff, but when doing video or music rendering, recording, etc, you could tell it was old.
Three, I really wanted to have a good fast solid computer for recording. My Mac laptop is awesome, but even that was showing it’s limitations when it came to high power mixing and whatnot. As cool as it is, it’s also a few years old. In exporting music tracks for recording, mixdowns, etc, I was truly wasting a lot of time with either machine.
Now again, my current PC was old enough that an ‘upgrade’ wasn’t gonna work. Pretty much EVERYTHING was outdated. But with my schedule the way it’s been, coupled with the fact that the PC WAS still working, it was hard to justify this change.
Then finally, a few weeks ago it hit. Power went out in our house for a few moments one night, and after it returned, I could not get my PC to properly boot up no matter how hard I tried. I later discovered what was probably the primary reason for this, One of the capacitors on the motherboard seemingly popped. It may have been from the power out, age, or who knows what else. Needless to say though, the computer was done.
The victim:
The Final blow:
In addition to all of this, in the past few months I had stumbled across some interesting information in the form of what they call “OSX86” or a “Hackintosh”. This is a PC that is capable of running OSX or I should specifically say Mac OS. In the past few years Macs are made with Intel processors, as opposed to the previous proprietary ‘PowerPC’ processors. This means that at the heart of it, new Macs run on the same hardware as PCs do. This has opened up possibilities for those who want to run Mac without having to fork out the huge amounts of cash to do so. It’s really for the underground, ubergeeks, and those who are willing to try something new and different, associated risks and issues accompany it as well.
It was one of those things that the more I read, the more I wanted to see if I could do it. It seemed that the people who got it working well loved it. And for as much as I would never have thought it just a few years ago, I love Macs. Newer ones that is. I love my laptop for what it is, as well as Mac OSX in general. And while, I could never completely abandon PCs, because I like the flexibility of both, as well as the fact that both Windows and Mac are not without their respective faults and strengths, to be able to get high end performance out of either system sounded like a win/win to me.
There was specific hardware that would work to pull this off, so I figured I’d follow that path in getting parts for my new machine. My logic being if the whole Mac thing failed, I could just still run it as just a Windows box. But the prospect of a dual boot Windows/Mac computer just seemed awesome. Basically the performance of a Mac Pro, but without having to pay $3000. With the information provided by the Hackintosh/OSX86 web presence, I ran to geek central (ie Newegg) to piece it all together. Luckily I found some good bargains, and away I went.
Let’s talk about the parts:
Motherboard:
Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS3L $60! (open box)
One of the darling motherboards in Hackintosh circles, as well as among standard PC users. Solid and stable, good for overclocking, and not a bad price. Not as feature laden as some other boards, but a solid performer, and super compatible for my project. Plus, open box….price was definitely right! I didn’t want to venture away from an Asus board, but this board was a lot cheaper than an OSX86 compatible Asus. The only real departure I made in this build. That being said, it came with a bunch of accessories, and so far I am very impressed with it.
Processor:
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Kentsfield 2.4ghz $190
This actually was a last minute choice. I was gonna go with a 3ghz Duo. But this was only 10 bucks more. I weighed the pros and cons of a faster Duo, or a slightly slower Quad. In essence, much software is just beginning to address dual cores, and even less supporting quad cores. At least in the PC world. But Mac has been addressing Quad for quite some time. Not to mention that in either realm, music software (specifically what I use, Steinberg Cubase) addresses Quads, it seemed the better choice. It would be siginificantly higher performing for music, and for the Mac end of it. Plus, with my RAM and motherboard choices, it would be easy to overclock to probably 3ghz as well. The prices on quad cores has significantly dropped just in the past few months (I think in like the spring this very CPU was in the neighborhood of 400 bucks-ish if I’m not mistaken). It also seemed like a good way to help prevent the inevitable being obsolete a little more.
RAM:
OCZ Platinum 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2 1066mhz $105 (but $30 rebate on the way)
I wanted fast, solid performing RAM. OCZ makes great RAM, and this is some of their better stuff. Also, I wanted to be able to use the maximum amount of RAM in this computer I could, and the maximum supported by the motherboard was 8GB in 4 slots. So I figured this was a good start, and I’ll get another pack of these down the road. Mac will address 8GB of RAM, though Windows (XP) will not. That’s why I figured, well, 4GB was a good start lol. And the price? Just bonus ☺
Power Supply:
Antec Basiq 500w OEM $40
This was a pretty easy choice. I wanted at least 450w, preferably higher. I didn’t necessarily need silent, but I wanted strong and reliable. Antecs are top performers in this regard. Plus, this model had dual 12v rails, and 18 amps on each of them to boot. Some of the power supplies that cost 2-3 times this one didn’t meet that. My only gripe was that it only has 2 SATA connectors; I would’ve preferred 4. Other than that, this thing was a perfect choice, and at a ridiculous price as well.
Video Card:
Asus EN7300GT Silent 512MB $32! (open box)
The 7xxx series nVidia cards are standard offerings (or at least had been) in Mac Pros, so this would be a solid choice for this project as well. Not to mention a card of this caliber for this price! Keep in mind I’m not a gamer, so the top performing video cards aren’t necessary for me. That being said though, the visual effects in Mac OSX rely on at least decent graphics, so I figured the standard offering should get me there. Not to mention the standard offering in a Mac Pro would be 256MB, and this doubled that. Should be beyond plenty for my needs.
Firewire:
Syba PCI card $12
PCPartsAndCables front FireWire header to standard FireWire plug contraption $16
I like firewire, as do Macs. For extended file transfers, external hard drives, and audio interfaces, firewire is so much better than USB. This was a must for me, so I picked this up. It has one internal port, because I wanted a front mounted firewire port as well as the rears. The cool thing was that the bundled 6-4pin firewire cable was worth the price alone (I think I paid $20 for the one with my camcorder!).
The clincher was that even though this card had the internal plug, and my case had a front port, the front port had the type of plug that would plug onto a firewire equipped motherboard. This is not the same type of plug as a standard firewire plug. This plug from PCPartsAndCables in the UK was basically able to mate these 2 plugs. Yay for scouring the net to see that at least ONE other person experienced this and made a solution. Go PCPartsAndCables!
DVD burner:
Samsung 22x DVD+/-RW LightScribe SATA drive $26!
The price of internal DVD burners is absolutely ridiculous. Just in mechanisms alone, these current prices must just barely cover cost of parts. I went with the SATA for solid transfer speeds, and LightScribe just to check it out. I chose Samsung because they tend to make solid stuff all around, and along with that, this particular drive seems to be very highly touted.
Case:
Cooler Master Centurion 5 Black/Silver $40 (on sale)
This is quite possibly the piece of the puzzle that got the most scrutiny. My qualifications I thought were quite simple, but in essence not at all. I wanted a case that looked semi-decent, was built fairly well, had enough drive bays to hold the multiple drives I’d have, have good cooling and air flow in terms of intake and exhaust fans, an intake fan that would blow across the hard drives, have front mounted USB AND FireWire ports, fit in the 17.25” spot I had for my tower, and most importantly, not cost some ridiculous amount of money.
I literally scoured through 100s of cases, even over the past few months, and often came up short. I finally discovered this one. Really, it was obvious fairly quickly, it pretty much met all the requirements. I wanted the one with blue trim, not silver. But the silver was on sale for 20 bucks less, so that was a no brainer.
Hard Drives:
Western Digital 36gb 10k RPM Raptor $40 (used on ebay)
Western Digital 320GB 7200RPM 16MB cache $15!!!! (NEW! On ebay)
I got both hard drives on eBay, a bit of a fluke but wow. The Raptor was a buy it now of a lot of 12, and it’s also a few years old (but still under warranty). It was more curiosity for that. I wanted the small one for a Windows system drive, and specifically to keep Windows on a completely separate drive for wipe/reinstall purposes, as well as to aid in the dual boot factor.
Now the 320gb, THAT was the fluke. New, sealed, and no reserve. I was just watching it to see what these were going for on ebay. I knew they were $50-75 new. I got the email saying that this one was ending and was only at $9!!! I figured, what the hey, I’ll bid $18 bucks. I won it at $15! Absolutely ridiculous.
Both drives are awesome and fast. The Raptor is a little noisy, but that seems to be a common issue. However, the Raptor being older it still has the old 4 pin molex connector, so the 2 SATA connectors on the power supply is just enough.
Keyboard:
Apple A1243 Aluminum full size keyboard $50 (Best Buy)
(not mine, but a better example of how it looks than my photo)
Well, ever since I saw and tried one of these out I was in love. And when my install got to a point where I needed a USB keyboard, this was the one I decided on.
Carried over items from previous machine:
Keyboard
(Originally, but soon realized it was not going to work. Replaced with Apple aluminum keyboard)
Logitech Track Ball
I have had this for ages, probably like 7-8 years. It still works perfect, and it still fits me like a glove. It’s USB, so no need to replace it. If/when it breaks, I’ll buy the exact one again lol.
Western Digital 250GB IDE drive
Initial setup was done with this drive, but it was removed as soon as the new ones came. After that, I bought an external enclosure for it, and I now use it as a backup drive for this machine.
Sony 16x DVD+/-RW drive IDE
This drive doesn’t like to eject a lot of the times, but it does still work well. It’s nice to be able to do disc copies with a source and a record drive, so I decided to keep using this.
Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Platinum.
Now I knew I wouldn’t get this working in Mac, but I would in Windows. It was gonna have to do until I get my FireWire recording interface.
So that covers the choice of parts. The motherboard was ordered first, and thus arrived first by itself. Everything else, except the hard drives and firewire contraption, all arrived the following Tuesday. 7 boxes, it was early Christmas for me! After a long day of lessons, I finally came home and began constructing. I took my time so I could be sure it was done right, as well as I wanted to relish in the computer building process. Initially I used my old hard drive, and upon very first power up, it worked just fine!
Within the next week or so, I got my new hard drives, as well as began to fiddle and tweak with the Mac installation, as well as dual booting and getting it all to work in the new configuration. Now, a Windows install is pretty much no biggie, but the Mac install is. I used a version of Mac OSX made by Kalyway, and I used two different ones, the 10.5.1 and 10.5.2 versions. I started with the 10.5.1.
On the first run, I literally just ran the disc and wanted to see if it would take. This was without following any of the install guides, changing settings or anything, just ran the setup disc. The bad thing about this particular install is that it takes probably in the neighborhood of 10-15 minutes just to get to the beginning of the install. I got a little tingle seeing the apple logo on my display though ☺ So I just let the install run and I was off to lessons. When I came back, it said install had failed. D’OH!
Alright, so I went online, did a little research, and changed some motherboard BIOS settings. I also made some specific choices in the installation, and let it go. It worked! Upon reboot after setup, I discovered that it needed to be using a USB keyboard to enter my information. Unfortunately, my keyboard wasn’t USB, so I had to run to the store and get one. I’m kinda fussy about keyboards, button feel and placement, etc, so I didn’t like most of the standard offerings, not to mention most of the standard stuff is way expensive and wireless. I don’t need wireless, it’s just gonna sit on a desk. So I decided to go with the keyboard I’ve really liked from the first time I saw/tried one; the new aluminum Apple keyboard. Seemed appropriate for such a build too. I picked up from Best Buy, and it was back home to the Hackintosh.
I put in all my info and boom I was running Mac OSX. The only thing that needed patching was a quick audio fix. Also, the graphics were supposed to work, but they didn’t. I guess the 512MB card wasn’t supported, but some searching found a fix for that as well. Networking worked fine as well. So I went and installed a bunch of apps to see how it worked. The only problem I encountered was that my version of Toast (CD burning app) liked to crash. That, and the machine wouldn’t restart or shutdown from the menu, it had to be done with the reset and power buttons on the case. Not the worst situation. Bootup and shutdown were very quick, and everything else was super stable.
So this was very successful, and the level of ability needed to get it working was in actuality a lot less than a Windows install and all the drivers needed. But it still wasn’t exactly what I wanted. In the next few days when I got my new hard drives, I got to experiment a little further. I downloaded the next newer version of Mac OSX, Kalyway 10.5.2. I decided to see if it would simplify the process, see how it compared. This one booted up to install a whole lot faster which was welcomed.
After the install, I rebooted it up, and this time it did recognize my graphics card. So the only thing that required a patch was the audio (basically like a driver install). That, and I was having some weird issue with it seeing external drives, which was another patch. And that was it. Two patches, one for external devices, one for sound. This install also addressed the shutdown and reboot issue as well.
Tack this on with the no problem Windows XP install (I’ll shoot myself in the foot before I let Vista touch this machine…..maybe if they actually make any steps to make Vista decent I’ll reconsider, but in 2 years they haven’t, so the odds don’t look too good), and I have a serious performing, decently priced computer that runs both XP and OSX flawlessly, quickly, and I got to build it all myself! Talk about win/win! ☺
It uses a small patch on the Windows install to let Windows give you the option for dual booting, and a Darwin Boot Loader to select Mac or Windows, and voila…a dual boot XP/OSX machine ala new Macs with BootCamp. But for a whole lot less money.
So for those of you who were adding, it was $610 in parts. All of the shipping came out to about $100. So roughly a $700 computer. For the record Mac Pros (desktop Macs with competive specs to this) start at $2800!!! I mean, I admit Mac Pros are awesome machines but uh…4 times the price? And…my machine is pretty awesome too ☺
I haven’t gone through the trouble of benchmarking or anything, but lets just say everything runs REALLY fast. And some of the audio exporting that I would do that would take 4-5 minutes to do, gets done in 15-45 seconds. I’ll let you decide if that seems like a decent upgrade ☺
Welcome my new machine….the “SkyBox”. ☺
R.I.P. "Blackbox" (2002-2008)
As a final note (and testament to true geekiness), I setup my ancient laptop as a Linux SAMBA print server, so that the Windows and Mac machines can all use my printer. So my *gulp 11 year old Dell Latitude CPi 300D laptop with a 300mhz Pentium II, 192MB of EDO SDRAM, and 6GB hard drive has actually gone to use. It also allowed me to change around my dining room area a little bit to incorporate this and also put my internet/networking stuff out there instead of my room.
That’s the lastest in the always changing world of my geekiness. PHEW. Ok, now that that’s finally done, on to other stuff.
(I can’t believe I wrote all of this…
…I can’t believe you read all of this :-p)