My office

I have a new computer sitting in my room!

I started with a Gigabyte EP45T-DS3R motherboard with 4GB of Crucial DDR3 ram (in a 2x2GB configuration so I can upgrade to 8GB later), and a Core 2 Duo E8500 (stock speed 3.16Ghz). For graphics I went with an ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB card which can plow through almost any game on the highest settings (Crysis topped it out on “High” settings while there is the available “Very High” setting) and will kick serious ass in Snow Leopard with OpenCL. Added in a 1TB hard drive, DVD burner, Apple keyboard, and Corsair 520W modular power supply and stuffed all that into an Antec P182 case. The P182 is designed to be very quite with 3 120mm fans and rubber grommets and stripping to reduce vibration. The whole system cost just under $1000 including shipping from 2 suppliers.

I’m dual-booting OSX 10.5.6 and Windows 7 Beta (build 7000). Unfortunately, OSX doesn’t fully support my HD 4870 so over the last week I’ve installed all the standard flavors of Windows so that I can access all that power (and play some games). I got a stable install of XP SP3, a pathetic Vista install, and, surprisingly, a solid-as-a-rock Windows 7 beta install. I’m so blown away by Windows 7 that I’ve gotten rid of my other Windows flavors. It’s fast, clean, and unintrusive. The only problem I had was installing Daemon Tools for disc mounting (Note: as of this writing, Daemon Tools cannot be installed on Windows 7). A quick search revealed another free program PowerISO that does the job.

OSX installed with only 2 fixes. One for my onboard audio, and another that fixes Restart/Shutdown functionality. Other than those, I have a Vanilla (unmodified) installation of OSX running on this machine. No word yet on when to expect mac drivers for the HD 4800 series.

Crysis running on Windows 7

While I still prefer OSX, Microsoft has a strong offering in Windows 7. Of course, I might be giving them too much credit just for having a functioning OS. This is what Vista should have been.

In the course of building this computer and getting everything installed I learned some things that might be helpful to fellow Hackers:

• - The Gigabyte board I got works well and is mostly compatible with OSX right out of the box.
• - Don’t get an ATI Radeon HD 4800 series card unless you’re willing to wait for OSX drivers to show up.
• - If you get stuck, use Google. Search for your hardware (motherboard, graphics card, etc.) with the terms “hackintosh” or “OSx86”. The Hackintosh community is huge, if someone out there has your hardware they probably have the same problems.

If you’re interested in Windows 7 beta, Gizmodo has an excellent article on getting it up and running.

1. 1. stefanie p. warmouth Jan 18, 2009 6:36 PM

   karl, are you gonna hack a gibson now?