GUIDE 10.6.8 / GA-EG41MF-US2H / nVidia GeForce 210 1GB

[cheezmonkey]

Background:
I am a Windows Engineer of some considerable experience, who has on occasion been forced to fix the odd unix-related problem. I have been using Macs at home for about five or six years and quite like them, enough to have bought a couple and have a hankering for another. I should however point out that I haven't ever really had to fix much with any of the my Macs, I wouldn't consider myself any higher than a "power user" at a push.

So I was poking around on eBay watching auctions of minis and iMacs, roughly around the 2006-8 time-range and seeing that they were regularly selling for anything from £200-£400, so I started squirelling away the pennies when it occured to me that most of the machines I was looking at were Core Duo or even Core Solo, therefore not capable of running more recent builds of OSx. So I thought to myself, do I really want to spend that much money on something that is already pushing obsolesence? Probably not, but what to do?
I cast my mind back to the bad old days when I tried to build a Hackintosh using 10.4, laughed at my ridiculous idea and then went about my day. But for some reason, I couldn't get the idea out of my head, probably because I hate to be defeated. So before I knew what was what I had dusted off my old rig (literally, with canned air and a black sack) and was busily trying to find an intelligible guide appropriate to the hardware I had to hand, which for the record was as follows..

Hardware:
Generic PSU
Board: Gigabyte GA-EG41MF-US2H socket 775 mainboard (Link: http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3469#ov) or google the board name if the link expires
CPU: Intel E2160 (Link: http://ark.intel.com/products/29739/Intel-Pentium-Processor-E2160-(1M-Cache-1_80-GHz-800-MHz-FSB) ) or google
Graphics: Asus nVidia GeForce 210 1GB Silent - which I should admit I bought especially for this project. (Link: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B004I5UDO6/?tag=tonymacx86-21)
RAM: 4GB of whatever was cheapest back in 07 when I built it, shows in hardware profile as A-DATA DDR2 800, 2x2GB
HD: Seagate ST9500420AS (500GB SATA II, 2.5")

So How did I do it? (The build: )
Well after a couple of days tinkering it became apparent that in order to make my life easier, I should buy a known good grpahics card rather than the one I had which apparently no-one else on the whole planet ever bought. This makes the first few days of work irrelevant so I will not detail them. So after a couple more days playing around following as best I could guides written by people with different components than me or different OSX'es I was beginning to lose hope, until I came across this awesome guide: http://tonymacx86.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/iboot-multibeast-install-mac-os-x-on.html - I take no credit for this guide, it was not written by me. What I can tell you is that by following it and applying a little common sense and background knowledge, I was at 10.6.8 from a blank disk in TWO HOURS (considering I had been at it for a week at this point, I was delighted.) If your hardware matches mine, remember to install VooDooHDA in Multibeast as this is not installed by default. The guide invites you to install other components, it's just a tickbox. So, I was already most of the way there. Everything except full-on grpahics working. I installed all the outstanding updates and rebooted. Now I had to set about the graphics card. A quick look at the super-awesome 10.6.8 HCL (http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/HCL_10.6.8) showed me that my card was supported (I already knew this) and that I could "make it go" using graphicsenabler=yes (Included in the build above by default) and by injecting the card's EFI string into boot.plist. What? I hear you ask, isn't EFI A record label? Well no it isn't, that's EMI and fear not, it's damn sight easier than you are probably thinking at this point. To The internet! once again. This time, I came across another useful guide, here: http://www.insanely-mac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=257446&st=0 -I ended up doing this twice after doing something stupid and having to start again. The first time through I nicked the EFI String right out of this guide, whilst it did work after a fashion, I had problems... only one monitor would work, changing res caused the screen to go blue til after a reboot... This guide does tell you how to get your own EFI string, it takes seconds and is totally worth it, as I was able to get Full HD, dual displays apparently with nothing broken (Played Diablo 3 on full settings for hours.)

NOTE ON EFI INJECTION: If you have followed this guide and are intending to follow it to completion, you will need to note that in this build rather than inserting the EFI string for your graphics card into com.apple.boot.plist as directed in the guide, you will instead need to add it to org.chameleon.Boot.plist, located in /Extra

So having injected the string and rebooted, you should be looking at a nice, modern resolution and wondering to yourself whether you're about finished.. well you are. Congratulations. The first thing you should do is attach a spare drive and use an application such a Carbon Copy Cloner (http://www.bombich.com/) and clone out your hard work before you go and do something stupid to it, like I did twice.)

Does anything not work?
Yes - I can't get into the appstore BUT THE ITUNES STORE DOES WORK. My belief is that I have an invalid system serial number, but trying to change it caused me complete rebuild from scratch number two, so I can live without it for now.

Anything else?
Nope. It's been up for three days now, running Diablo 3 for several hours during the day and playing 1080p video via XBMC in the evening. No unexpected reboots, no weirdness, performance is staggering - it leaves my 2008 iMac (8.1) in the dust.

So what I have done here is proved to myself that it is most certainly possible for a Mac novice to build a decent performing Hackintosh for a fraction of the cost of equivalent Apple hardware. Which wasn't much of a surprise, but I was glad my proof of concept went ahead. Over the coming months, I will be improving the hardware in stages, beginning with a case and PSU which don't require their own seperate outbuilding, then an SSD and when I can be bothered to go through all the above again, I will replace the board and CPU with something a little more current, but right now, it will more than meet my needs.

If you have any questions about the specifics of this guide please either reply to this thread or email me moc.liamg@revoltaoggnigar (its reversed) but as I said way back at the start, I'm no expert. This worked for me, it may not for you. This is just me giving something back to the Hackintosh community. . I will try and help you where I can, but in all likelihood following my advice on an existing build will break it. Always make changes to your cloned build rather than your live one, it will save you a world of pain.

 

[jeffcarrera]

this one was very pleasant to read. thanks for the great post.

 

[cheezmonkey]

Just a quick update to keep this thread alive...
Since posting, I have had a thought or two and started some of the work upgrading the machine.
Firstly, it is important that you install a bootloader onto your cloned build, or at least have a manual alternative. Multibeast will allow you to install the bootloader straight from the desktop, just follow this guide if you are usure: http://blog.waldrondigital.com/2010/06/12/cloning-a-hackintosh-to-a-new-hard-disk-drive/
As I promised, I have bought a silent PSU and enhanced case. I can now actually hear the Time machine backup drive spin up for backups, which is a novelty/annoyance depending on your perspective.
Additionally, this week I have bought and installed the SSD, I promised. One of these: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B004Z0S6RU/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i00[/URL].
I was also kindly gifted an i7 3770, which kinda blows my self-imposed budget of £300, however, you could still use all the components I ahve and just buy the i3 I had originally intended to buy and keep in budget. Board and RAM next payday hopefully. Probably pick up Lion on USB from my local Apple store this weekend, assuming they still stock it. Then next month, I get to go through all this good stuff again, no doubt with another post or two on here!

 

[archer2009]

I also have the Gigabyte EG41MFT-US2H Motherboard

I'm thinking about turning it into a Hackingtosh as my MacMini is too slow and doesn't have dual screens.

Would you recommend the Nvidia GT210 Graphics Card?

I was actually thinking about buying the Nvidia GT610 instead which is also fanless in many designs abut a bit faster.
Am I correct in thinking I won't be able to use this motherboard without buying an addon Graphics Card?

Are you able to Dual Boot at all into OSX and Windows 7?

 

[cheezmonkey]

Hi Archer,
Let me address your points in the order they were laid out.

::Would I recommend the Geforce 210? Well, no, probably not. Though I still use it in my shiny new build, it's pants. It works fine for HD video and lower requirement games, but benchmarks and research show it to be weak. If you just want to watch videos on it it will be fine though.

:: Would the 610 work? I don't honestly know, if it's in the HCL link I posted then yes, but I have no experience working with it.
:: Can you use the onboard Intel graphics? Not that I know of with 10.6.8 - Even the GeForce 210 would be better anyway!
:: Am I able to dual boot? I've no real need to so I haven't set it up, but depending on your skill level this is pretty trivial to achieve. I can probably offer some pointers if you really need it. No warranty or responsibility mind you

General thoughts - I would look at using OS 10.8 as a longer term goal, it was a damn sight easier to setup for me, particularly the graphics support, which is always the hard bit. Though it won't run on your hardware from the looks of it.

Hope this helps.

 

[archer2009]

Thanks for the speedy reply.

Did you notice at all if the GT210 made the rest of your Computer quieter? By that I mean do you think it took off the strain from the rest of the system?
I don't know if you used the computer in Windows before you installed OSX, but after you added the Graphics Card?

In my PC for example it's quiet until you push the computer to work a bit harder and then the CPU fan speeds up - I'm still in two minds about turning my PC into a Hackingtosh - I'd need to use Windows 7 for sure on it as well so I'd have to make it Dual boot. But I also use it to watch movies on and it's built in graphics card is pretty good for this most of the time.

One of the draws of the Nvidia Chipset was some software I use such as the Freeware DVDSoft is CUDA enabled and so it will convert video files faster if there's a CUDA Graphics Card installed. Although I have no idea how much faster.

BTW did you also notice any difference in Image quality - especially for text / webpages? Compared to the built in graphics card?

DVI output on my PC is fine but sometimes HDMI output is a little soft.

 

[cheezmonkey]

Hi Archer,
Again, your points in order.

:: Did the 210 make the computer quieter? I can't really answer that. As the original post states, this box was my old machine, which had been sat in the corner in parts for some time. It had been replaced by a teeny little zotac machine. Before that, when it was my main machine, it had a big fat ATI grpahics card with a massive fan, loads of case coolers and 4 hard drives. It sounded like a squadron of jet fighters.

:: Did it previously run Windows? In it's previous guise, it was an XP machine. But as I said above, the two were not really comparable.

Regarding your other thoughts, I've not used that particular programme, I use XBMC for all my media playage and have done for a long time. The old machine ran it when it was windows-based, as did the Zotac and as does the Hackintosh now. I can't really report any major differences except that the Zotac wouldn't play 1080 HD stuff, which is ultimately why I replaced it (though I replaced it with the computer it had in fact replaced in some ways. Weird how things work out.) I had never used the onboard graphics card as when I built then thing it was my main gaming rig and the idea of using an Intel chipset for any kind of serious gaming used to send a shudder down my spine.

Regarding your plans to dual boot, it might be sensible to install each OS on seperate hard drives if you have the hardware. The more you can isloate them from each other, the less likely you are to damage one whilst fiddling with the other.

 

[archer2009]

Spare hard drives is no problem - I could certainly put Windows on one and OSX on another if I had to
I have one Intel SSD and a few regular Hard Drives.

My CPU is an Intel E6700 - so that should be ok hopefully.

http://ark.intel.com/products/27251/Intel-Core2-Duo-Processor-E6700-4M-Cache-2_66-GHz-1066-MHz-FSB

I often wonder if games are written particularly badly to encourage consumers to splash out on new hardware - I can play Trackmania Nations - which is a free game that anyone can download of the net and it plays perfectly fine on my embedded Intel Graphics Card, looks wonderful.

But I just downloaded a demo of Farming simulator where you drive a tractor and it's dead slow and blocky.

I was mainly looking into Graphics Cards to speed up processing when doing occasional video editing work - but then remembered about Hackingtoshes and so whatever I buy I'll certainly keep in mind a graphics card that also works well in Hackingtosh machines

Anyway it's nice to know that your machine works well for you and that you have the same Motherboard and similar processor to myself.
And that all I might need to turn my machine into a Hackingtosh is a fairly cheap Graphics Card

 

[cheezmonkey]

That CPU is ideal - a lot of Macs use a similar one.Good that you have spare disks too, it will make backing up various stages of your work easier. If you can, I'd strongly recommend popping one into an external USB enclosure so that you can backup your work as you go. I know what you mean about game coders - Things like Xbox and Playstation can get by on the same hardware for five or more years, but trying to run today's new game on a 5 year-old PC is a laughable notion

Anyway, best of luck to you in your build. Don't lose heart if it doesn't work the first time or the third for that matter - the satisfaction you will feel when you have it working far outweighs the frustration you may build trying to get it going. Trust me, afer a week of stupidly late nights, finally get it working made me giddy (though that could have been delirium from the sleep deprivation!

If you need any pointers or tips, I'll help where I can, feel free to email me at the address in the original post. Remember, it's written backwards!