I never saw an answer on why we need a separate Wifi card for this set-up. Will the on-board capability work or do we have to get a separate card? If we have to go separate, you can't get a discrete video card.
I am trying to dual boot this to Win 7 and OS X and want multiple monitors for both.
Thanks
Noo-Beee
The Mini Half Height PCI e card supplied is an Intel Centrino 630, (which is an integrated BT 4.0 and b,g,n Wifi) and it's not supported by OS X. If you don't mind resorting to a dongle for bluetooth, because bizarrely this card's bluetooth works out of the box on OS X, you can replace the installed Mini PCI e with a Atheros AR9280 / AR5BHB92 (Same card, just different names) which supports Wifi, Airdrop, Airplay and Dual Band b,g & n without any messing. It even works straight away using the installer for Mountain lion to download updates before your OS is installed.
I think it's bad advice on this build to get a PCIE card, because the Mini PCI e slot on the board will take the AR9280 without any modifications, you just lose the onboard BT. I've got an Asus 660Ti in the only PCI e slot, and the Atheros replacing the centrino card that was in there.
Great thing about the centrino cards is they are worth about 3x what the atheros is, so you can easily sell it to someone with a windows laptop that wants an upgrade.
The only issue I had with this was that I ordered my card after I'd already installed my build, and after I tooik the old card out and rebooted with the new card installed, I couldn't get rid of the Bluetooth icon in the finder, and it won't go away no matter what I try. If you create a new user afterwards, it's not an issue, so I could just create a new user, copy my files back over, delete my old account, then create a new account with the same name and copy the files over again. I might do someday but for the moment I can live with a greyed out BT icon.
Funny thing is, after I booted up Windows 7, with the same change in cards, it bluescreened everytime unless I booted in safe mode. Then I couldn't delete the original intel driver, even trying the commandline to delete all trace of it. It's scary when a Hackintosh is more forgiving than Windows.