My build: GA-P55A-UD3-2.0/Core i5 750 success

[magicmirror]

Hi,

I just thought I'd share since I got this working quite smoothly, and the install is painless.

Here is what I purchased:

GA-P55A-UD3 version 2.0
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002XDQC4K?ie=UTF8
(Came with F8. Updated it to bios F9 since that was the DSDT available here:http://www.tonymacx86.com/Public/DSDT-GA-P55A-UD3-2.0-F9.aml)

Core i5 750 (2.66ghz)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002KQ5KDY?ie=UTF8

8GB OCZ PC3 10666
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003IUG418?ie=UTF8

Apevia iceburg PS 680w

OCZ 32GB solid state boot drive
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003BPBUQO?ie=UTF8

nvidia 220GT 1GB video card
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002RL8I5O?ie=UTF8

You can save yourself money with a 4GB memory kit, and a spinning disk. I will tell you though, that the SSD seems to make a world of difference in boot time, and overall system performance.

==optional components that made this easy for me==
I was mainly concerned with 64bit functionality. So, I didn't test very much with 32bit mode, but all of these devices worked well for me, out of the box, no kexts to load.
Turtle Beach Amigo II USB sound card (works OOB 10.6.3 & 10.6.4 in 64bit & 32bit mode)
NetGear GA311 PCI network card (works OOB 10.6.3 & 10.6.4 in 64bit & 32bit mode)
IOGear USB Bluetooth Adapter (works OOB 10.6.3 & 10.6.4 in 64bit mode)

I happened to have the netgear card on hand, because I've used their products in the past. I know this is still sold though, and I don't think I paid but $20 for it at frys.

I used iBoot supported and the latest multibeast. I also turned off the onboard audio and network in the BIOS. The 8111D networking was 32bit only, and the onboard audio only worked through the optical ports with the voodoo drivers. At some point i will probably return to using the onboard audio, but for now I have this hooked up to an analog only receiver an opted for the USB audio which works just peachy. In multibeast I loaded an i5 smbios, 64bit enabled mode, user DSDT, permission repair/kext cache rebuild. That was it.

Thanks TonyMac!

My previous experiment with OS10 on a PC was using on an AMD with leopard. While I was able to get that working, it was never as stable or seamless as using the iboot + vanilla 10.6.3 install disk. This was too cool, and it ends up being a cheaper better configuration than buying an imac. can't beat that.

 

[HollowMan]

Hi Magic,

I have exactly the same MOBO+Proc and i had no luck in booting the system in the installer. Running in verbose mode will hange the installer on: Still waiting for root device
Can you please tell me what HDD+Optical unit are you using? Sata, IDE? And what bios settings?
I've tried using an IDE HDD+IDE Optical unit while trying to set the HDD to Primary and Optical unit to Slave and vice versa and nothing worked.
I've tried with the SATA HDD + IDE Optical (Primary) and this still hasn't worked so i must be doing something wrong. Can you please let me know exactly what you've done and how you configured your system hardware+bios ?

Thanks

 

[magicmirror]

I'm using an OEM unboxed samsung SATA DVDRW, and an OCZ 32GB SDD for boot. I think just about any SATA DVD/BRD drive would work considering that people buy aftermarket drives and upgrade thier macs. What video card are you using? that's the thing that I tripped up on was a off branded ATI chip video card. It crashed the system on boot everytime.

 

[HollowMan]

I'm using an OEM unboxed samsung SATA DVDRW, and an OCZ 32GB SDD for boot. I think just about any SATA DVD/BRD drive would work considering that people buy aftermarket drives and upgrade thier macs. What video card are you using? that's the thing that I tripped up on was a off branded ATI chip video card. It crashed the system on boot everytime.

ATI Sapphire Radeon 5850 HD... I've been using the RC3 of the ATI iBoot for Radeon 5XXX and that seems to work but i'm starting to think it's the damn IDE drives that are causing the problems... that and the fact that a friend with mac experience suggested it's probably the issue here.

 

[MacMan]

I'm using an OEM unboxed samsung SATA DVDRW, and an OCZ 32GB SDD for boot. I think just about any SATA DVD/BRD drive would work considering that people buy aftermarket drives and upgrade thier macs. What video card are you using? that's the thing that I tripped up on was a off branded ATI chip video card. It crashed the system on boot everytime.

ATI Sapphire Radeon 5850 HD... I've been using the RC3 of the ATI iBoot for Radeon 5XXX and that seems to work but i'm starting to think it's the damn IDE drives that are causing the problems... that and the fact that a friend with mac experience suggested it's probably the issue here.

The IDE ports on your motherboard are unsupported, there are no drivers available for it.

 

[HollowMan]

I'm using an OEM unboxed samsung SATA DVDRW, and an OCZ 32GB SDD for boot. I think just about any SATA DVD/BRD drive would work considering that people buy aftermarket drives and upgrade thier macs. What video card are you using? that's the thing that I tripped up on was a off branded ATI chip video card. It crashed the system on boot everytime.

ATI Sapphire Radeon 5850 HD... I've been using the RC3 of the ATI iBoot for Radeon 5XXX and that seems to work but i'm starting to think it's the damn IDE drives that are causing the problems... that and the fact that a friend with mac experience suggested it's probably the issue here.

The IDE ports on your motherboard are unsupported, there are no drivers available for it.

Thanks for the answer MacMan that's the conclusion I reached eventually, will an USB Drive work for the install on an USB external drive?

Thanks.

 

[magicmirror]

I believe this motherboard does support boot from USB CD/HDD/Thumb, and I don't think you'll have issues installing or using a USB DVD or HDD drive in MacOS. I create an administrative build to boot from on USB drives to make disk images with carbon copy cloner.