Snow Leopard, Sandy Bridge Advice needed

[Reactor-core]

Greetings fellow Hackintoshers,


I am in the process of planning and purchasing parts for a Sandy Bridge, Snow Leopard, 10.6.8 specific build. The reason I am going this route is I need to run some necessary legacy applications which require Rosetta and will not run on later versions of Mac OS X. I tried virtualization of 10.6 and was not satisfied with results so I need a permanent physical Hackintosh build of Snow Leopard.


Some of my goals are:
1. Snow Leopard Mac OS X, already have Retail Install DVD.
2. Powerful yet dollar friendly/conscious.
3. Run my required legacy apps, audio, web authoring.


My initial list of components will be:
1. CPU: i5 2500k thru i7 2700k.
2. Mobo: Gigabyte Z68 flavored mobo, i.e.: GA-Z68XP-UD3, A-Z68X-UD3H-B3, GA-Z68MA-D2H-B3 or GA-Z68A-D3H-B3.
3. Video: Radeon HD 1GB 5850, 5850, 6850, or 6870.
4. DRIVE: Sumsung 850 EVO 250GB.
5. RAM: Kingston HyperX FURY 8GB Kit, 1866MHz DDR3 CL10 DIMMs.
6. POWER SUPPLY: EVGA 600Watt Power Supply.

Any recommendations on components I should stay away from, i.e. have issues or which components work well/flawlessly would be appreciated. I have perused many of the forums, build guides, installation guides etc. and most of the builds focus on eventually upgrading beyond Snow Leopard and eventually running some version of Lion, Maverick or Yosemite. I wanted to know if there was/is a recent build guide which is centered on building a Snow Leopard system with the most current, latest information so I can hopefully avoid any mis-steps due to outdated information or hackingtosh software.


Overall I'm looking for components and steps which have proven to be straight forward and get up and running smoothly and reliably in Snow Leopard.


Any information fellow Hackintoshers can offer me or point me to I would be very grateful for, thank you.

 

[WhiskyTangoFoxtrot]

I have a similar use case and you are on the right track.
60 series is the max chipset.
Sandy Bridge is the Max CPU.
The gpu was the hardest part for me. The best nvidia chip is a 285. The best radeon is a 5870.
Ssd brand doesn't matter that I know of but you do not get TRIM.

The 5770s were popular. I bought a 6670 from a buyers guide and later found out the guide was geared for post snow leopard builds. I don't know if your 6xxx gpu will play nice or not. The 6670 mostly worked but DVD player would always crash. Could work and play games and do most everything but the DVD player thing felt like a bad omen. I now have a 9800 in that machine and a 9600 in another 10.6 build that both work great.

It is hard to get concise advice on old OS installs because everyone wants the latest OS instead.

 

[neilhart]

You maybe pushing the CPU a bit. The SandyBridge CPUs came on the market as Snow Leopard was approaching its final release.

You might be better off with H55, P55, and or H67 chipset socket 1156 mother board and an original i Core CPU such as and i7-860. SL was well suited for those systems. I have three system that run SL 10.6.8 very well and they are each pre SandyBridge.

Good modding,
neil

 

[Reactor-core]

Thank you for the advice. The reason I selected these specs as they are based on Apple's iMac which used a i5 2500, socket 1155 and shipped with Snow Leopard 10.6.6, you can see full specs over at everymac.com. This is the "End-of-Line" for Snow Leopard so I don't think anyone can do much better than SL and a Sandy Bridge configuration. I didn't want to build the ultimate beast hackintosh but wanted something fairly decent in terms of performance for SL.


I purchased all my components and should start the build in a few days:
Mobo: Gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD3 rev 1.03 LGA 1155, BIOS F10
CPU: Intel i5 2500k
RAM: Crucial Ballistix 8GB Kit (4GBx2) DDR3 1600 MT/s (PC3-12800) CL9 @1.5V
VIDEO: Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 6850
POWER SUPPLY: EVGA 500W 80PLUS
HARD DRIVE: Samsung 850 EVO 250GB 2.5-Inch SATA 3 SSD


Hopefully all will go smoothly, fingers, legs and eyes crossed.

 

[Reactor-core]

Well spent the better part of a yesterday getting my new/old Snow Leopard Build up and running. The following list is issues I ran into and how I overcame them…


1. Got all hardware components together and built the system. Upon booting into BIOS all hardware seemed to work properly and looking closer at the BIOS I notice it was using the U1G / EFI, ugh!


Problem: From what I have read EFI BIOS is great if you want to upgrade your MAC OS to Mountain Lion or more recent versions but not so good if you want to remain at Snow Leopard.


Solution: I had to create a bootable flash drive using Windows 98 and run a downgrade BIOS app called EFi2AWD. Not really familiar with DOS commands in Windows Command Prompt window so it took me a while to flash the BIOS back to F10.


2. Finally got the right MOBO BIOS for the Snow Leopard build and booted up with iBoot DVD.


Problem: iBoot DVD would not boot up or even be recognized as a boot option.


Solution: Reburned iBoot to a CD, (had to run to Rite-Aid and buy some CDs, haven't used a CD in AGES!).


3. Booted up with iBoot option and got immediate Kernel Panic.


Problem: iBoot boots with error: <\"ACPI"\".\n"@/SourceCache/xnu/xnu-1504.15.2/iokit/Kernel/IOPlatformExpert.cpp:1387">


Solution: Before loading iBoot, pop out the CD and put in Retail Snow Leopard Install DVD, hit F5 and start SL install.


After the initial SL install I booted into SL 10.6.3, no audio, graphics skewed, video card not fully recognized but I did have net connection strangely enough. I updated Snow Leopard with the Combo 10.6.8 update and then ran Multi-Beast with appropriate selections. I rebooted and everything seems to work, audio, graphics recognized correctly, etc.


I was able to install all my old/cherished software including my Snow Leopard Rosetta only apps live Golive and Freehand. Even got Unreal Tournament running.


Snow Leopard / Sandy Bridge Build: Gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD3 v1.3 w/F10 BIOS, Sapphire Radeon 6850 1GB, Samsung 850 EVO 250GB, Crucial Ballistix GB Kit (4GBx2) DDR3 1600, Snow Leopard 10.6.8.