To hack or not to hack

[Zyte]

Hello everyone,

I'm a noob on the verge of building my first Hackintosh. Thank you Tony for clear tutorials and thanks for everyone else sharing their thoughts too!

My supposed build:
Mobo: Gigabyte P55M-UD2
CPU: Intel i5-661
RAM: Corsair 4x2GB DDR3 1600 Ghz
HD: 60GB Phoenix Pro SSD
GPU: Gigabyte HD5770 1 Gt Silent
PSU: Silverstone Nightjar 450 W
Other stuff: Magic mouse, Apple keyboard, blue tooth bundle, external DVD, external soundcard (A/D to moob's optic output)

Currently, I have two concerns:

1) I haven't found any reports of the exact GPU board on Hackintosh before. I want to use the passive cooled version of the card (with a TV and a monitor attached) because I'm building a very silent setup. Can anyone guess how much trouble the GPU will cause? I'm hoping not much, cause people have been using the actively cooled version of Gigabyte Gigabyte HD5770 1 Gt.

2) While many tutorials make the operation seem like eating a lollipop, I'm very concerned because all the forum threads report hangs, display problems, problems with sleep etc, etc. While I'm OK with problems in the building phase, I really want to end up with a reliable setup, with full sleep functionality, a tv and a monitor (cloned) at 1920x1080, and optical sound output working. The other option is to buy an iMAC, but this bugs me because I want to use it for games and Hackintosh offers so much more power for the same price. Can anyone estimate how many percentage of Hackintosh projects end up with FULLY functional machines with no problems whatsoever?

Sorry for bugging you all with these noob questions! I will be more than happy to report back with my project to help the community and others with similar projects!

 

[ADent]

There are no reports on the 5770 Silent, because it doesn't exist yet. It hasn't started shipping.

Why i5-661 ? The i5-750 is cheaper (at one store) and has more real cores.

What is a "bluetooth bundle"?

I have a sleep issue - but have not tracked it down since I stopped using it on my true blue Apple Mac mini that had sleep issues.

Bluetooth can be an issue - make sure you get a fully supported BT adapter.

5770's seem to be working (don't know about mirroring), but particularly well if you use a reference design. The silent 5770 differs, so no idea if that will be flawless or not.

 

[Zyte]

Hasn't started shipping? Weird, my local store informs me they have them on stock.. Maybe they are screwing with me, or maybe it's just a matter of country. I'm leaning towards i5-661 because it has considerably higher frequency and most CPU consuming applications I use are games which cannot fully utilize four cores. By blue tooth bundle I guess I ment dongle (it that makes more sense). Anyway, just an external USB blue tooth device. Thanks for informing me that can be troublesome, I thought they are almost plug and play.

Anyway, currently I'm leaning towards the 27" iMAC, since I will know for sure it can go to sleep and everything works. It's not such a bad deal, when you consider the 27" ips high resolution display.