What is the cheapest Mini-ITX board/processor combo I can use in my Macintosh Classic?

[raygan]

I had previously built this little emulator box inside a Macintosh Classic based around the Raspberry Pi. I was pleased with the result externally, but I have come to my wits end struggling with the Pi’s very limited power and occasional issues like corrupted SD cards. In honor of the Mac’s 30th birthday, I want to give my Classic a (newer) new brain.
This time I am thinking a small, inexpensive mini-itx Hackintosh.

I have built a gaming PC style Hacintosh built into an old PowerMac G5 and I am pretty familiar with that end of the market, but I have never built a low power small computer before. My goals are:

• Cheap! This is a novelty project really so I prefer to keep it really cheap. Power is not a priority, my main uses for this will be running OpenEMU, the Basilisk II early Macintosh emulator, and basic OSX usage. Ideally my budget for this would be somewhere around $200 for the motherboard and processor combo. I have a 60GB SSD I am planning to use.
• Not too hot. The Macintosh Classic is basically a big plastic box without a lot of cooling. I’m going to put in a fan, but I need something that won’t generate a lot of heat.
• Wifi for networking.
• Both VGA and HDMI, or dual HDMI The VGA will power the 8-inch 800x600 screen, and the HDMI will be external for connecting to other displays or TVs.

I am not opposed to shopping for used parts on eBay, but I’d prefer to just grab everything from Amazon or MicroCenter.

What should I be shopping for?

 

[Going Bald]

View attachment 81257
I had previously built this little emulator box inside a Macintosh Classic based around the Raspberry Pi. I was pleased with the result externally, but I have come to my wits end struggling with the Pi’s very limited power and occasional issues like corrupted SD cards. In honor of the Mac’s 30th birthday, I want to give my Classic a (newer) new brain.
This time I am thinking a small, inexpensive mini-itx Hackintosh.

I have built a gaming PC style Hacintosh built into an old PowerMac G5 and I am pretty familiar with that end of the market, but I have never built a low power small computer before. My goals are:

• Cheap! This is a novelty project really so I prefer to keep it really cheap. Power is not a priority, my main uses for this will be running OpenEMU, the Basilisk II early Macintosh emulator, and basic OSX usage. Ideally my budget for this would be somewhere around $200 for the motherboard and processor combo. I have a 60GB SSD I am planning to use.
• Not too hot. The Macintosh Classic is basically a big plastic box without a lot of cooling. I’m going to put in a fan, but I need something that won’t generate a lot of heat.
• Wifi for networking.
• Both VGA and HDMI, or dual HDMI The VGA will power the 8-inch 800x600 screen, and the HDMI will be external for connecting to other displays or TVs.

I am not opposed to shopping for used parts on eBay, but I’d prefer to just grab everything from Amazon or MicroCenter.

What should I be shopping for?

http://www.amazon.com/Gigabyte-GA-H61N-USB3-Intel-Express-Chipset/dp/B005SCYHV8/
and
http://www.amazon.com/Intel-I3-2105-Dual-Core-Processor-Cache/dp/B0051YS85O/

would work well. ~$230 for the pair but this combo has worked well in several HTCP builds.

Might be able to get a combo deal at your local MicroCenter.

 

[stehor]

mc has the asrock h61m-dgs on sale for 45.00 no usb 3.0 picked 1 up last week no sleep issues bios will need to be patched with pmpatch or dpcimanager or use clover bootloader if u dont want to patch bios