A new Mac

This blog is about a project that I've had for a couple of years - since I tried emulators to run the original Mac Os. Yes, I'm old enough to remember using original Macs. Those that look like a shoebox with a little screen. Of course, by then they were way too expensive to afford one. Man, by then even PCs where expensive. I remember an IBM PC clone costing about 2,500€. And that will buy you a 8088 CPU, 4.77MHz, 640K RAM, a 5 1/4 floppy disk reader and a 20 MB hard drive.

But I'm digressing. Ever since I've tried an hack of Mac OS 10.4.6 on my old AMD X64 CPU, that I was thinking about building a much more compatible system. About an year ago I decided to replace my computer's board, and jump out the AMD wagon. So I've replaced the ASRock board by an Asus - nice board, by the way, with lots of overclocking options - and an Intel Core 2 Quad 6600. But that board also turned out to be not very compatible with Mac OSX. My old 10.4.8 (I had upgraded) would run but for Internet I had to add and old 3Com 10/100 network adapter. Almost none of the onboard features worked. No sound and no ethernet. So I decided that the next time that I'd upgrade will choose a board with an Intel chipset. So there we are. An year has gone by, and it's time to upgrade. To be sincere I toyed with the idea of buying a real Mac, maybe a Mini, but they are so underpowered, and so hard to upgrade that I felt that it would be like throwing money away...

I would be reusing the CPU and memory. Ditto for hard disks, graphics adapter and monitors. I decided to replace the case, power supply, CPU cooler, motherboard and DVD burner. Anyway I had to replace the power supply and motherboard as I had a power glitch and both were fried. A quick budget:

Motherboard: Gigabyte EP45-DS3 - 100€
Power supply: Corsair TX650W - 90€
CPU Cooler: Thermalright Ultra 120 Extreme Edition - 60€
Case: Lian Li PC8 - 90€
Wifi network adapter: D-Link 547 - 40€
DVD Burner: Pioneer DVR216D - 35€
Bluetooth: USB Cambridge Silicon Radio - 10€
Keyboard: Apple Wired Keyboard - 50€
Mouse: Apple Optical USB Mouse - 50€
Total: 490€

Recovered from my old computer:
Graphics: XFX NVidia 8800GT Extreme
Monitors: 2 LG L-1919S
Hard disks: Samsung HD501LJ, Samsung HD103UJ, Seagate ST3250823AS and Maxtor 6V250F0
RAM: 4 Team Elite Dual Channel PC400 2GB
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Stepping 11 Revision G0
Card Reader

Stuff I had lying around:
Firewire 400 4 port PCI board
120 mm Fan for CPU cooler

Assembling all the hardware took about 3 hours. I have to say that while this CPU cooler is very good, if I ever want to replace the CPU I'll have to remove the motherboard. But the system that it uses prevents uneven cooling for some cores when the board is mounted vertically. The case is very well built in aluminum, and already comes with two 120mm fans (front and rear). It had all the needed screws. I have used the disk cage to put 3 hard drives, the remaining went to the space below the 3 1/2 floppy bay, that I used to mount the card reader. These days I have no use for diskette drives anymore. The DVD writer went to the lowest 5 1/4 bay. I think this was the cleanest PC that I've put together.

I installed Windows Vista 64 for a test drive - and also for gaming. The system came out with a 5.8 performance score without overclocking. With overclocking it was the same, as the slowest component was the hard disk (I used the 500GB Samsung, it would be better with the TB drive, which is faster, but that's my file and software depot).

More on OSX installation another day...