The Beast: Rockin a 3Ghz quad-core hackintosh

It’s been a long time since I’ve assembled my own computer; the last was probably somewhere in the vicinity of 2001, before I made the leap (back) into the world of Mac and OS X. But thanks to the thriving Hackintosh community that aims to bring OS X to non-apple branded hardware, putting together a custom machine to run OS X is a possibility once again.

I had already tried building a modified netbook running Mac OS X, which was a lot of fun. But I stayed away from building larger projects as the prospect of modified EFI boot strings, fiddling with drivers, and not having a reliable software upgrade path didn’t excite me. I mean part of the reason we use macs is so we don’t have to do that stuff right?

Recently, however, I read Adam Pash’s build of a “Hack Pro,” a 3Ghz quad-core beast with 8GB of RAM, and a fantastic graphics card, all for under $1000. To put this in perspective, this isn’t that much more than a Mac Mini, and a fraction of the price of the Mac Pro. He even had Snow Leopard running on it, and it was a (relatively) simple install process and looked promising in terms of being able to take point releases without a problem. Well, this was a combination I found too hard to resist.

I ordered the parts, put the beast together, flipped the switch… and nothing. Oops, forgot to plug in a power cable on the motherboard that supplied dedicated power the CPU! (When did they start doing that?) Got everything installed over the course of an evening, and by around midnight was looking at the Finder in all its 64-bit glory. And it did not disappoint: this thing was fast!

Now, just in case you do this, I did encounter a couple of head scratchers, which you should be aware of too. The EFI bootloader defaults to booting Mac OS X with a 64-bit kernel, which is a little unusual — currently all desktop Macs run with 32-bit kernels. So, there were a few incompatibilities I ran into while setting up the machine:

• MacFUSE will currently not run in 64-bit
• Due to the above, Expandrive will not run either
• VMWare Fusion requires a 32-bit kernel and will not run either
• Adobe AIR applications (e.g. Tweetdeck) do not seem to run
• others?

So, clearly, this would not do. It’s a fairly simple process to boot the kernel into 32-bit mode however. First, tweak your BIOS settings so that in the Power Management Setup screen “HPET Mode” is in 32-bit. Leaving this in 64-bit caused a kernel panic for me. Then at the Chameleon bootup screen, press a key to interrupt the automatic bootup process and simply type ‘-x32′ and then return to boot the 32-bit kernel. That’s all that’s required. There is supposed to be a way to change the default boot mode in a plist file, but I’m still researching the correct string to use and haven’t tried it yet…

Related posts:

1. VMware Fusion 3: Awesome
2. Synergy