My office

I have a new com­puter sit­ting in my room!

I started with a Giga­byte EP45T-DS3R moth­er­board with 4GB of Cru­cial DDR3 ram (in a 2x2GB con­fig­u­ra­tion so I can upgrade to 8GB later), and a Core 2 Duo E8500 (stock speed 3.16Ghz). For graph­ics I went with an ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB card which can plow through almost any game on the high­est set­tings (Cry­sis topped it out on “High” set­tings while there is the avail­able “Very High” set­ting) and will kick seri­ous ass in Snow Leop­ard with OpenCL. Added in a 1TB hard drive, DVD burner, Apple key­board, and Cor­sair 520W mod­u­lar power sup­ply and stuffed all that into an Antec P182 case. The P182 is designed to be very quite with 3 120mm fans and rub­ber grom­mets and strip­ping to reduce vibra­tion. The whole sys­tem cost just under $1000 includ­ing ship­ping from 2 suppliers.

I’m dual-booting OSX 10.5.6 and Win­dows 7 Beta (build 7000). Unfor­tu­nately, OSX doesn’t fully sup­port my HD 4870 so over the last week I’ve installed all the stan­dard fla­vors of Win­dows so that I can access all that power (and play some games). I got a sta­ble install of XP SP3, a pathetic Vista install, and, sur­pris­ingly, a solid-as-a-rock Win­dows 7 beta install. I’m so blown away by Win­dows 7 that I’ve got­ten rid of my other Win­dows fla­vors. It’s fast, clean, and unin­tru­sive. The only prob­lem I had was installing Dae­mon Tools for disc mount­ing (Note: as of this writ­ing, Dae­mon Tools can­not be installed on Win­dows 7). A quick search revealed another free pro­gram Pow­erISO that does the job.

OSX installed with only 2 fixes. One for my onboard audio, and another that fixes Restart/Shutdown func­tion­al­ity. Other than those, I have a Vanilla (unmod­i­fied) instal­la­tion of OSX run­ning on this machine. No word yet on when to expect mac dri­vers for the HD 4800 series.

Cry­sis run­ning on Win­dows 7

While I still pre­fer OSX, Microsoft has a strong offer­ing in Win­dows 7. Of course, I might be giv­ing them too much credit just for hav­ing a func­tion­ing OS. This is what Vista should have been.

In the course of build­ing this com­puter and get­ting every­thing installed I learned some things that might be help­ful to fel­low Hackers:

• - The Giga­byte board I got works well and is mostly com­pat­i­ble with OSX right out of the box.
• - Don’t get an ATI Radeon HD 4800 series card unless you’re will­ing to wait for OSX dri­vers to show up.
• - If you get stuck, use Google. Search for your hard­ware (moth­er­board, graph­ics card, etc.) with the terms “hack­in­tosh” or “OSx86”. The Hack­in­tosh com­mu­nity is huge, if some­one out there has your hard­ware they prob­a­bly have the same problems.

If you’re inter­ested in Win­dows 7 beta, Giz­modo has an excel­lent arti­cle on get­ting it up and running.