Ive spent days buggering about with this board. It can be made to work but its a pain.

I have M2N68, Phenom II X4 920 2.8GHz Quad, 8GB RAM, 2 x WD Black 1TB, NVidia GTX260, 2 x benq 22" 1920 x 1200 displays, FireWire PCI card, D-Link Wireless N PCIe card (fully Airport compatible), Apple magic mouse, apple aluminium wireless keyboard, sony blueray burner & shitty £4.99 bluetooth usb adaptor from friday big shop.

The whole setup now runs 10.6.5 reasonably with decent graphics performance from the GTX, reasonable disk performance from the WD's, lots of RAM, Decent CPU, etc but the whole thing feels a bit slugish, not slow, just not what you would expect from the components. This is true for 10.5.6, 10.6.0 & 10.6.2-10.6.5. All tried with choco kernel, mach_kernel.test7, legacy_kernel 10.2+10.5.

Out of curiosity i swapped the mb, cpu & ram for a Asus P5KPL, Core 2 E5200 2.5Ghz Core Duo & 4GB Ram (only has 2 slots & I only had 2GB sticks). Entry level shitter components for your "friends" new PC that you don't really like that he continually ----ing whined on at you to build so eventually you give in. The cpu benchmarks were way down, Graphics & disk were a little down but the system FEELS much more responsive, although things do take longer. Adobe CS5 apps take longer to start, to process & to save but at the same time the apps themselves feel far more responsive than they did on the Phenom. Same shizzle 4 XCode, Firebadger & Google Chrome with 28 youporn.com tabs open + gmail & crash.net

Why? No idea, I spent too much time spazzing about with it to care.

Personally Ive stuck with the E5200. Its just for a spare machine in my loft and for its primary function, porn browsing with the occasional game of portal its far nicer to use and makes half the noise from its little nancy boy cooler. To sweeten the pot further, it took less than 2.5 hours to install the components, install from Genuine 10.6.3 retail DVD (via iboot cd), install bootloader (cheat: myhackinstaller-1.1), patch dsdt, setup all needed kexts, update to 10.6.5 via apple update, setup time machine to second disk, install google chrome & clear my history.

Some things to check for the M2N68;

Your bios needs to be the latest revision (it fixes some ACPI issues which will allow sleep to be resumed from).

2) Remove any IDE/PATA devices, you can make them work later if you really need them

3) If you have more than 4GB Ram then take some out for now (kernel panic in x32, can be added back later once your happy your system is stable in x64)

4) set the following in the BIOS (if you need step by step for this you probably shouldn't be doing it):

IDE/ATA - All Disabled
SATA Mode - AHCI
Legacy USB - Disabled
ACPI Mode - S3
Plug & Play OS - No
SMART - enabled
SVM - enabled if you want to run parallels, virtualbox, etc

5) Get a supported graphics card, if you want dirt cheap but full QE/CI get a 9400GT 512MB. £21, powers 2 x 22" displays fine, feels responsive, plays casual games, falls on its arse for what my nerdy friends call real gaming.


If you want quick and easy setup then off you trot to pirate bay and torrent yourself Snow_Leopard_Client_Server 10.6.2_SSE2_SSE3_Intel_AMD_by_Hazard.iso. It will install straight from dvd if you pick the right options and you will have a working system within 30 minutes. It is however desperately, special school type ugly. At first glance it looks ok, then you open a finder window and wtf are those 2 ms paint quality looking icons on my toolbar? Then go sneak a peek at about this mac... Don't try this if your epileptic or prone to any other types of seizure.

Hazzard options: Legacy Kernel, AMD Boot, NO bootloaders (AMD Boot contains one), Graphics enabler, USB_Fix, CMOS_Fix, AzillaAudio, nForce Chipset, nForce network, anything else shiny.


If you really want to waste hours and hours of your life and end up with a shitty unresponsive system that hasnt had a serious twatting with the ugly stick then start here: http://www.ihackintosh.com/2009/09/i...pc-hackintosh/

Then repeat ad nauseum with minor variations until you convince yourself its ok because you've had enough even though you really know its not 100%.

Pip Pip