Hi, Where do I start? -Hardware

[Lord_Jeremy]

Hello all! I'm looking into building a powerful machine at low cost and installing Mac OS X 10.5 on it. I'm thinking of a Core 2 Quad 2.4 GHz and a generic Intel LGA775 motherboard with integrated graphics. Can anyone make any recommendations for where I should start with this? I'm pretty familiar with computers and I've already built a couple PCs for people. Personally I use a MacBook Pro with leopard but I also have Windows Vista installed.

I also have a rather old PC that I want to see if I can install 10.4 on (I doubt it will support Leopard). It doesn't have an OS installed right now and I don't know the specs offhand. I can tell you it's to old to support Vista. I'd imagine at this point it's actually harder to install Tiger than it is to install Leopard so I'm asking if you think it's worth it to even try the former.

EDIT:
Thought it might help to say that I've done some more googling and I kind of have an idea what to do. I see all this jazz about iPC OSx86 public beta and I'm wondering if there is some generic instructions manual before I *ahem* obtain the release.

Also the older PC's specs are as follows:
PC Chips 811LU motherboard
AMD Athlon XP 2200+ Socket A processor
512MB DDR 266 RAM
MSI Nvidia Geforce4MX 64mb AGP video card

[nfoav8or]

as for your first request. a list a good hardware is already laid out in the forum (http://www.infinitemac.com/f39/recommended-intel-osx86-hardware-late-2008-t1449/).

You can also check over at the HCL (http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/HCL_10.5.2)... this HCL isn't up-to-date in terms of system version but all the hardware listed that is said to work will work (with a few exceptions here and there) in an updated system.

iPC sounds like a good place to start since it is the newest ( and I can safely say that the install does work... tested it on an external HD earlier today ) and has the most options for Hardware.

The biggest thing to note is a full system spec should be given if you want the most accurate help. Most people put this in their signature.

[Lord_Jeremy]

Thanks for the response, I have one question. Do you need to find a motherboard with EFI or can it work with any PC motherboard?

[nfoav8or]

The motherboard does not have to have EFI support. Thats what we have EFI emulators built-in to the bootloaders and kexts for.

[Lord_Jeremy]

From what I'm seeing the processor needs to support at least the sse2 instruction set, which the Athlon XP series doesn't. Am I correct in that the older specs I mentioned won't run even 10.4?

[pαuℓzurrr.]

You CPU at least needs to be running SSE2 or it wont even boot OSX...

[Lord_Jeremy]

Ah ok, thanks...