If you buy components you have to look for available drivers AND for power consumption. It is possible to use an ATI Radeon HD4850x2, but this beast needs 285W power. I've chosen a Radeon HD2600XT, it's ok and only needs 50W. Dual monitor, rotation and so on is supported. It's crazy, it allows resolutions which are bigger than the native resolution of my Eizo moitor. I can display 1920x1440 or even 2048x1536! The pic looks a bit grainy (hope the word was the one I want ;-) because the resolution is higher than the pixel size, but it's no problem working with it. In higher game resolutions the card maybe a bit slower, Lego Indy @ 1600x1200 is too slow in special situations. But the Mac's gfx engine isn't built for games anyway.

@Beaver: If your like Amiga tracker tunes, I've converted about 200 Protracker mods to MP3, ready for iTunes, including cover and full MP3 tags. There are a lot of converted game soundtracks, Jaguar, Lotus III, Lemmings, Monkey Island and so on. The demo is resampled to 80kbit/s because my websapce only allows files up to 1.5 MB.

@naquaada man It is amazing the amount of power high end graphics cards use.

I just wrote a response and somehow lost it in a sea of tabs... oops

Anyhow, to summarise:

lanceomni:
- Adobe RGB doesn't matter for us, as all of the work is for the web
- Using consumer displays makes the most sense, since that's what nearly all of our customers are using. Although, I prefer to at least step up to a M-PVA/PVA, or whatever they are. Just to get more uniform contrast across the screen
- I've never considered buying a cheap 22"er just for photoshop palettes etc. That's a great idea.
- Agreed. Apple LCD's are way over-priced, they're just a fancy case with the same panels everyone else is using (with the exception of the 30" which I think is still an S-IPS)

naquaada:
- I'm all about the fan-less, silent video cards. I consider the fastest card without a fan the best option.
- Downloaded the Lotus III track... that's great. I even forwarded on to someone who will appreciate it.

My current work machine is a 2.8ghz(C2D) Alu iMac, and I don't find it fast enough. I'd like to build a hackintosh that's noticeably faster, and hopefully just as reliable. I'm thinking quadcore at a better clock speed, and way more ram.

These types of professional video monitors are a good choice as most consumer models differ output greatly: http://www.compumodules.com/professi...monitors.shtml

@beaver: Didn't I mention that there are silent versions of the HD2600XT? Silent gfx cards are very important to me. You can take a look at various supported ATI HD Series cards.

If you like some old stuff like Amiga music, do you know Boxer? It's a great solution to run MS-DOS games on the Mac. You can start the games just any normal Mac program. I made a lot of preinstalled games including icons.

Music: Try www.remix64.com for C64 remixes, amigaremix.com is the same for the Amiga. Here are three 100 MB packages of Amiga protracker Tunes, and for total crazy geeks take a look at SIDPlay, a fantastic player for C64 SID tunes, including access to the HVSC (High Voltage SID Collection) with over 35000 Tunes!

just had to post this is turning into one of the more interesting threads as of late

Wow, Boxer is great (nice little website too). I'd never come across it before. Some of those games bring back memories. I can't believe I wasted so much time playing Kings Quest when I was younger.

Do any of you guys run VMware Fusion/Parallels? Since it interacts at more of a driver level for some functions, I was curious how it would handle a hack-mac. I use Fusion quite a bit for testing all of the windows browsers (except for IE6, which we've officially dropped support for).

Finally found a non-TN monitor at a reasonable price, the Samsung 27" 275T. I'll use this for the test box.

@Beaver
"I can't believe I wasted so much time playing Kings Quest when I was younger."

Yeah I wasted a great deal of time playing Civilization 1

I'm currently running Tiger, but just got in some new parts today Gigabyte ep45 ds3l or what not, and I will get Leopard up and running. Then I will test them both and let you know.

SIDPlay is pretty awesome! Thanks for the Amiga tunes. I love old scene music.

Erm, because here's already a lot of this: I'm preparing some packages with MS-DOS games. If anyone is searching something special from the past (what's not too big) send a PM to me. I have a collection of about 2000 MS-DOS games, maybe I have it. There are even C64 classics like Lode Runner, Hard Hat Mack and Montezuma's Revenge!

Lucasfilm, Sierra games and other Point'n'Click-adventures are easier to play with ScummVM.