xjas wrote:PTherapist wrote:Got a new CPU cooler for my Packard Bell, Athlon 64 X2 5000+ Hackintosh. I didn't want to spend a lot of money, so took a gamble with a cheap Chinese cooler with a "Deep Cool" brand.
Would love to hear some details about this system. I thought building a hackintosh on an AMD platform was problematic. What OS version are you running & did you have any difficulty setting it up?
I have a bunch of AM2 suff sitting around I should do something with.
I'm running Mac OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard.
Full PC specs I'm currently using:
Packard Bell iSTART 2380
Biostar MCP6PB M2+ Socket AM2+ Motherboard
Nvidia nForce 430 Chipset
AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ @ 2.6GHz
2GB PC2-6400 DDR2 RAM (can take up to 4GB)
200GB SATA HDD
Nvidia GeForce 6150 SE Onboard Graphics (not supported in Mac OS X)
Nvidia GeForce 7300 LE 128MB PCIe Graphics
Onboard Sound
Onboard Ethernet
1x DVD Writer Drive
My intention was to be able to run classic Mac OS X games & software, with PowerPC binary support via Rosetta. This AM2 system is essentially a slightly faster, smaller & less power hungry replacement for my still working PowerMac G5 which runs 10.4 Tiger. I could have gone with either 10.4 Tiger or 10.5 Leopard as OS for this Hackintosh, but thought I may as well add some extra software compatibility with the newer 10.6.
Installing the OS was the easy bit, just boot with iBoot Legacy + Retail Mac OS X install disc and then after the OS is installed use iBoot Legacy to actually boot the installed OS and then install Multibeast for the needed KEXTS & boot loader, as well as the Legacy Kernel etc. required for AMD systems. I later downloaded and installed the Chameleon bootloader, it's highly recommended.
Running an AMD system does mean you have to take extra steps when performing major software updates such as the point releases, namely booting with iBoot Legacy and installing a matching Legacy Kernel, as well as replacing any modified KEXT files as you'd have to do on Intel systems too.
The biggest difficulty I had, was getting the GeForce 7300 Graphics Card working with full acceleration. That particular card isn't really well supported and even with the current setup it has issues with certain games (Tomb Raider Chronicles gives only a black screen, for instance) and occasional slight GUI glitches on menus. This is why I'm swapping it for a fully supported AMD Radeon HD 5450 PCIe card, as soon as I receive the newly ordered PSU.
If you stick with a supported Graphics Card, you should be ok on most AM2 setups.
1 thing that did surprise me, my USB WiFi dongle had terribly unreliable software support on my PowerPC Macs with freezes and disconnects. Yet it works great on my 10.6.8 Hackintosh. I guess the x86 drivers for that device are a vast improvement. 🤣