So if you’re thinking of getting a Mac without actually getting a Mac, here are the specs of the machine that run OS X Snow nearly 100% out of the box.
- Asus P5QC Motherboard
- 3GHz Intel Core i5
- 4 GB DDR2 SDRAM (you might be able to use more if Snow decides to switch to 64-bit)
- Sitecom WL-172 USB WLAN Dongle (for which I happen to have the driver if you need it)
- NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX+ with 512 MB RAM
- On board sound
- Standard 1TB SATA hard drive
- 22 inch widescreen, preferably of LG as OS X seems to have the drivers to switch to native resolution
That’s pretty much it… follow Tonymac’s guide with iBoot NVIDIA – and you’ll have a fairly cheap Mac Pro on your hands.
You don’t have to enable anything else… hardware acceleration works out of the box. Sound you have to enable with the MultiBeast on board sound kext. And that’s about it =)
Confirmed working apps:
- complete iLife ’09 suite
- complete iWork ’09 suite
- Time Machine
- iTunes 10 with Ping, syncing to iOS devices
- Firefox 3 (Firefox 4 I have not tested yet)
- Software Update (but be careful not to accidentally download system updates)
- VLC
- Xcode (including iOS device development)
- Final Cut Pro
- Transmission
- Pixelmator
- TextWrangler
- Cyberduck
- Burn.app
- Spaces and Expose
- Plex Media Center
- Spotlight Search
- World Of Warcraft
- EVE Online
It’s safe to say all apps should work as intended.
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