Hackintosh makers..... can you help me from making a mistake on my build?

[blusubaru]

I'm of no help for the i5/7's. I'm still 775.

[jdc]

M A V I C wrote:
[quote=jdc]
i wouldnt take anything less than 8 gig of ram anymore

I never see my system using more than 4GB of RAM. Photoshop, InDesign, Flash, Illustrator, Word, Excel, Safari, Firefox, Chrome... each with a dozen or two windows open...
I must be doing something different -- same apps + Quark 8 and have pretty big page in/outs and very little free ram with my 24" 2.4 and 4 gigs ram...

[AllGold]

If electricity use over performance is a concern, keep an eye on the TDP of the CPUs. Some of the i7s are a little more power hungry. If you're going for maximum performance, that is to be expected but if a middle-of-the-road quad is fast enough, you can stick with a CPU with TDP <= 95 watts.

jdc wrote:
[quote=M A V I C]
[quote=jdc]
i wouldnt take anything less than 8 gig of ram anymore

I never see my system using more than 4GB of RAM. Photoshop, InDesign, Flash, Illustrator, Word, Excel, Safari, Firefox, Chrome... each with a dozen or two windows open...
I must be doing something different -- same apps + Quark 8 and have pretty big page in/outs and very little free ram with my 24" 2.4 and 4 gigs ram...
You are doing something different--you're running Quark 8! ()

[Panopticon]

M A V I C has done the research, good info for i5/i7.

My one bit of advice is for the hard drive, avoid any non-7200 or vari-speed 'green' model for your system boot disk.
My boot 1TB HD is a Samsung Spinpoint F1, 7200 w/ 32MB Cache.
Blows the doors off my 10K WD Raptor as the system drive! About $70 when on sale. http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Samsung/HD103SJ/

My aging C2Q tower:
Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L {5.1 audio & gigabit net}
Q8200 2.33GHz {Stock Intel hs & fan}
8GB RAM {4 x 2GB PC2-6400}
2x 1TB SATA-II HDs
nVidia 9400GT-512 Video - Sparkle passive
LG 22X SATA DVD Burner w/ LightScribe
HEC 6C28BB8S Mid Tower Case $40
Thermaltake TR2 430W PSU $36
FireWire800 Lucent FW800/400 {$15 on fleabay}
BlueTooth {$1 USB plug on fleabay!}

Un-altered 10.6.2, everything works including sound, sleep, network, & driving TWO 22" WS 1080p Displays.
It does everything I need it to do.

:priate:

[decay]

is this worth $50?

Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 CPU + GA-P35-DS3L mobo

[AllGold]

Sure. The E6300 is a 1.86GHz 2MB L2 cache CPU. It can probably be overclocked to at least 2.4GHz if not close to 3GHz. It should be approximately as powerful as a typical iMac or MBP.

But you might want to pay a little more for a better CPU. An E6600 for example, has twice the L2 and the stock speed is 2.4GHz.