All of the parts for my new machine arrived from newegg today, with an amazing amount of packing materials, manuals, and other such garbage. I stacked all of the product boxes up for the photo you see to the right. Here is what’s included:
- Antec Solo Black/Silver Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case
- GIGABYTE GA-P35-DS4 Rev. 2.0 LGA 775 Intel P35 ATX Intel Motherboard
- EVGA 256-P2-N751-TR GeForce 8600GT 256MB 128-bit GDDR3 PCI-E
- Antec earthwatts EA380 ATX12V v2.0 380W Power Supply
- Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Kentsfield 2.4GHz LGA 775 Processor
- 2 x G.SKILL 4GB(2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800
- 2 x SAMSUNG Spinpoint F1 HD753LJ 750GB 7200 RPM SATA Hard Drive
- D-Link DBT-120 USB 2.0 Wireless USB Bluetooth Adapter
The total came out to $1232.90, which wasn’t too bad. I assumed that the money I saved versus a Mac Pro would be spent in hours of frustration in getting the machine working, but so far it hasn’t been too bad. The only part I could re-use from my dead PowerMac G5 was the CD-ROM drive, but even that will have to be replaced, as there is no true eject button, and the screw-holes don’t line up all. Since I have only bought Apple hardware for the last 6 years, it’s been quite a while since I have had to put my own hardware together. Because of my curiousity, I went ahead and recorded how long it took to get the hardware put together and tested:
- Unwrapping all of the packaging (12m)
- Installing the power-supply, plugging the RAM & CPU into the motherboard (18m)
- Finding "right" screws to attach motherboard to case (10m)
- Install motherboard, attach all cables for front-panel and power (40m)
- Attach machine to monitor, keyboard and power, do a basic BIOS test (5m)
- Notice the case screws are hidden in the 5.25″ slot, add a motherboard post for stability without removing the mobo (12m)
- Install hard drives via the funky suspending mechanism (27m)
- Boot machine, realize one of the SATA cables is not plugged in. Fix. (3m)
- Plug CD-ROM in, burn a Puppy Linux CD on my laptop, test firewire, USB, video, ethernet. Get concerned that Linux only sees 3.5GB of RAM. (24m)
- Verify that BIOS sees the 8GB of RAM. Get happy. (1m)
- Clean up packing materials. (9m)
- Boot back into Puppy Linux and test audio, front USB ports, and Bluetooth (3m)
- Seal the box up and place under desk. Move peripherals. (11m)
Overall, it’s taken at least 3 hours of my time to put the machine together, and another 1.5 hours of my time to select and procure the right parts. The next step will be acquiring the necessary patchkit to install Mac OS X 10.5 onto this machine. Will post final photo of the machine once I get that up and running.
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January 24, 2008 at 06:24
[...] See The Hackintosh is Built! [...]