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| Hackintosh with LGA 771 to LGA 775 Mod |
OS X with modified LGA 771
The purpose of this post is two fold; showcasing the ease and compatibility of modifying an LGA 771 Xeon CPU for use with an LGA 775 motherboard, and continued support for G31 chipsets with OS X 10.9.1 Mavericks with TonyMacs UniBeast and MultiBeast installer packages. In addition I would like to highlight the
NVIDIA GT 640 as an affordable, mid range, OS X compatible, graphics card.
Modifying the Processor and Motherboard to accept 771 CPU:
A cheap way to build a budget PC or Hackintosh is to perform a modification to both the Intel LGA 771 Xeon CPU and LGA 775 motherboard. These two components can be purchased on eBay for extremely affordable prices. Last week I was able to pick up an X5450 (3.0 GHz, 12 MB Cache, 1333 MHz FSB) on eBay for $35.00.
Overclock.net has an excellent overview of this modification. The Intel Xeon
X5450,
X5460 and
X5470 should all be compatible with a motherboard that supports Q9000 series Quad-Core LGA 775 CPU's.
This build confirms that an X5450 Xeon Quad-Core processor will be fully compatible after modification, with an MSI G31TM-P21 motherboard. After installation, the motherboard successfully completed POST, and recognized the CPU immediately. After booting up the first time into OS X 10.9.1 I found that the
org.chameleon.Boot.plist file needed to be modified to allow execution of 64 bit code using
arch=x86_64 as a boot flag.
Despite the many reviews and testimonials that the GT 640 will work OOB with OS X 10.9.1, my build required a few tweaks to get this card to boot. Initially the system appeared to boot to OS X however the display went black and went into power saver mode. This was most likely because the graphics card stopped sending a video signal. Using the boot flag
npci=0x3000 and
GraphicsEnabler=No I was finally able to get this card to boot past the white and fatally black screen. It would appear that this card is fully supported. Launchpad and Dashboard animations look great.
Geekbench Score
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