Saturday, November 26, 2016
Cheap Hackintosh!
Cheap Hackintosh!
Im a hacker. I mess with computers and Ive been known to switch operating systems on a whim, tinker with perfectly well functioning installs in order to try and accomplish something. Sometimes my tinkering does go awry leaving me with no choice but to reinstall my operating system(s). It doesnt bother me, but for my wife who wants to just be able to sit down at a computer and use it when she needs to, my tinkering becomes tiresome. So it became apparent that I needed to either get or build her a computer of her own that would not receive the same type of punishment that the rest of my systems do.
Perhaps its because of the economy, but I started shopping around for parts to build another computer and I was shocked to find that its virtually impossible to build a computer for under about $300 anymore, unless youre willing to go with an AMD or Atom based board. I have never cared for AMD products, they generate dangerous amounts of heat, and maybe its just me but even if an AMD cpu has an equal clock speed, an equivalent Intel processor will always be faster and more stable. Also, knowing what Ive learned from my experiences with my netbook, while having the portability and battery life of a netbook is awesome, Atom processors are sadly underwhelming in terms of computing power. I know that although my wife doesnt claim to care about such things, she would be unhappy with the performance of a "net top".
So I started scouring amazon, ebay and craigslist for cheap decent computers. Eventually I decided on purchasing a used Dell computer that had 1GB of DDR2 and a Core2Duo (the seller didnt list the clock speed) for $150 from a seller on Craigslist. I drove over to the place which turned out to be a 3rd party consignment firm. I had the cash in hand to buy the computer but first, like any sane and rational person I asked to see a demonstration first that the computer was in fact operable and what it was touted to be. The guy plugged the tower in and hooked up a monitor to it. When he hit the power button we were greeted by the sound of fans spinning and nothing else; it had a bad motherboard. It just so happened that he had a few other Dell computers laying around of similar vintage that were purchased at auction, originally having belonged to a company that went out of business. After a few minutes of haggling, I convinced the guy to sell me a similar model which had an older Pentium 4 CPU for - get this -- thirty dollars! He sold me a 17" flat screen LCD monitor to go with it for only $35. The computer I ended up purchasing was a Dell Optiplex 320.
I was so stoked at the awesome deal Id just gotten on the computer. All except for peripherals like a keyboard, mouse and some speakers, I had just gotten a decent computer for less than $70. Since I saved so much money on the computer itself, I decided I could spend a little extra money on upgrading it, but given the age of the computer I did run into a few compatibility issues. First off, I had to figure out what CPUs would be compatible with this computer. Then I had to figure out what type and how much RAM it could handle. The board does have a PCIe X16 slot and a 6 pin plug on the PSU for it.
First upgrade was a 320GB SATA hard drive which I bought for $55 on newegg. Installation was as simple as could be, the only trick here was that I kept the original 80GB hard drive, but I swapped it to SATA port 2 and put the 320GB hard drive in SATA port 1.
The second upgrade was the RAM. I bought a 4GB DDR2 533Mhz ram kit from Crucial. I ran into an interesting bug at this point where I found the computer would only address 3.5GB out of 4 which I initially thought to be due to the fact that the operating system was 32 bit. I was running Ubuntu, so I simply installed the PAE kernel in hopes that it would fix the problem, but no such luck. So then I did a fresh install of Ubuntu 64bit with the same results, only 3.5 GB of ram seen by the motherboard, and 300MB of it was dedicated to the onboard ATI x200 graphics.
The third upgrade was the CPU. As it would turn out, there is a very limited selection of Intel LGA775 socket CPUs that are capable of running on this board, the biggest limiting factor being the 800Mhz front side bus speed. After doing plenty of research, it came down to a handful of models of Core2Duo, the E4X00 series. I lucked out and picked up a 1.8Ghz C2D E4300 for about $20 on Ebay. Its nothing to write home about but the increase in performance was noticeable over the 3.0Ghz P4.
The last upgrade I got was a PCIe X16 graphics card. Its worth noting that on this board, installing a PCIe X16 graphics card will kill the second DIMM of RAM. The computer absolutely refuses the behave properly with two sticks of 2GB and a PCIe X16 card. My initial thought is that the problem is related to an under powered PSU, but Im starting to realize that this board itself is pretty quirky about RAM in general. The graphics card I opted for was an EVGA GeForce 8400GS 1Gb DDR3 for $35 on Newegg, so in essence I ended up with 3GB of RAM between the graphics card and the onboard memory and it doesnt seem like Im going to do much better than that.
So to recap:
base system - Dell Optiplex 320 $30
monitor - Planar PL1700 17" LCD $35
hard drive - 320B Seagate SATA $55
ram - 4GB Crucial 533Mhz DDR2 $40
cpu - Intel Core2Duo E4300 $25
gfx card - EVGA 8400GS 1GB DDR3 $35
speakers - generic powered speakers $10
HIDs - Pixxo 2.4ghz wireless combo $25
TOTAL $255!!!
Available link for download
