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After finally getting fed up enough with the flickering cause by my old motherboard (onboard video), I decided to RMA it. Was told it would be 5-7 days, so sent in my old board to get replaced. Well a week later, thanks to UPS Ground and it going to coast to coast, I see a credit for the motherboard on my bank statement. So i call newegg and they inform me that the board is discontinued so they refund me. That would be all fine and dandy except this board was used to run Mac OS X so its not exactly like i could pick up any old board. It needed to have very specific hardware on it. The Foxconn was perfect. After searching online for hours to find one last Foxconn board i gave up and starting looking into alternatives. Let me tell you, it was hard finding a Intel 915 chipset using DDR and compatible Sound and LAN with video onboard. Only one i found was the Gigabyte GA-8I915ME-GL, on eBay none the less, but for a good price. $29. For that price it was worth a shot. So i used Buy it Now! and waited.

Got the board in almost 3 weeks to the day i sent the old one back and installed it as fast as i could. I missed OS X. I was using an old laptop of mine with XP on it and another with Vista on it while i was down. I couldn’t wait to get OS X back. Installed the board, booted up and everything looked good expect some permission errors which where quickly fixed by running a Repair Permissions.

The new GA-8i915ME-GL fixed some annoying problems i had with the Foxconn which i an extremely pleased with. One being i had to use the Line Out instead of the Speaker Out on the old board. Also, the front Mic and Speaker Out work now too which they didn’t before. Only small problem I’ve run into is when i plug in my headphones to the front jack, it doesn’t complete cut off the speaker output. It doesn’t lower the volume tho. I can live with that seeing as i couldn’t even use headphones nor a mic before.

So all in all this seems like a great starting board if you want to build your own Hackintosh. Its just too bad i didnt start with this board instead of the Foxconn.

Here are what I’ve been using as replacements for my Windows apps:
WindowsXP>OSX

Web Browser: Firefox>Safari
Email: Outlook>Entourage
Bittorrent: utorrent>Azureus
IRC: mIRC>Colloquy
Blogging: ecto>ecto
Flickr: Flickr Uploader>iPhoto/Flickr Export
Comics: CDisplay>ComicBookLover
MP3 Tagger: Tag&Rename/Musicbrainz>Media Rage/IEatBrainz/Export Artwork
Music: Winamp>iTunes
Last.fm: Audioscrobber for Winamp/Last.fm Player>iScrobbler/Last.fm Player
P2P: Limewire>Limewire
Office: Office 2003>Office 2004
Compression: WinRAR>Stuffit
PSP - PSPWare>iPSP
DVD ripping: DVDShrink>Handbrake/MactheRipper
FTP: FlashFXP>Transmit
Video Player: Windows Media Player>VLC
Xbox: Qwix>Xbox Browser
Burning: Nero>Toast
IM: AIM/Google Talk>iChat/Adium
Webpage: Nvu>Nvu
Finance: Quickbooks 2004>Quickbooks 2006 for Mac
VOIP: Ventrilo/TeamSpeak/Skype>Ventrilo/TeamSpeex
Todo list: Google Desktop with Todo Plugin>High Priority
Text: Notepad>Textmate
Photos: Pisaca>iPhoto

Some cool new programs:
Coverflow
GarageSale
MyMySpaceMail

Favorite Widgets:
I was never a fan of Konfabulator,now Yahoo Widgets. I never found anything really useful to me but I got to say I’m loving Dashboard. Here are some of my favorite non-default widgets:

Now Playing (Tivo)
TV Tracker
Bloglines Notifier
EasyEnvelopes
Stats for Adsense

Issues:
Ventrilo and Teamspeex can only use Speex codec, default is GSM, Have to change it on the server to work.
Quickbooks not up to par with Windows Version, tho i haven’t tried QB 2006 yet.
Skype not working on Intel Macs.
Office 2004 sluggish, Rosetta
ecto sluggish. Rosetta
Needed to used a patched version of Azureus
Firefox not Universal Binary yet, sluggish, Rosetta

Things I can’t do on Mac I can on Windows (so far):
Update the firmware on my MPx220 cell phone. Updater is Windows only.

Here is what i used to get OS X 10.4.3 x86 up and running using PC components as my everyday PC. This should last me until the Intel Mac Minis are released and I can actually get my hands on a real Mac.

I used macosx_10.4.3_8f1111_for_dtk_userdvd.dmg, converted it to ISO using UltraISO and then patched it with JaS 1111a Generic Patch v4.2b PPF. Burned it to DVD and that part was done. Next was putting together the hardware.

Motherboard: Foxconn 915GL7MH-S Socket T (LGA 775) Intel 915GL Micro ATX Intel Motherboard - Retail - $66
CPU: Intel Celeron D 336 Prescott 533MHz FSB LGA 775 64-Bit Processor w/ Execute Disable Bit Model BX80547RE2800CN - Retail - $89
Memory: Corsair VS512MB400 512MB DDR400 PC3200 CAS2.5 Value Select Memory Retail x2 - $40.99
Hard Drive: Maxtor DiamondMax 10 6L300S0 300GB Serial ATA 7200RPM Hard Drive w/16MB Buffer - $123.99
DVDROM: Pioneer DVR-110 16X Dual Layer DVD�RW Drive (Black) - $46.50
Case: Generic from local PC shop - $65
Keyboard: Apple Pro Keyboard - $29

Total: $501.47

Alright, now that we got our PC ready, its time to install. Now I’ve read a bunch of different methods to install involving partitioning with partition magic, windows diskpart, using vmware etc. I didn’t need any of that.

1) Boot up the PC with the DVD in the drive and set to boot.
2) At the Installation Screen, goto Tools > Disk Utility.
3) Choose the drive on the right.
4) Click the Partition button and choose 1 Partition from the drop-down menu. Hit the Partition button on the bottom to partition the drive.
5) Close Disk Utility and continue the install.
5) Click on the Customize button and Uncheck the Developer Tools and whatever printer drivers you don’t need.
6) Finish Installing.

Problems i ran into:
While USB keyboard and Mouse worked during the install, it didn’t after first boot. I had to use a PS2 Keyboard and Mouse to finish the setup then deleted AppleFPMemDriver.kext and AppleTPMACPI.kext from the Extensions directory. After that i rebooted with USB keyboard and mouse plugged in an they worked with no problem after that.

Sound output only works out of Line-Out, not Speaker-Out.