Silent Hackintosh for Sale

	Current Price as of 01/20/09
Monitor
SAMSUNG 941BW Black 19" 4ms (GTG) Widescreen LCD Monitor - Retail	~222.99
System
Antec P182 Gun Metal Black 0.8mm cold rolled steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case - Retail	144.99
3x Nexus 120 mm Real Silent Case Fan - Black & White with Fan Mounts	43.47 (14.49ea)
3x Nexus 3-Speed Fan Cable	11.97 (3.99ea)
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Wolfdale 3.0GHz LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor Model BX80570E8400 - Retail	164.99
Scythe Ninja Plus Rev.B 6 Heatpipe Copper CPU Cooler	51.99
GIGABYTE GA-P35-DS4 Rev. 2.0 LGA 775 Intel P35 ATX Ultra Durable II Intel Motherboard - Retail	~186.99
XFX PVT88PUDD4 GeForce 8800 GT 256MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Supported Video Card - Retail	~245
ARCTIC COOLING ACCELS1 Rev 2 VGA Cooler - Retail	21.99
CORSAIR CMPSU-450VX 450W ATX12V V2.2 80 PLUS Certified Active PFC Compatible with Core i7 Power Supply - Retail	68.99
Western Digital Caviar GP WD7500AACS 750GB 5400 to 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM	69.99
mushkin 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model 996557 - Retail	47.99
ASUS 20X DVD±R DVD Burner with LightScribe Black SATA Model DRW-2014L1T - Retail	39.99
ENCORE ENLWI-N PCI 2.3 Wireless Adapter - Retail	19.99
ENCORE ENUWI-N USB 2.0 802.11n Wireless Adapter - Retail	22.99
Accessories
60 ml ArctiClean 2-Step Thermal Compound Cleaner	5.49
Tuniq TX-2 Cooling Thermal Compound - Retail	3.79
Total	1373.60

This is my Silent Hackintosh. While building a computer, I wanted first and foremost a quiet computer, but I also wanted to try my hand at making a hackintosh as well. After a lot of trial and error, purchases and refunds, building and taking apart, installing and reformatting, I did it =D

I'm' very proud of this computer, and hate to see it go, but I'm moving to Japan. And it's too expensive to take with me, not to mention too big for a small apartment in Tokyo. Especially considering that I may still have to move around after I get to Japan. I'm struggling between building a mini-itx silent hackintosh or buying a laptop and installing a SSD as a replacement computer after I get there. But, I suppose that's not of your concern =P

Since this is a two-tiered enthusiast pc, I thought I might go into some detail about how I went about building it. My primary resources for the silent part of it were the forums and articles at www.silentpcreview.com. My primary resources for building a hackintosh were, of course,  the wiki and forums at the osx86 project: www.osx86project.org. Thank you to everyone at those two sites.

I would like to sell the computer as is. But let me know if you don't want anything, for example the monitor, the wireless usb adaptor, or the hard drive. We can work something out.

I'm looking to sell it at the price of what it's worth right now. Which might not seem to make sense at first, but it is a lot of work putting it all together. Especially cutting the case, creating the hard drive suspension cage, etc. But, feel free to make an offer! The main thing is that I hope someone else can enjoy the computer as much as I did.

I have some of the original packaging. Some I kept, some I threw away. Because, well, it's a lot of stuff, lol. If you want it, it's yours. Also, I live in the San Francisco bay area. Delivery or pickup is the best option, obviously. But shipping can of course be arranged. I'll have to research into it, though. I've never shipped a computer before.


----- Part Hackintosh (of course, you don't have to run mac if you don't want to)
For those interested in how well it works as a hackintosh, this machine runs on the Kalyway 10.5.2 installation CD. If you look at the osx86project wiki, you will see that this is pretty much the recommended installation method for the Gigabyte GA-P35-DS4 motherboard (which I chose because of superior cooling qualities). Everything pretty much works out of the box, except for a couple things:

- The onboard audio I believe doesn't work (never tried it, but from what I read it doesn't work), but is easily corrected with an external sound card. I personally use an audio interface because of music recording. It's great because you can get much better sound with the external sound card for reasonable prices.

- The ethernet works, but the internal wireless card does not. The wireless problem can be address with a USB wireless adaptor and the Ralink driver. See this forum page for more details.

- I opted to dual boot hackintosh and windows with each installed on a separate hard drive. Worked like a charm.

----- Part Silent Computer
There's a lot that goes into consideration when making a silent pc (ok, very quiet would be more accurate). But here are the general considerations I used when choosing the parts for the machine.

- I chose the Antec P182 based on silentpcreview's case recommendations. I didn't want to get into water cooling, so I went with the best air cooling case.

- All the hard drives are suspended, based on the information on this forum post. I pretty much followed the directions here word for word. No sandwiching, just suspension. It made a world of difference. The hard drive case is set up to hold three hard drives. I'm only selling one because the other two are filled with my files, so I'm keeping them. I actually rather keep all three, but it seemed kind of incomplete to sell the computer without a hard drive. But if you want to install one yourself, just let me know!

- Again, I chose the Western Digital Caviar GP based on silentpcreview's storage recommendations. I initially wanted a velociraptor, but I needed the storage space, and the WD's had 750GB of capacity. While suspended, you really can't hear anything except the seeks. And even those are really quiet.

- There are many topics on the subject of air resistance, but the general concept can be found here. As such, like many others, I opted to cut out all of the fan grilles on the P182.

- Along with cutting the grilles, I undervolted all of the fans so that they run a at slower speeds, keeping them quieter.

- The Scythe Ninja and the Arctic Cooling Accelero S1 were both installed to help keep all the components cool.

- I waited for the GeForce 8800 GT series for enhanced cooling while providing excellent performance.

- The Corsair power supply also chosen for it's low noise level. And also it's capability to handle larger loads. For those concerned about insufficient wattage, please read this article from silentpcreview concerning how much power computer systems actually draw. The forums also have more information on this topic. So far, I've found the power supply to be more than sufficient.

- Similarly, I waited for the wolfdale chipset for improved cooling over previous models. For the same reason, I chose core duo rather than quad core.

- I also found this article via silentpcreview, but it reviews thermal grease and effectiveness of application methods. Thus I chose to use the Tuniq thermal grease and applied it using the dollop method.