If you use a DAW these pages may be of use

[DrNomis_44]

Here's spec for motherboard supports 3rd and 2nd Generation Intel® Core™ i7 / i5 / i3 / Xeon® / Pentium® / Celeron® in LGA1155. http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/Z77%2...Specifications
As Kels suggests check out Tonymacx86 website see if board is compatible with Apples software.

Cheers mate, I'm actually doing that right now, it's looking pretty favorable so far, the spare ATI graphics card I have is an ATI Radeon HD 4870 512Mb PCI Express Card, I tried it out in the PCI Express ports on the motherboard and it fits, so that's looking good, I think I have a spare PC case I can use.

[kimball492]

Interesting project for you Doc good luck

[DrNomis_44]

Interesting project for you Doc good luck

Cheers mate, the more I think about it the more I seriously feel like doing it, I might need to buy a Firewire PCI card with Texas Instruments Chipset for it since there are no Firewire ports on the motherboard, but I'll cross that bridge when I get to it, I think the first priority is to establish if the motherboard even works and boots.



There's a bit of a snag though, apparently I need to purchase a copy of OS X Snow Leopard, Lion, or Mountain Lion if I want to download and install OS X El Capitan on my Hackintosh PC.

[keloooe]

From memory yes the Z77 chipset boards are compatible with OSX. The i5 by the sounds of it will work perfectly as well. 450 watts should be plenty for it, depending on what else you are using in the rig, and for getting OSX, ask around and see if any mates have any macs that you can use for getting your bootable USB!

[kimball492]

Doc did you get it to work

[kimball492]

Kels have they got it working with El Capitan OK. Have you built a hackintosh yourself if so how'd it go .

[DrNomis_44]

Doc did you get it to work

Haven't tried it yet mate, might give it a test out later on today or tomorrow, will let you know if it does work, I need to get some silver Heatsink compound and put some on the CPU before I can do any testing though.

[DrNomis_44]

From memory yes the Z77 chipset boards are compatible with OSX. The i5 by the sounds of it will work perfectly as well. 450 watts should be plenty for it, depending on what else you are using in the rig, and for getting OSX, ask around and see if any mates have any macs that you can use for getting your bootable USB!

I reckon a 450 Watt power supply should be enough to power a basic setup as the motherboard, graphics card, CPU fan, and the CPU, with no Ram, or HDD installed.

[kimball492]

Not sure if you'll get a boot with no memory doc. But give it a go

[DrNomis_44]

Not sure if you'll get a boot with no memory doc. But give it a go

With no memory installed, what should happen if the motherboard is good is that it should go through the Power-On-Self-Test and then it should show an error message saying something like "No ram installed", that will at least indicate that the motherboard's BIOS is good, if I get that then I'll be pretty relieved.


The motherboard BIOS is like a mini operating system that tells the CPU what peripherals are connected to the motherboard, it also does the initial checks and tests before the system boots up and stops the boot sequence if there's a problem somewhere.