Alright, I've successfully gotten my Hackintosh up and running, and everything seems to be a GO so far.
Here is my setup:
Intel Core 2 DUO 3.8GHz
8GB RAM (4 2GB modules)
ASUS P5K-V (motherboard)
(w/ built-in Realtek ALC883 audio)
SATA 1TB HDD, 500gb HDD (Windows Vista)
SATA optical drive
nVidia GT8800 512MB (Asus model EN8800GT)
Buffalo Wi-Fi PCI card (WLI2-PCI-G54S)
My method: I used a the BOOT-132 DVD swap method. Burn the loader to a CD, boot it up, swap the disc for a Leopard retail install, and install it. Biggest snag here was that I needed to find a boot loader with "drivers" for my motherboard. I ended up just using some P5K one that worked fine, even though I have a P5K-V. Search for BOOT-132 and your motherboard's code (like P5K).
Here are a few of the snags I ran into, from biggest to smallest:
1) HUGE ISSUE: My original IDE optical drive wouldn't allow me to use the BOOT-132 boot loader method. I really wanted this method because I can use my retail Leopard DVD and I can use Software Update. I *had* to buy a SATA drive to get it to work, I tried everything.
2) At first, I wasn't getting anything but basic video card support. I used the EFIStudio application from the Chameleon package to install the "drivers" for the card, and it came up with full support (I also clicked "enable" for the Quartz GL support in the OSX86Tools app).
3) I had to manually get my Airport working on the Buffalo card. The first time I did the install, after using Chameleon's installation and tools, it somehow just worked. Later, I had to follow the advice of another website to manually edit some files (changing the Buffalo card to be "en1" instead of anything else). That worked like a charm, perfect Airport so far.
4) My audio was the biggest fight. I had to install two kexts (the ALC883 one, then the HDAEnabler.kext). After that, I fought with it for a while before realizing that selecting "internal speakers" in the output settings in System Preferences did the trick. I dunno why, but I had to select that.
Also, here are the current "quirks" with my system that I've noticed:
1) I have a lot of trouble with hitting the eject button on my DVD player. I generally HAVE to use a built-in Mac OS X eject procedure (click the icon in the system bar, or drag the desktop icon to the Trash).
2) Once when I rebooted after installing some audio kext, my Airport was permanently set "off." I couldn't turn it on. A reboot fixed it. I always use the "-f" setting at the Darwin prompt when I reboot, so dunno if that is necessary. I'm a bit of a noob at this.
That's it! So far, everything else seems perfect. I'm running Software Update now, and I'll let you know how it goes in a follow-up post. If it works, this would seem to be the generally "best" Hackintosh method around, since it uses the retail DVD (and this is not only convenient for most of us who buy the software, but it promotes and encourages purchasing the real thing from Apple, which is very good).
P.S. I forgot to mention that I had to do the install twice. the first time I accidentally installed a wrong kext, and when I rebooted, I got a kernal panic (a screen that said I need to reboot the machine). Endless cycle of needing to reboot every restart, so instead of fighting it, I reinstalled fresh.
P.P.S. Installed and ran World of Warcraft VERY nicely. Even beats the FPS on my Windows Vista setup with an ATI Radeon HD 4850 1GB card. No, I don't like World of Warcraft, but I had some game time remaining so I tested it out.
