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Building the Frankenmac

To realize my dream Mac system, I set myself a budget of $1000 (not including keyboard, monitor, or mouse), and started shopping for computer parts. While this amount is much more than what Psystar claims it will charge, I wanted to build a more powerful machine than what that company is offering, and then see how well it worked compared with machines from Cupertino.

When you build your own PC, you must decide exactly what goes into it--an absolute freedom that comes with absolute responsibility. You must choose the motherboard, processor, CPU cooling solution, video card, hard drives, CD/DVD burner, memory, case, and possibly even the power supply. To make things even more challenging, if you're building a Mac-compatible PC, you've got to stick with certain hardware that's known to work with Mac OS X. I spent a lot of time searching the Web to find out what worked and what didn't.

When I set out to configure my machine, I wanted to make it reasonably fast with the best video card I could fit into my budget, and with lots of room for expansion. (I plan on using this machine as a platform to test various Mac-to-Windows tips, and of course it will be a dedicated machine for certain Windows-only applications that I absolutely must be able to run. For those reasons, I need it to run Windows Vista as well as possible, as that will ultimately be the machine's primary role. )

When the dust settled, I wound up with the list of components seen in the table above left (click on the thumbnail for a full-size image).

As you can see, the total cost of my parts was just over $980, leaving about $20 for dinner out before I hit my budget limit. And as the list shows, this was clearly a "lots of assembly required" project.

After all of the parts arrived at my home, it took a few hours to build the machine. If you've never built your own computer before, it's an interesting experience--there's something quite satisfying about putting it all together, powering it up, and hearing that first "beep" that lets you know you haven't just turned your collection of parts into a collection of junk. Of course, if you don't hear the beep, there's an entirely different reaction, one that borders on panic. Thankfully, I heard the beep. But assembling the hardware is actually the easy part of the process.

Next, I installed Vista on the PC, just to be sure everything worked. From there, it then took many more hours to get OS X working right--while the process is relatively straightforward, many steps are involved, with many BIOS settings to tweak. If you want to run Windows and OS X on the same drive, there are more hoops to jump through to get it all working. But after many hours of reading, assembling, disassembling, screaming, installing, uninstalling, reinstalling, saying bad words, pestering friends, and generally not having very much fun, I was done: my machine was up and running, and capable of booting into either Windows Vista or Mac OS X 10.5.2.

Using a Home-Built Mac

My machine--which I've named the Frankenmac--doesn't look anything like a Mac from the outside, of course. The Antec case is glossy black, with a swing-open door that hides the externally-accessible drive bays, along with two USB ports, one eSATA port, and audio jacks on a shiny metallic strip on the front. And if you happen to be sitting in front of it when it starts up, the BIOS loading screen and black-and-white text-based boot loader (which lets me choose between Vista and OS X) is a dead giveaway that this is not your normal Mac.

However, if I were to hide the case and set you down in front of the monitor when the system was already running, you'd be convinced that you were using a "real" Mac--with one minor exception: If you were to open the About This Mac box, you'd see a big clue that this machine isn't your typical Mac. I don't think Apple's ever shipped an "unknown" processor!

But close the About box and just start using the machine, and you'll be using a "real" Mac, one that performs (mostly) just like its factory-approved counterpart. The Frankenmac runs any OS X program, including PowerPC-based programs, via the Rosetta code-translation system. The CD/DVD burner works with iTunes, iDVD, and iMovie. Even low-level stuff like Sleep mode works--although I have to wake the Frankenmac by touching the power button; the keyboard and mouse are ignored while the machine is sleeping. (That may be due to the fact that I'm using a wireless Microsoft keyboard and mouse over USB--I haven't tested it with Apple-branded hardware.)

On the hardware front, everything also seems to work fine. The onboard Ethernet, audio, USB, eSATA, and FireWire ports all work. I even found an old USB/FireWire PCI card (from a previous generic Windows machine I built), plugged it in, and connected my iSight camera to it--no problems whatsoever. I plugged in my Wacom tablet, installed the drivers, and found that it also works just fine--including handwriting recognition via the Ink System Preferences panel.

Then I took advantage of the fact that I'd built a machine in a case of my choosing: I installed a hot-swap SATA drive bay--something like this one.