Quick weekend project: I had an existing XP machine and frankensteined most of those parts into a new case, power supply, motherboard and hard drives. With two Mac notebooks, a couple of iPods, and a 5-user license for Leopard, it was time to experiment with getting OSX to run on “foreign” hardware. The new case gave me a good place to stick some of those free Apple decals that come with their products. More photos to come…

Ran xbench, and got a respectable score: 157.16 RAID0 Performance is good, with the exception of a big performance drop with random 4K block writes. This is because it’s running on a non-configurable hardware only SATA RAID controller (Silicon Image 4723… Asus calls this “Easy Backup”), and I think the stripe sizes are a bit large. I’m pretty happy here since I was able to also use 4GB worth of DIMMs (and have the OS access all of it). Performs much better than my 1st-gen MacBook Pro (circa 2006). One BIOS setting that helped me with allowing my iPod and USB drives to mount is to set the “EHCI Hand-Off” to “enable.”