How I built my custom Mac – six degrees of freedom

Here’s a list of the parts:

Intel Core i7 2600K $335.00 Corsair Vengeance CMZ16GX3M4A1600C9B 16GB (4x4GB) DDR3 $149.00 Antec Sonata IV with 620W $187.00 Crucial M4 SSD 256GB $439.00 LG CH12LS28 12X BD-R Blu-ray DVD Combo Drive $69.00 Arctic Cooling Freezer 13 Pro CO CPU Cooler $59.00 Gigabyte GA-Z68MX-UD2H-B3 Motherboard $165.00
First I had to update the BIOS to F12 and configure a few settings:

enable HPET in 64bit mode
Set all SATA controllers to AHCI
give 64MB of memory to the integrated graphics
turn off the SATA RAID BIOS

I then prepared a UniBeast stick on my other Mac, according to the instructions here. I followed the guide but could not get to the Lion installer. After fiddling around with a few parameters I realised that passing PCIRootUID=1 on the UniBeast loader did the trick. After partitioning and formatting the SSD I was able to install Lion and boot it through the USB stick.

I then installed Multibeast with the DSDT for my mainboard. After rebooting Lion got stuck on the white apple screen. To go ahead I passed GraphicsEnabler=false to the boot loader and got into Lion at a low resolution. System Info reports that the machine is a Mac Pro, and that was the problem since the Mac Pro doesn’t have an Intel HD 3000 graphics card. So I ran Multibeast again and installed the Mac Mini System Definition. I had to add it to my /Extra/org.chameleon.Boot.plist:

< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
< !DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">


	GraphicsEnabler
	Yes
        Timeout
        2
        Legacy Logo
        Yes
	SMBIOS
	/Extra/smbios.plist
	EthernetBuiltIn
	y

After a reboot I got it running in full resolution. What was still missing is the USB3 driver and the Lnx2Mac RTL81xx driver from MultiBeast, which installed with no problems. Everything is working now, even the sound and the USB Bluetooth stick. It’s a rock stable system overclocked to 4GHz and I have never seen a faster Mac. And it is silent, too. CPU core temperature never goes over 60 degrees, even overclocked & under full load.