OS Xbox Pro Mod: Four HDDs, Windows 7, OS X

Extremely well made video and system.

My hat is off for you, good sir. *bows*

Pretty cool, but haven't you heard Steve Jobs? Installing Mac OS on non-Apple hardware will precipitate the end of days.

no, it won't.

Fucking beautiful.

Very nice work. Still, its a lot of work just to fit in an old xbox.

All that just to make a computer look like an XBox? Big deal.

$1500 for a machine that amounts to a $4500 Mac Pro? Really? How can a Core 2 Quad 2.93GHz "amount to" either an i7 based Xeon quad core with hyperthreading or two i7 Xeon quad cores with hyperthreading? Unless he's comparing it to the original Mac Pro from 2006 which had Core 2 Quad based Xeon chips, which was available as a 3.0Ghz machine at $3299.

I'm all for hackintosh building but some people really stretch their comparisons. A core i7 based quad system could maybe be compared to an entry level Mac Pro, even though it doesn't have ECC and Xeon chips. A hackintosh using Xeon chips etc could definitely be compared. Both would of course be cheaper than Apple's current overpriced Mac Pro pricing but this comparison just isn't remotely accurate or fair.

It is a beautiful bit of hardware that he's made there. Apart from the EFIX chip. Poor sucker fell for their scam.

What no blu-ray? hahah. I would be proud to have this prominently displayed anywhere. That is awesome.

very nice
I'm jealous
few questions though..
anodized or paint, any issues with heat?
why destroy a dev unit when standards can be had for less than 50?
don't mac pros have dual xeons ie 16 threds?
you paid for efix?
any plans to emulate xbox for original function?

That was exactly my thought the whole time: 'this is all very nice, but will it play Xbox?'

to answer some of your question i dont think heat was too much of a problem and no mac pros dont have 16 threads, they have 8 threads because the xeons only have 1 thread per core, the only cpu tht has 8 threads on 4 physical cores is the core i7, and a mac pro with 8 cores costs around 5000 so yeahh....

very nice. I am wondering where he got those SATA power connection though. Id love to get some

The Xeons have 8/16 threads since they use hyperthreading. They have 2 threads per core. The 8 core Mac Pro has 16 virtual processors and the 4 core Mac Pro has 8 virtual processors, as does the Core i7 iMac. The Core i5 iMac, however, does not have hyperthreading and so only hs 4 virtual processors.

Beating Apple in a price/perfomance contest isnt really an achievement. I bet my dog would built a better system for less then Apple.

Frozencpu.com

http://www.frozencpu.com/cat/l3/g5 [...] Page1.html

Hah, that's funny. I still think it's crazy that the original XBOX is just so huge that you can fit a whole ATX board in there . Good stuff.

Amazing craftman skill and video.

Now let's see the video where Newegg and ExpressHD take his design and puts it on an assembly line.

Talented guy ... choice in music ... not so much.

FUCKING AWESOME!

Best ever video i've seen...

Too bad his XBox has been banded for the severe mods.

woah that was awesome ! lots of tools too

Very nice.
I damn near went crazy assembling my i7 system in a normal case though...
Guess it pays to plan ahead. That leads me to wonder though, how long did the guy plan for this?

no, Its $3000 with 4 hds at 640gb. I think its funny how I spent 30 minutes verifying exactly which cpu they currently have just to have someone post who didn't even know what a xeon is. You remind me of the kids who come in to my store and tell me that amd laptops are superior. In my opinion it is very hard to build the 16 core mac cheaper without really going low quality parts.

lol 4k i wish it was 3k

Microsoft called. They just banned your Xbox from XBLive.

The board he used is actually 3.5 cm narrower than a standard ATX board. I have a similar model to the one he used, the difference being his actually used DDR3 and mine uses DDR2, and they are 30.5cm x 21.0cm; I also have a Gigabyte EP43-DS3, and it is 30.5cm x 24.4c. So he chose wisely: right motherboard size, and yet is already uses DDR3, making it a better performer.

I owuld only advise him to get a Radeon HD 5770; since it's built on 40nm and from the reviews it doesn't draw to much power, I bet it would fit the envelope and definetely be a better performer. Aside from that, a very good and good looking system!

Congratulations for the build! A lot of hard work, but the end result is beautiful! Great video too, the guy also knows how to tell the story of the build in an interesting way.

If

it's a very gorgeous machine.

I forgot to add sometinhg: the original Xbox is huge because it it mostly a PC. The processor is a Mobile Celeron from the Pentium III era, the OS is a custom build using Windows NT/XP kernel,it has a normal 5.25 DVD drive and a 3.5 hard drive, so it's necessarily big, but it also makes it fairly easy to source parts. The graphics chip is made by Nvidia, and since the OS is based on NT/XP it supports DirectX 8.1 and besides also OpenGL 1.4.

That said, it shouldn't bee too dificult to get the original XBox games to work, he's got the right hardware to do it, he just needs to get the software to make them run. (I have my doubts if it's legal to do it, but hey, if he's got the original games...)

well... if ya added xenon processor support, liquid cooling, 8 fans, 2 16x PCI Expres and 2 4x PCI Expres, support for 32GB of RAM, TOSLINK audio ports, then it might amount to the mac pro

Mac Pros use server parts, this doesn't. does it need server parts? maybe not? but lets not try and say that Apple are using the same parts and then just charging 3 times the price.

the main reason Apple gets blamed for overcharging is because they use laptop or server parts, not the best price/performance ratio desktop parts.

So while its still true that price/performance ratio on Macs SUCK!, its not just them taking massive amounts of profit (it is a bit of that of course) there are more subtle advantages to the Hardware they use, that can't be shown in your average benchmark.

P.S. Apple sucks.