EFiX Dongle Turns (Some) PCs into Macs

Back in June, a European company called EFiX announced its EFi-X USB dongle for desktop PCs. The dongle promised the ability to not only install legitimate copies of OS X on any PC, but to utilize the Software Update feature, something Hackintoshes and Psystar machines cannot do.

Earlier today, Gizmodo ran a review of the dongle, and despite a few bumps in the road, the dongle appears to hold up to most of its company’s claims. The dongles biggest shortcoming is hardware support. As of right now, only 15 motherboards are supported, all but one of which are Gigabyte, and the oldest chipset on the compatibility list is the P35. If you happen to have one of the several Gigabyte boards supported, and you have hardware that’s less than two(ish)years old, you should be in good shape. The EFiX website has a complete list of supported hardware, which includes any and all Core 2 Duo processors, as well as virtually every GeForce 7 and 8 series card, as well as the Radeon 2600XT and 3870. However, only 256MB of video RAM will be recognized, no matter how much vRAM the card actually has.

According to Matt Buchanan of Gizmodo, the dongles update software is 32-bit only, so for the 64-bit Vista users in the audience, you need to install the 32-bit version on the drive you’ll be putting OS X on. Once you get past the limited hardware and the lack of 64-bit support, the dongle supposedly works well. The only real irregularity after the installation was the test machines RAM running @ 800MHz instead of the 1066 it runs at when Windows is booted. Perhaps the most important part of the review is that Leopards Software Update works flawlessly. Buchanan downloaded and installed the 10.5.5 update for Leopard without a hitch