Hello everyone. Lets get started.
First off I went and scorched Hawalli for the parts that we needed to get this baby running. The list of compatible hardware on the EFIX website is pretty limited when it comes to motherboards. For the sake of easiness and to avoid problems we went ahead and purchased items that were on the list. The motherboard is a Gigabyte EP-45-EXTREME. Although this is an excellent motherboard it is also very expensive. We also purchased a Core 2 Quad CPU from intel. SATA hard drive and DVD drive, 4 GB of DDR2 800 Kingston memory, GeForce 7600GT Video card and a case.

Motherboard: 130KD
Memory: 11KD per 2GB = 22KD
Processor: 99KD
Graphics Card: 30KD
Hard Drive 500GB: 20KD
DVD: 10KD
Case: 15KD
Power Supply: 35KD

We went a head an put everything together at about 2:00 AM when all of a sudden the motherboard refused to boot. Naturally, being Mac people, we thought that we did something wrong.


Scorching the motherboard’s manual we noticed that we needed a bigger power supply and hence the added power supply cost. Next day, everything booted find. We started the machine up. Made sure all the setting are correct and rebooted with the EFIX USB module attached. Low and behold here it was showing one hard drive with Caution sign on it and DVD icon. We loaded an Original Copy of leopard and pressed enter. 5 seconds later we were greeted with Leopard installation screen. Click on disk utility from the menu bar, partitioned the drive, and clicked installed. 20 minutes later, it rebooted and went right into Leopard with the Welcome Screen.

Problems:
With the installation going without a hitch, we proceeded to upgrade Leopard to the latest version. Naturally we used Software Update and let the system do its thing. After 3 hours of downloading, the system asked to be shut down to start the installation of the updates. Suddenly it got stuck at configuring installation forever. This happened to all the updates downloaded using software update. So we decided to download the old fashion say with a download manager. All the updates installed fine when downloaded using a download manager. The system also refused to shutdown or restart cleanly. It would get stuck with a spinning dial and you have to press the reset or power button manually. The solution to this was simple. We turned off the put the hard drive to sleep option in the System Preferences Energy settings.

Overall Feel:
The computer is fast running Leopard. Programs are snappy to start and manipulating images is a breeze. Writing a 500MB mp3 CD to the DVD-CD drive took only 2 minutes. The screen sleeps and wakes up normally as well as the computer. As you can see from the previous post, EFIX doesn’t detect the Quad Core CPU string but it does do so with dual core CPUs. Writing and reading to the USB drives is not as fast as the Macbook Pro but it works fine. Even writing to the hard drive sometimes feels a bit sluggish. Booting the system from pressing the power button on to Leopard being ready to use take about 30 seconds or less. Overall the computer is perfect and EFIX delivers on its promise.

More to come: Benchmarking!