I promised you guys a writeup on an EFI-X(tm) chip build sometime ago and here it is. If you don’t know what EFI-X(tm) you need to check their site out and read up. Basically it is a chip that enables PCs, yes, PCs to boot our favorite OS. What this chip does is act as a layer between the computer and the OS to allow the OS to communicate with the computer. If you remember sometime ago we did a similar build in which we followed the recommended hardware list and it worked out of the box. What makes this new build special is that we are using hardware that is not yet approved and a new processor, the core i7 from intel.

Here are the specs:

Gigabyte GA-EX58-EXTREME

Intel Core i7-920 2.66GHz

eVGA Nvidia Geforce GTX275 with 896MB DDR3

OCZ Triple Channel DDR3 6GB RAM

OCZ GameXstream Power Supply 850Watts

Zalman CPU Cooler

SATA CD/DVD

SATA Hard Drive Western Digital 1TB 32MB Cache

Thermaltake Armor+ Case

Retail Copy of Mac OS X Leopard

EFI-X Module

We first assembled the Gigabyte Motherboard into the case. Some careful consideration should be taken with the Extreme board from Gigabyte because they come with Huge Heat Sink that fits into a slot of its own and cools the chipset of the motherboard. Make sure you dummy fit all the cards you want as to see how or in what order you might need to install these. After securing the CPU bracket for the Zalman Cooler from under the motherboard, we proceeded to installing the motherboard into the case. We then screwed everything in, and fitted the OCZ Ram modules before installing the CPU. We then installed the CPU and applied a bit of thermal grease that came with the Zalman Cooler, Arctic Silver, just enough to cover the CPU and create a really thin layer on top of it. We did the same thing for the heat spreader of the motherboard chipset. Installed the Zalman Cooler and then the heat spreader onto the motherboard and making sure everything is fastened snugly. We then installed the Graphics card. Here you can see how huge the card is. The 200 series from nvidia are pretty wild in size. After we fitted everything in and make sure all your wires are connected correctly, we fired up the computer and made sure BIOS and other setting are all correct and working. To make sure that the components for our build are in good working order, we installed windows and loaded all the drivers. Below you will find a gallery of all the images we took. In Part 2 we will look at how to install OS X on this beast!