So a while back, I bitched about Intel and how I was never going to buy another one of their processors because of the horrible experience I had with the Pentium D 805. I was really happy with my Athlon X2 4400+ system, but the problem was I just couldn't find it in myself to love Windows Vista.
Lets face it; Windows Vista is the biggest load of operating shit the world has ever seen. I thought my system with 2gb of 800 mhz DDR2 RAM would be able to run Vista, but for some damn reason Vista seemed to always want to access my hard drive (YES I TURNED SEARCH INDEXING OFF!) for some unknown reason.
I was back to using good old Windows XP but I quickly realized that I wanted to try something different. Linux was out of the question, because well frankly, everytime I install any kind of distro what so ever, it always fails to boot within a month (I do something to screw up the settings, and the window manager doesn't load, so I'm stuck with a command prompt and I'm too damn lazy to learn Linux).
Then I got this brilliant idea of using OS X on my machine. I actually owned some recent Macs in the recent years, and actually enjoy using the OS X software. My problem is I have always had a problem with the hardware. If it wasn't for the shitty hardware experience, I would most likely be using a nice iMac C2D today, but instead now I am just using OS X on generic hardware. I could write ten pages of whether its legal or not (its not legal), but I'll do that some other time.
So back to the whole OS X story. To make a long story short, OS X wouldn't play friendly on my AMD system. My onboard nVidia graphics didn't work, my sound didn't work, and a bunch of other things probably didn't work (my wireless network card did however work with a bit of tweaking).
I did some research, and it seemed that the solution was to buy a Intel processor and an Intel chipset motherboard. Mac OS X ran very nice on my Pentium D system, so I figured I would purchase a cheap Conroe based Celeron processor, and a cheap motherboard despite my new found hatred towards Intel.
I didn't realize how awesome the Core 2 platform really is. I managed to buy a Celeron 430 CPU off of eBay for a mere $20 and a Intel 945gz based Biostar motherboard off of NewEgg for $30. I took the 2gb of 800mhz DDR2 memory from my AMD system and threw it into the board (It only operated at 533mhz though.. bummer) and overclocked the processor upto 2.4ghz with no problems (I had to literally fight with my Athlon X2 4400+ to overclock it sucessfully, and I was using a somewhat expensive motherboard!)
So why am I using the Celeron 430 now instead of the Athlon X2 4400 as my main system? Its not all about me running OS X... the Celeron 430 when OC'ed is actually a pretty damn good processor that almost fully puts my dual core Athlon to shame!
More details later!
