EFI-X Chip - PC to Mac

I’ve conventionally been a PC boy, although I have been exposed to various operating platforms. I’ve had my share of experiences with various OS’ and given the options I figured I’d stick with Windows assuming Microsoft would finally figure a way to deliver a slicker version of Windows (which now comes true with Windows 7, but that’s another story for another day).

Getting to the point. Apple’s strategy to go Intel recently, opened up a whole new range of possibilities for computer enthusiasts and modders worldwide. We had the OSX86 project, a community of Mac fanatics, with a much more open set of Idealogies, who believe that Apple needed to open up its OS to more open x86 architectures, however, I don’t believe Apple has any such plan in the near future.

So I ended up trying the Hackintosh. However, there was always something that had to be tweaked. The next revelation that took place was in the form of EFI-X.

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EFI-X is a company based in Holland, and their purpose is to be the bridge between the PC/MAC world, two giants who haven’t seen eye to eye since each of their beginnings.

EFI-X has managed to create this bridge in the form of a USB based chip, meant to be a BPU (Boot Processing Unit). The chip fits into the USB header of your motherboard and somewhat bypasses the conventional boot process and diverts it to its own internal boot process. It’s well known that Macs use a boot ROM called the EFI kernel, as opposed to the conventional BIOS that you have on a PC. The chip bypasses BIOS, and emulates in real time, an EFI-X kernel, with all the necessary boot drivers, which as many hackintosh tweakers will know, is quite a boon.

Build
The chip is quite inconspicuous and small, yet well built and well finished. It ships with a cable that is meant to fix the chip onto the USB header on your motherboard (this is not possible on an external conventional USB port, it must be the header pins on your motherboard.

Apart from that, there’s nothing else that’s really required. Now, all you have to really do is push in your Leopard Installation DVD and you’re good to go (Yes. This requires a retail Leopard DVD. Hackintosh installs will not work with the chip, although previous installs do load seamlessly with the chip, and I might mention even perform slightly better).
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Installation
As mentioned, after the chip is fixed onto your motherboard, all you need to do is boot up and you will be brought to the EFI-X splash screen, which allows you to choose between previously installed operating environments, and disk drives (DVD-ROM’s, other bootable devices). If you haven’t already got Leopard on your system, then you can boot through the disk drives option and start your Leopard installation.

You must use an original retail Leopard DVD to avoid any issues. This will also make it easier to download the updates straight from Apple (as opposed to waiting for community updates as in the case of Hackintosh.)

Now one thing that you have to remember is that you can’t just go about putting together random hardware components in order to build this rig. There is quite an extensive list of supported hardware that EFI-X has on its website, and is in fact very similar to the list on the OSX86 Wiki, which is quite interesting; however I’ll skip the details to keep in the context of this article.

Now just to give you an example. I had initially bought my system only as a Hackintosh project and I was quite successful at that one too. But the problem with Hackintosh is that you have to wait for the community to tweak any of Apple’s updates, you have random functionality that’s missing, which is not always a great option, especially when you’re a bit low on patience. EF-X is in this scenario an extremely viable option. Here’s my system configuration:

Intel Core2 Quad 6600
Gskill 2GB RAM @ 800Mhz DDR2
Gigabyte EP35C DS3R Rev1 Motherboard
Nvidia Geforce 8600GT 256MB DDR3
Western Digital 750GB 7200 RPM (Windows Partitions/ Pure Data partitions)
Seagate 200GB 7200 RPM (Mac OS GUID Partition)

Conclusion
So basically I’m not really running a really high end PC but it’s a good solid configuration, solid enough to give me great performance on Leopard without any hiccups.

The only bottleneck that was experienced sometimes was with the hard disks. Sometimes they’d freeze up for a couple of seconds, but there was and still is no major issue. I have a fully functional Mac Pro at home. I use a lot of audio editing software which runs very smoothly on Leopard’s coreAudio drivers. Surprising yet, very true. A smooth installation from the very start, and at a price tag of $155 (Apart from the cost of the rig) for the EF-X chip, and another $110 for the Leopard DVD. Well as opposed to paying over Rs. 2,50,000 approx and above, I’m quite a happy customer.

All in all, I’m quite satisfied, at least at this point. I’m running Mac OSX Leopard 10.5.6 on my rig, and it’s as smooth it’s ever been. I’m running VMWare to access my Windows partitions, and quite surprisingly it works without too many hiccups.

Although Apple has not made any legal allegations against the company, news on this front is yet to be watched. It might just get interesting. However, considering the fact that EFI-X promotes the purchase of original retail Mac DVDs, claiming that their solution will not work otherwise, might just end up as an additional opportunity for Apple to boost Leopard sales, which from what I last saw have already been seeing a rise. Will this change Apple’s business model as well? Maybe. But with competition like Windows 7, which looks like one of Microsoft’s best releases even in beta phase, this company might just prove to be a useful ally to Apple in the long run, hey they might even just get acquired.