Any Experience With Hackintosh?

[jyl]

Well, I've been happily using my old iMac G5 for years now. Maxed out the RAM, put in a big hard drive, kept the OS updated, and in return the old iMac has chugged away serving me nicely - until now.

I'm ripping DVDs using Handbrake, and lordy is it slow. I mean, I'm getting 5 . . . frames . . . per . . . second. Ripping four TV episodes off a DVD (about 200 minutes of video) takes all night and most of the next day. Incredible.

So, a new computer is in my future. Apparently a current iMac will do around 20-25 fps (a reliable number from a friend), and the hottest Power Mac will do 50-70 fps (a possibly unreliable number from some internet boasting).

But, frankly an eight-core Nehalem-based Power Mac is expensive, and will still be so later in 2009 when I get around to doing this. I mean, spec any goodies at all, and you're at $5K in no time. So I think I'll have two options - (1) buy a new iMac, or (2) build a whitebox PC.

I'm sort of leaning toward (2), because I think by mid-year I'll be able to build a dual-socket 8-core Nehalem workstation for not much more than the cost of an 24-inch iMac.

But either way, I want to run Mac OS.

So, I've read it is possible to install and run Mac OS on a non-Mac PC, using a hacked version of Leopard. I guess they call that a Hackintosh.

The question I have is, has anyone here made a Hackintosh? Once you get it installed, is it stable and usable, or is it a continual pain that can't see peripherals and breaks everytime OS X does a software update?