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OS Xbox Pro is the hottest hackintosh ever

by Mike Schramm Nov 26th 2009 at 4:00PM


Warning: some NSFW lyrics on the music in the video above.

What do you get when you combine an old Xbox with OS X and some Mac Pro level hardware? This monstrosity. Built by Will Urbina, the OS Xbox Pro is a hackintosh casemodded into an original Xbox dev kit, with some crazy hardware under the hood, including a pair of 2.93GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550s, an NVIDIA GeForce 9800GT card, 8GB of RAM, an 16GB solid state drive, and four traditional hard drives -- one boots Windows 7, the other one does OS X (Snow Leopard, we believe -- he bought a copy retail), a Ubuntu install in there somewhere, and two other sweet hard drives for video editing.

And here's the wacky thing: Total material cost of the system is under $1500. That, combined with the video above, almost makes me want to spend a month of weekends trying to do something like this myself (aside from, you know, fitting it into a dev kit Xbox thing -- although fitting it into an old Macintosh might be a fun build, too). At any rate, awesome build for sure.

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Warning: some NSFW lyrics on the music in the video above. What do you get when you combine an old Xbox with OS X and some Mac Pro level...
 

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John

Awesome, simply awesome. The fact that he has a metal bender sure helps things as well.

December 01 2009 at 9:54 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
xander.bear

I'd give that guy a bj!

November 29 2009 at 5:52 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Tom Craft

While his skills are obviously very well honed, I'm more impressed with the video. I've seen professional video shoots not come out as clean or well done. Well worth the watch, wouldn't have minded it being even longer.

November 29 2009 at 2:22 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Peter

Awesome dude... Just Awesome...

November 28 2009 at 3:19 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
JOeMTC

What DSLR did he shoot this with? Pretty sweet video. The hack isn't bad either. :)

November 27 2009 at 10:57 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
fatslug1

It's been proven multiple times, Xeon's are crap compared to Core 2 Quad's (check the benchmarks done between Xeon's and other core 2's). The buffered ram puts a huge hamper on the processor speed. There is a reason for Xeon's - they are used in servers where redundancy and reliability is needed - nobody in the consumer space has a machine running 24 hours a day for years on end doing constant number crunching the entire time. At most you are rendering video and audio for several days at a time and a Xeon is overkill; and whats more Xeon is not made for power but for reliability - you gain much more performance with Core 2 Quad's and the reliablity is not an issue as you aren't running it constantly for years without reboots.

November 27 2009 at 1:11 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
jgohlke

What was that big Dremel-like tool?

Rubber floor mats!

Very nice mod...

November 27 2009 at 8:59 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
rasmus

nice skills indeed...

November 27 2009 at 12:57 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
DirtyRob

Nice Work. Wish I had the time and the talent to do mods like that.

November 26 2009 at 10:07 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Doug

Shop envy...

November 26 2009 at 8:38 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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