June 02, 2012 After some tries on installing Snow Leopard 10.6.8, Lion 10.7.4 and Mountain Lion DP1-Dp3, the board and i5 2500k are totally functional with both HD3000 on board and PCIE GS8400. Snow Leopard 10.6.8 will have full QE/CI/CL with Nvidia GS8400 but NOT HD3000 on board (full resolution though). Lion & Mountain Lion will work with full QE/CI/CL. The best is to get one low price external video card for the system.
To replace the i7 920 system that was blown, I built a budget i5 2500k($169) Sandy Bridge system with Asus P8Z68-V LX LGA ($59) motherboard and 8GB dual Corsair DDR3 1600 (2x4GB)($29). The system is faster than the i7 920 and the power consumption is much lower. I’m extremely happy with it. Again, z68 supports USB3 and SATA 6GB and H61 doesn’t. The way we build this PC is the same as the GA-H61MS2H system, the only thing different is this one is a full ATX board and GA-H61MS2H is a micro-ATX (smaller).
Performance (amazing)
Lion 10.7.3 installation went smoothly with everything working with HD3000 Graphics DVI, but my old Nvidia GS8400 didn’t seem to work because of the design some how, not like the H61MS2H.
Next – Install Lion 10.7.4 and Mountain Lion DP1 on this system.