Hi everyone- I currently run an XP tower and a macbook pro, I haven't benchmarked them but I think my mac runs quicker than the tower.

I haven't actually fired up the tower in a long time (I was actually thinking of selling it) but recently i've been meaning to get back into gaming, and moving back into 3DS max and solidworks on the PC side of things- so I was thinking of upgrading my PC a bit and thought it would be logical to try and turn it into a hackintosh.

When doing 3D rendering the temps on my laptop rise to 75 degrees C and sometimes higher, so I'm not really comfortable rendering out a 26 hour animation at that sustained temp.

The hackintosh will be mainly for C4D rendering, photoshop CS3, final cut pro and after effects. I will be doing a bit of music making with ableton too, and DJing with Traktor.
I'm going to want to run XP and OSX on the same computer, and it would be nice if the laptop and the tower could be networked to make a net rendering setup in cinema 4D

I've had OSX running on the tower before, but if I remember correctly I couldn't get drivers for basically anything, so it didn't seem like a stable setup for a workstation

the current specs are:
Core2duo e6600 2.4ghz (clocked to 3.3ghz) with a tunic tower cooling system
2gb Crucial ballistix ddr2 5300
BFG/Nvidia 8800 gts (1st gen) 640mb OC2
ASUS P5Ne- SLI
320gb Seagate Barracuda


so my questions are:
If I wanted to swap the processor for a quad core would it be best to keep on 775 or upgrade to i7 (also for my application would a xeon make sense?)
Is the motherboard I have good for a hackintosh, and if not what should I upgrade to (or go the i7 route)?
I'd quite like to get 8gb of RAM in there, but there's only 4 slots on my board, so should I just stick 2 more ddr2 5300 sticks in to have 4gb, or just get new RAM- my board doesn't support DDR3 but as I understand it OSX doesn't use it yet? The whole triple channel thing is quite confusing too
If I remember correctly OSX doesn't support SLI, so there's no point getting another 8800, but this would still work under windows?
Do I need to swap out the disk drive for a SATA model or is it fine to keep on IDE?

and where would I go about sourcing a mac pro case from- is it difficult to shoehorn a hackintosh in one of these cases? I already have a antec 900 so a decent case isn't vital.

Also if I wanted to set up a RAID array can I just do that in software, or do I need a hardware RAID array?


Unless I go for quadcore and 4gb RAM (or more) is there even any point in running this hackintosh- my laptop has a core2duo 2.4ghz, 3gb RAM, 8600GT. i'd rather invest in a cooling pad (do these work btw?) to try keep the temps lower rather than put cash into an aging system which wouldn't be any quicker

thank you so much for the help, i'm a noob when it comes to hackintosh, but I have a fair understanding of computers in general so I should be able to follow your instructions well