Proposed Pro Tools HD PCI build

Here's what's in my Newegg shopping cart right now, based on reading this forum and discussions with Genzai. This is to replace a G5, run Lion, and keep my PCI HD Accel2 hardware:

JetWay JNAF92-Q67 LGA 1155 Intel Q67 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s ATX Intel Motherboard

Intel Core i5-2500K Sandy Bridge 3.3GHz (3.7GHz Turbo Boost)

GeIL Black Dragon 32GB (4 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10660)

GIGABYTE Ultra Durable VGA Series GV-R685OC-1GD Radeon HD 6850

Seagate Barracuda ST500DM002 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive x2

Sony Optiarc 24X DVD Burner, Bulk Package Black SATA Model AD-7280S-0B -

COOLER MASTER RC-692-KKN2 CM690 II Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case

COOLER MASTER eXtreme Power Plus RS700-PCAAE3-US 700W ATX 12V v2.3 Active PFC Power Supply

The parameters of this project are to run Lion, use my existing PCI stuff and interface (plus expand as people jettison their legacy hardware), drive two to four displays, maximum RAM instead of maximum processing horsepower, one internal system/application drive and another for sample playback. I don't need sleep, wifi, or bluetooth.

Thanks to everybody for all of their trailblazing here, and you're welcome to weigh in before I click "buy" around 5pm

P

pbmusic said:

Here's what's in my Newegg shopping cart right now, based on reading this forum and discussions with Genzai. This is to replace a G5, run Lion, and keep my PCI HD Accel2 hardware:

JetWay JNAF92-Q67 LGA 1155 Intel Q67 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s ATX Intel Motherboard

Intel Core i5-2500K Sandy Bridge 3.3GHz (3.7GHz Turbo Boost)

GeIL Black Dragon 32GB (4 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10660)

GIGABYTE Ultra Durable VGA Series GV-R685OC-1GD Radeon HD 6850

Seagate Barracuda ST500DM002 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive x2

Sony Optiarc 24X DVD Burner, Bulk Package Black SATA Model AD-7280S-0B -

COOLER MASTER RC-692-KKN2 CM690 II Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case

COOLER MASTER eXtreme Power Plus RS700-PCAAE3-US 700W ATX 12V v2.3 Active PFC Power Supply

The parameters of this project are to run Lion, use my existing PCI stuff and interface (plus expand as people jettison their legacy hardware), drive two to four displays, maximum RAM instead of maximum processing horsepower, one internal system/application drive and another for sample playback. I don't need sleep, wifi, or bluetooth.

Thanks to everybody for all of their trailblazing here, and you're welcome to weigh in before I click "buy" around 5pm

P

Click to expand...

And I think you don't need audio neiter. But why this JetWay c**p, instead of a Gigabyte or at least an ASUS motherboard?
Four monitors is only possible with a HD6870.

^^ because the Jetway has 4 PCI slots for his Pro Tools cards and the Q67 chipset has native PCI support. There is one gigabyte too Q67 chipset, but it only has 2 PCI slots.

Yes, the native PCI requirement narrows the field substantially. ALso, right now I'm just driving two displays but in the future it would be nice to add another in the sound booth and another over by the drum kit. I gather there's a better card for this?

P

Anybody using this:

Galaxy 21GGE4AM9EKP MDT X4 GeForce 210 Multi Display 1GB 64-bit DDR2 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready Video Card

Thanks

P

pbmusic said:

Anybody using this:

Galaxy 21GGE4AM9EKP MDT X4 GeForce 210 Multi Display 1GB 64-bit DDR2 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready Video Card

Thanks

P

Click to expand...

Only 512MB versions work.

Okay after a little more searching I found Genzai's previous post about his success with this card:

PowerColor AX6850 1GBD5-I2DH Radeon HD 6850 1GB 256-bit GDDR5

Thanks to everybody for reviewing my list. Stuff should be in by the end of the week and I'll try to document everything here for future newbie builders like me.

P

THE NOOB CHRONICLES

I'm going to ramble a bit as I put this rig together in hopes that other people who are doing this for the first time will derive some entertainment and encouragement, and perhaps just enough information to get into serious trouble. I'm not going to document every step of the build, just the moments of uncertainty or failure. Laughing at my errors might not make your build go smoother, but at least you'll feel good for a few seconds.

I haven't got my internal drives yet (they're coming Monday) which means I haven't finished assembling all the parts and I certainly haven't powered anything up. But I do have a couple of observations so far:

The case I bought is cavernous, which is good for beginners because there's lots of room to work. It has some peculiarities. First, the standoff holes for the motherboard are mislabeled. It's not hard to figure out which ones to use, but do stop and verify this with your own eyes before you throw a whole three minutes down the toilet unscrewing and repositioning a few bits of hardware. Second, it has enough fans that with the casters on, it might actually propel itself across the floor. I'm guessing that in the gamer market, fans sell cases, because they spin and make sound and seem all awesome. Otherwise why put LEDs in them? Anyhow, it seems that there are no hard and fast rules about how to configure your case for cooling, but after a brief discussion of this with an engineer friend, I've decided that since the CPU has a fan, the graphics card has a fan, and the power supply has a fan, I'll run one of the four (!) case fans from the 3 pin system fan header on the motherboard and leave it at that. Once its fired up I'll keep an eye on temps and let you know if this is enough.

Do install the little metal trim plate for the rear panel connectors before attaching the motherboard to the case. I will never get those six minutes back.

This motherboard has a nine pin header for the front panel controls labeled "JW-FP", where my case just has a bunch of individual connectors for that stuff, so I had to study the pin configuration. Things don't always correlate neatly. For example, the pins for the power LED on the board are labeled "VCC5" and "PWRLED" and the connectors for the case are just + and -. VCC5 is +. Unless there's a failure when I turn it on. Or a fire. Then it's something else.

I'm utterly baffled by the built-in audio connections, where nothing matches up with anything, but I don't intend to use any built-in audio, so I'm going to devote my effort to unraveling other mysteries, like how my G5 rig came to understand that it would soon be supplanted (this is the only explanation for the sudden spike in failures and annoyances, which are clearly being perpetrated maliciously).

That's all for now. Thanks for tuning in.

Paul

THE NOOB CHRONICLES

If you want to create a bootable USB drive using UniBeast (which is something you *should* want, and here's the link: http://tonymacx86.blogspot.com/2011/10/ ... using.html), you must do it in Snow Leopard. If you're doing a build similar to mine, odds are good you're running ProTools HD on a PowerPC machine, which means you're probably running OS 10.5.6, which means UniBeast will hang on the first stage of the install. I have a Lion machine at home (which I had to use to download Lion from the App Store since there's no App Store in Leopard), so I tried it there. UniBeast will run a little deeper but still hang. So I copied the Lion Install along with UniBeast onto a USB Drive (not the one I'd be using to make a bootable drive) and went in search of a Snow Leopard machine. Turns out somebody in the office next door is running Snow Leopard, so I copied over what I needed, followed the instructions in the link above and...

(running next door to see if it's finished)

...and it's not quite finished. But it's at the "package scripts" stage, which is known to take some time and to feature wildly inaccurate progress estimates. I'll take this opportunity to mention two other things: 1) you'll need the admin password for the machine your using to do this, so think about that before you break into some campus computer lab in the middle of the night and 2) pay for UniBeast by making a donation to this blog.

So like I said, I copied over what I needed, followed the instructions in the link above, made a hasty phone call to secure the admin password for my neighbor's machine and...

(running next door to see if it's finished)

...success!!!

Now, actually booting from it is a test for another day.

Paul

If anybody thinks I should move this thread to another sub-forum and knows how to do it, let me know.

THE NOOB CHRONICLES

Success!

It took a couple of hours spread over a couple of days and maybe seven or eight attempts, but my machine now boots. The problems I had have fairly simple solutions, and I'll go ahead and describe what happened for anybody who's playing along at home.

The first time I switched on the new machine, I had no display from either the built-in VGA port or any of the digital ports on my graphics card. Easy fix: take out the graphics card. You'll read all over this forum that you should start with the leanest configuration possible (i.e. no cards, minimum RAM, nothing attached to USB except a keyboard, etc.). I can' t explain why I chose not to follow instructions. I will say, though, that having all 32 gigs of RAM installed seems not to have caused any trouble so far.

The next thing to do is configure the BIOS. Since I'm writing this for beginners, here are the details, at least for the Jetway board: Switch on the machine while holding the DELETE key (if you're using an extended Mac keyboard you want the key with the little flag with the "X" in it because the other one that just says "Delete" won't be recognized). This gets you into the BIOS configuration pages which you can navigate with the arrow keys on the keyboard. All I did was find the SATA configuration (it's in the "advanced" menu) and switch the mode AHCI. Don't forget to "Save & Reset." That accounts for one of my seven or eight tries.

Next, restart from your UniBeast USB and run UniBeast according to the instructions. There's a link to the instructions elsewhere in this thread.

The brambles got thicker when it came time to run MultiBeast. I didn't really know which options to select, and I don't remember what I ended up choosing that first time around. In any event, there were several things going on at once at this stage that resulted in failure and I'm not sure which is principally responsible, so rather than go down all the dead-end roads, I'll describe what eventually worked. First, I had to go through the UniBeast process again from the beginning, including re-formatting the hard drive, which had gotten polluted during my experiments. This time, when I ran MultiBeast, I kept it simple: I skipped EasyBeast, skipped UserDSDT, skipped System Utilites, then under Drivers & Bootloaders --> Kexts & Enablers --> Miscellaneous I installed FakeSMC and NullCPUPowerManagement. Then, under Customization --> Boot Options I installed 64-bit GraphicsEnabler=No. Finally, under Customization --> System Definitions --> Mac Pro I installed MacPro 3,1. I don't remember exactly where I ran across the recommendations for these components, but it seems to have work.

I have a couple of additional pointers. First, you'll have to go into the Boot menu of BIOS (see above) to force your machine to boot from your UniBeast USB. I've got a second USB drive called "HAC UTILITY" where I keep things like MultiBeast, which is where I put the boot1h file as outlined in the directions from the link. Second, it may look like you're about to re-install Lion when you boot from UniBeast, but you'll be able to open the Terminal after the language selection screen of the installer and then quit from there after you're done with the boot1h process. Third, for unix novices, don't forget that little space after the cd command. This seems like a real forehead slapping rookie error, but if you look in the comments section of the linked article you'll see I'm not the only one. Plus I have little kids so I'm not easily embarrassed.

For me, that was it. Restarted without any USB drives attached and my machine went straight to Lion. The fact that I didn't load an .aml file or otherwise get my hands dirty with DSDT suggests that my OS may be littered with land mines for the rest of the configuration, but I'm going to clone the hard drive at this stage so that as I navigate that minefield (which I'll have to in order to get my graphics card, ethernet, and Pro Tools going) I can always get back to a simple, bootable system.

Thanks for watching. More later.

P