MK500, I've got this beast up and running. The numbers are exactly in line with yours, I've got the OWC 250GB PCIe SSD and the thing smokes. But I will say a 3 drive RAID of Seagate 2TB on 6G SATA definitely does its best to keep up.
One of two real issues I'm having at this point have to do with the ports on the Radeon. It appears that it only likes certain combinations of outputs, and when it doesn't like them I lose video altogether. It seems to be most happy with one DVI-D screen and one HDMI screen...I have the HDMI going out to a Panasonic BT-LH1760 as this computer's primary purpose is for video and photography. I've been seeing some things around about editing some hex addresses in some system files to give the video card full functionality, but I've also been sleeping about 3 hours a night while doing both the tech and writing music for a commercial shoot, so I've been more breezing through a couple of posts rather than taking notes. More on that soon.
It's definitely a monster for both the money and for what it is, a bunch of great components running in harmony with a great OS. I wasn't sure about Lion and have avoided it like the plague up until this point, but I decided to take the leap and really get into making a full 64bit pathway for all the video/photo heavy lifting. I do believe it makes a huge difference.
The USB3 ports are a blessing to have, they are a little slow to mount sometimes but they do work consistently and are very fast. They outpace e-sata on every drive that I've tried thus far.
I would like to make the e-sata work normally, and it seems like everytime I run multibeast to enable its hot-swappable nature it doesn't stick, they just always appear as internal. Wasn't sure if you had any insight into that. Do you just have them all show up as internal? I'm moving drives between computers a lot on productions so it's a little more important for me. However USB3 is filling that void quite nicely when the enclosure supports it. Currently running a CalDigit 3TB RAID on USB3 and it performs as well as you would expect.
I'm running Final Cut Studio 3 on it, and it seems much more stable and able to deal with the Phantom Cine files I'm throwing at it than it was on a couple of the other real macs I was using to do this before. In full disclosure, however, I have not tried those machines on snow leopard with a clean install. There are only so many hours in the day!!
For any of the pro photographers out there, a major reason I built this machine was to help the very frustrated photogs/directors I work with, feeling disappointed with the fact that their new digital back (the Phase One IQ180) was creating such large files that the workflow for shooting fashion had become unbearably sluggish. With the older digital back, the files were around 35MB. Now they are around 86MB and it became painful when they were shooting thousands of shots. I did a quick test once I got the system running, and quickly fired off over 100 shots with no issues whatsoever. Then I rendered those 100 shots into 500 MB 16bit raw files, fired up 3 1080p HD Vimeo videos, and started shooting some more. Not even a hiccup! I was truly impressed.
The other hangup at this point is the Blackmagic Decklink HD Extreme 3D card. It shows up, and every program sees it, but I'm not getting video in or out of it. I was using quality signal paths and everything was connected correctly, but wasn't able to make it capture or send video. Seems strange, so I've been playing around with some settings in the OS and in the BIOS. It also makes the programs that utilize it hang or just doesn't respond to much. It does output a signal of some kind (my monitor reflects the changes in resolution when I change it), but the picture is always blank. I have to wonder if moving it to another slot will do the trick, or something of that nature. Just seems odd that everything else would work totally as advertised and this one thing doesnt. I will post results when I get something to work
Overall, however, this machine smokes. I thank you very much for the hours of hard work you put into detailing this build, and to the community at large who chooses to support itself when manufacturers don't listen to their patrons. As a lifelong computer geek, I have come full circle, building quality computers with great components which are easily replaced if the worst were to happen. I'm not sure whether Apple cares or not i'm sure the iPad and iPhone are plenty profitable enough where they don't), but I think that the core of Apple's success lies in the creatives who have bled with these machines to make art. The further they stray away from that, the less successful they are likely to become. I still have nothing but the utmost respect for the kinds of machines Apple has always built over the past 10 years. They almost always take the high road in terms of quality and build, and I have enough macs that still run and still get used to be a living testament to that. I only retire these machines when they DIE. They are plenty repairable and solidly built workhorses, and in building a Hackintosh we can only hope to achieve at least some of that class of machine. The numbers, however, don't lie. This is an exciting time to be a creative and a technician.
If you want any more specific information about my build, I'll be more than happy to document it and post it on this thread for anyone else who would like to build a similar machine. I'm not a hackintosh expert, but this is the most fun I've had in a while fixing computers. Ironically, I know tons more now than I ever did about OS X
