Building a 6 Core Graphics / Editing Hackintosh

[yo_mang]

Hey Guys,

First up, new around the forums here but the Tonymac community seems really great and the tools offered on this website, especially being free is just awesome. I'm sure I'll be donating once my hackintosh is built!

I've just sold my 27' iMac (Mid 2010 2.93GHz i7) and am about to order my parts for my Hackintosh build. I'm in my final year of University for Television Production and am moving up to Sydney later this year to start work with a production company. My iMac was getting along fine for the last few years but I'm at a point where I'm wanting to build a high powered work station for efficient workflow, fast rendering of effects and 3D objects and the ability to use more of my editing applications in real time at higher resolutions.

Plus I just wanna build another beefy computer

These are the specs that I have come up with so far. I know that Ivy Bridge / X79 isn't fully supported yet but it seems like people are getting it to work fine. Plus I'm fairly confident that Tonymac will deliver the goods in the near future and I'm really keen on an X79 setup.

So heres what I have, go hard or go home right!?

Intel i7 3930K
Gigabyte GA-X79-UD5
32GB Corsair Vengeance Memory (8 x 4GB Sticks, 1600MHz, 9-9-9-24)
Some brand HD6870 (I wanted the 2GB XFX one but am hearing bad reviews about XFX)
Corsair H100 CPU Water Cooler
2 x Corsair Force 3 120GB SSD in RAID 0
2 x Segate Barracuda 2TB Hard Drives in RAID 0
Corsair HX-650 PSU
Either a G5 Case if one comes up cheap or Corsair 600T White Edition
2 x Acer 24" LED Monitors
Optical drive of some sort. Any Blu Ray / DVD Combo's that work with OSX? (Won't need Blu Ray burn just read, unless it's a reasonable price)


I know that I could make it a bit cheaper by getting other branded parts but I really love Corsair products and this is a setup that I will be able to rely on. I plan on over clocking the 3930K and ultimately want a Geekbench result over 20,000


Thoughts on this setup? Also if someone can point me in the right direction re: getting X79 working properly that would be awesome!

Cheers

Blake

 

[knouroozi]

Intel i7 3930K
Gigabyte GA-X79-UD5
32GB Corsair Vengeance Memory (8 x 4GB Sticks, 1600MHz, 9-9-9-24)
Some brand HD6870 (I wanted the 2GB XFX one but am hearing bad reviews about XFX)
Corsair H100 CPU Water Cooler
2 x Corsair Force 3 120GB SSD in RAID 0
2 x Segate Barracuda 2TB Hard Drives in RAID 0
Corsair HX-650 PSU
Either a G5 Case if one comes up cheap or Corsair 600T White Edition
2 x Acer 24" LED Monitors
Optical drive of some sort. Any Blu Ray / DVD Combo's that work with OSX? (Won't need Blu Ray burn just read, unless it's a reasonable price)

I would suggest getting a GT5XX or GT6XX series GPU as CUDA support will help you in the video editing department (as long as you're using Adobe's tools). If you're going the Final Cut route, then both AMD and Nvidia work, but you might want to make this future-proof in case you do use Premiere Pro/After Effects. At the price point of an HD 6870 you can get a GTX 560 or the upcoming (read: releasing in August/September) GT 650 Ti. A little higher and the 560 Ti becomes a nice pick or the upcoming GTX 660.

Check this link out if you'll be using Adobe's suite:
http://www.studio1productions.com/Articles/PremiereCS5.htm

Replace your SSDs with Samsung's 830 series, just because they perform better all-round - even Apple picks them in their Macs. With the Force series you picked you're getting a low-quality Asynchronous SSD, but with the Sammys you'll get a high-quality Toggle-Mode SSD. If you can't find the SSD 830 then go for the Crucial m4, another Hackintosh favorite.

Since you're going for an X79 build then I would suggest trying to mirror Michellk's build (/viewtopic.php?f=264&t=57962) by getting the Asus Sabertooth X79 just because setting up will be SOOO much easier when someone's done it beforehand.

Good luck, and if you have any questions, then ask!

 

[Asus-Freak]

If you want to use that board, follow Macman's post here....

viewtopic.php?f=54&t=58246

 

[yo_mang]

Intel i7 3930K
Gigabyte GA-X79-UD5
32GB Corsair Vengeance Memory (8 x 4GB Sticks, 1600MHz, 9-9-9-24)
Some brand HD6870 (I wanted the 2GB XFX one but am hearing bad reviews about XFX)
Corsair H100 CPU Water Cooler
2 x Corsair Force 3 120GB SSD in RAID 0
2 x Segate Barracuda 2TB Hard Drives in RAID 0
Corsair HX-650 PSU
Either a G5 Case if one comes up cheap or Corsair 600T White Edition
2 x Acer 24" LED Monitors
Optical drive of some sort. Any Blu Ray / DVD Combo's that work with OSX? (Won't need Blu Ray burn just read, unless it's a reasonable price)

I would suggest getting a GT5XX or GT6XX series GPU as CUDA support will help you in the video editing department (as long as you're using Adobe's tools). If you're going the Final Cut route, then both AMD and Nvidia work, but you might want to make this future-proof in case you do use Premiere Pro/After Effects. At the price point of an HD 6870 you can get a GTX 560 or the upcoming (read: releasing in August/September) GT 650 Ti. A little higher and the 560 Ti becomes a nice pick or the upcoming GTX 660.

Check this link out if you'll be using Adobe's suite:
http://www.studio1productions.com/Articles/PremiereCS5.htm

Replace your SSDs with Samsung's 830 series, just because they perform better all-round - even Apple picks them in their Macs. With the Force series you picked you're getting a low-quality Asynchronous SSD, but with the Sammys you'll get a high-quality Toggle-Mode SSD. If you can't find the SSD 830 then go for the Crucial m4, another Hackintosh favorite.

Since you're going for an X79 build then I would suggest trying to mirror Michellk's build (/viewtopic.php?f=264&t=57962) by getting the Asus Sabertooth X79 just because setting up will be SOOO much easier when someone's done it beforehand.

Good luck, and if you have any questions, then ask!

Legend, thanks. This is the info I was after, funnily enough I was just looking in to Adobes CUDA acceleration so I may go down the nVidia road.

After Effects is one of my main programs as well as a little Premiere and Photoshop. Up until this year I was editing mostly in Final Cut Pro, but seeing as it has shot itself in the face with Final Cut X I've converted to Avid Media Composer (plus majority of the television industry in Australia uses Avid0. Other programs I'll be running include Boujou, Davinci Resolve and Pro Tools.

Re; The mobo, I was looking for something with 8 DDR3 Slots for future upgradability (although 32GB is pretty future proof in itself!) and chose the Gigabyte board because it seems they have the best support. MacMan also used the same Gigabyte board in his build which seems to be working great so I could go off that. The sabertooth is a freakin beefy mobo though!

I actually first chose OCZ SSD's but read alot of reviews about bad benchmarks and high return rates - thats something I really don't want to deal with. I've read about the 830's being a good SSD too but I didn't know that about the Corsair ones! The 830's aren't much more anyway so I might look in to them

Cheers

 

[yo_mang]

If you want to use that board, follow Macman's post here....

http://www.tonymacx86.com/viewtopic.php?f=54&t=58246

Thanks mate, another member linked me to that build on chat, seems sweet!



Also I'm blind re: Sabertooth not having 8 DDR3 Slots

 

[knouroozi]

MacMan also used the same Gigabyte board in his build which seems to be working great so I could go off that. The sabertooth is a freakin beefy mobo though!

I actually first chose OCZ SSD's but read alot of reviews about bad benchmarks and high return rates - thats something I really don't want to deal with. I've read about the 830's being a good SSD too but I didn't know that about the Corsair ones! The 830's aren't much more anyway so I might look in to them

Cheers

I neglected MacMan's build, so sorry for that.

The thing with SSDs in terms of performance is this:
Toggle > Synchronous > Asynchronous

Most SSDs on the market employ the Sandforce controller, which heavily compresses data before writing it to the FLASH, so speeds are very high to the OS (i.e. copying a 500MB compressible file in 2 seconds results in only 200MB being written to disk, which is actually a 100MB/s write speed but feels like a 250MB/s write speed). Of course, the example is a bit exaggerated, but I think you get the point. In this compressing process the files are encrypted whether you like it or not, and the key is stored in the SSD, so if someone got the individual NAND dies then he/she would not be able to do anything - they would the the whole SSD. Notice also that Sandforce encodes/decodes the files in real time (that must take some processing power!). The real-time compression has 1 major caveat: when faced with incompressible data (think MP3 and h.264) Sandforce-based drives perform significantly worse.

Other controllers, like Marvell, Samsung, or Indilinx, do not compress data, so they are not faced with this issue, but since they do not do the compress switcheroo explained in the example, they end up having lower write speeds than Sandforce-based drives for compressible data. However, since they write all the data then they are more reliable.

If you're going Sandforce, the best would be the Corsair Force GS series.
If you're going custom Sandforce, then the Intel 520 series is the way to go.
Marvell? Crucial m4.
Samsung's SSD 830 is a great performing drive.
And if you want Indilinx, then you'll go with the (aforementioned) OCZ Vertex 4.

In terms of reliability, I think it goes like this, but know that (current) SSDs are very reliable (compared to HDDs) to begin with.
Marvell/Indilinx/Samsung > Intel Sandforce > Sandforce

When you have a hard drive, "deleting" a file tells your Hard Drive that that sector can be overwritten. However, on an SSD, "deleting" only happens on an OS-level - the file is still on the SSD. This is where Garbage Collection comes in, with varying levels (from passive to agressive). Agressive garbage collection means that the SSD regularly queries the OS to see which files it can delete to free up space, and to free it up it must shuffle around other files. Passive means that it does so less often, and both methods are there to ensure that you get the full speed of your SSD. Garbage collection results in what is called write amplification.

Write amplification is a sort of a multiplier. Because of the way SSDs work, you never end up writing the data to the flash once - the controller will have to move it around (thus writing it multiple times) in order to ensure you get the fastest possible write speeds. Comparatively, HDDs have a write amplification of near 1, where SSDs have greater than 2-3.

What TRIM does is that whenever your I/O usage is low, it sends a message to the SSD telling it to purge all the unneeded data, therefore giving you an easy way to run garbage collection. But since SSDs have garbage collection built-in, you don't always need TRIM.

Whichever drive you get, use this TrimEnabler instead of the MultiBeast-included one.
http://www.groths.org/?page_id=322

 

[yo_mang]

MacMan also used the same Gigabyte board in his build which seems to be working great so I could go off that. The sabertooth is a freakin beefy mobo though!

I actually first chose OCZ SSD's but read alot of reviews about bad benchmarks and high return rates - thats something I really don't want to deal with. I've read about the 830's being a good SSD too but I didn't know that about the Corsair ones! The 830's aren't much more anyway so I might look in to them

Cheers

I neglected MacMan's build, so sorry for that.

The thing with SSDs in terms of performance is this:
Toggle > Synchronous > Asynchronous

Most SSDs on the market employ the Sandforce controller, which heavily compresses data before writing it to the FLASH, so speeds are very high to the OS (i.e. copying a 500MB compressible file in 2 seconds results in only 200MB being written to disk, which is actually a 100MB/s write speed but feels like a 250MB/s write speed). Of course, the example is a bit exaggerated, but I think you get the point. In this compressing process the files are encrypted whether you like it or not, and the key is stored in the SSD, so if someone got the individual NAND dies then he/she would not be able to do anything - they would the the whole SSD. Notice also that Sandforce encodes/decodes the files in real time (that must take some processing power!). The real-time compression has 1 major caveat: when faced with incompressible data (think MP3 and h.264) Sandforce-based drives perform significantly worse.

Other controllers, like Marvell, Samsung, or Indilinx, do not compress data, so they are not faced with this issue, but since they do not do the compress switcheroo explained in the example, they end up having lower write speeds than Sandforce-based drives for compressible data. However, since they write all the data then they are more reliable.

If you're going Sandforce, the best would be the Corsair Force GS series.
If you're going custom Sandforce, then the Intel 520 series is the way to go.
Marvell? Crucial m4.
Samsung's SSD 830 is a great performing drive.
And if you want Indilinx, then you'll go with the (aforementioned) OCZ Vertex 4.

In terms of reliability, I think it goes like this, but know that (current) SSDs are very reliable (compared to HDDs) to begin with.
Marvell/Indilinx/Samsung > Intel Sandforce > Sandforce

When you have a hard drive, "deleting" a file tells your Hard Drive that that sector can be overwritten. However, on an SSD, "deleting" only happens on an OS-level - the file is still on the SSD. This is where Garbage Collection comes in, with varying levels (from passive to agressive). Agressive garbage collection means that the SSD regularly queries the OS to see which files it can delete to free up space, and to free it up it must shuffle around other files. Passive means that it does so less often, and both methods are there to ensure that you get the full speed of your SSD. Garbage collection results in what is called write amplification.

Write amplification is a sort of a multiplier. Because of the way SSDs work, you never end up writing the data to the flash once - the controller will have to move it around (thus writing it multiple times) in order to ensure you get the fastest possible write speeds. Comparatively, HDDs have a write amplification of near 1, where SSDs have greater than 2-3.

What TRIM does is that whenever your I/O usage is low, it sends a message to the SSD telling it to purge all the unneeded data, therefore giving you an easy way to run garbage collection. But since SSDs have garbage collection built-in, you don't always need TRIM.

Whichever drive you get, use this TrimEnabler instead of the MultiBeast-included one.
http://www.groths.org/?page_id=322

Thanks again man. I will be dealing with a fair bit of H264 as thats what my Canon 5D Mark II shoots to so thats awesome info, thanks again.


Anyone have any recommendations for a Blue Ray Reader / DVD Burner Combo? I'll also be needing a WiFi card, although I've seen a few threads that show some cards that are working perfectly in Mac OSX

 

[ggeorge]

I would go with a 4x 8gb ram set, rather than 8 x 4gb sticks. There's little or no price difference and it will enable you to go to 64gb without tossing all of the ram.

 

[knouroozi]

I would go with a 4x 8gb ram set, rather than 8 x 4gb sticks. There's little or no price difference and it will enable you to go to 64gb without tossing all of the ram.

I agree with ggeorge. As for your Blu-Ray drive, try the LG BH10LS30. If you manage to get sleep working on your X79 board (which is possible), then know that autosleep only works when there is a disc in the drive.

 

[yo_mang]

Sweet, thanks again guys. Cheked up the prices and it's only $20 or so difference for 8GB sticks so yeh, like you said it's probably better to get the 8GB sticks instead.


Just went ahead and ordered the first of my parts. I'm heading away for a week for some Freelance work so I've just ordered the bulky parts so that I could pay for slower shipping but should be here when I get back. I've put through my order for the following:

Intel Core i73930K
Asus X79 Sabertooth Motherboard
Corsair 600T White Edition
2 x 24" Acer S240HLBD Monitors


So that stuff is set. I'll be using the 3930K and X79 Chipset. Fingers crossed there isn't too many problems


So thats about half of my stuff ordered. I think I'll also end up going with a GTX 570 for my video card, seems to be a good performer for Adobe plus not too bad of a price (although by ATI standards it's a bit rich). I'll be ordering the rest of my parts once I get back and get paid for the gig!