pastrychef's Asus ROG Strix Z370-G Gaming (WI-FI AC) build w/ i9-9900K + AMD 6600 XT

[pastrychef]

It really depends on the application. One simple example is transferring large files from my NAS over 10GbE. I get approx 800MB/s from my NAS and copying from it to a SATA SSD, the SSD would bottleneck it to about 500-550MB/s.

 

[dclive]

Can you describe a bit of your 10GbE environment? It's something I'm interested in but costs have kept me away so far.

 

[pastrychef]

Sure!

I built an 8 bay Synology clone (think hackintosh for Synology). Then I added a 10GbE SPF+ card to it. I think I got the card for approx $20 used from Ebay.

On my hack, I added a SolarFlare 10GbE SPF+ card (approx $55 used from Ebay). I direct connect the two and I get approx 800MB/s reads and 300MB/s writes. It was a very simple setup that has been working great for going on 2 years now.

I chose to go with the SPF+ standard because my Synology clone had built-in drivers for it and because of cost. It's was much less expensive than 10GBase-T at the time. Hopefully, now that iMacs have 10GBase-T, it will become more mainstream and costs will come down.

I documented my experiences here: What are the options for 10GbE on Mac Pros? | MacRumors Forums

 

[dclive]

Interesting.

As my house is wired for RJ45 GigE, I'm not sure I see an upgrade anytime soon. I believe I have Cat5E, which may or may not work reliably with 10GbE (45M, 135 feet or so...I suppose I should be OK...), and I'd also need to upgrade to 10GbE switches. Even if I just focused on the areas where my connections need the most improvement, I'm still looking at a few thousand bucks - 1 main house switch upgrade required, and two 'room' switches required. I'm also tied into the Ubiquiti Unifi environment, and I don't want to leave at the moment. So many choices to make.... I have little desire for another box near my "Mac", as I have a 'server closet' with the ESXi host, SAN, etc. stored safely (and quietly) away.

 

[pastrychef]

I looked at the cost of switches for about a second before I knew it was going to be out of my price range. I live alone in a tiny NYC apt so my setup is much simpler. NAS to my hack over 10GbE and everything else on 1GbE. Fortunately, 1GbE is plenty to stream videos from the NAS to my Apple TV.

 

[dclive]

I looked at the cost of switches for about a second before I knew it was going to be out of my price range. I live alone in a tiny NYC apt so my setup is much simpler. NAS to my hack over 10GbE and everything else on 1GbE. Fortunately, 1GbE is plenty to stream videos from the NAS to my Apple TV.

Understood. And after I moved away from ESXi's iSCSI/NFS-on-Synology for VM disk use to using NVMe on local ESXi host, ESXi disk i/o was no longer a bottleneck - 10GbE doesn't really buy me anything, it's just something I'd like to have (nice-to-have!) for when I do notice transfers hitting that 100-120MB/s limit.

Maybe in a few years.... thanks for sharing your experiences.

 

[Lestliness]

Hi @pastrychef
thanks a lot for your great build and the effort to document all of your work. Really appreciate it. I am new to all of this hackintosh thing and finally made the decision to build my first hackintosh. Currently I am running a decent Mac Pro 2010 with 2 E5620, R9 380, Samsung SSD blade and 16GB of RAM, in it. It is not bad but not as good as I want it to be. I want to speed up my workflow with Adobe Software and Cinema4D and kind of came up with a very similar build to this you shown up here. Budgetwise I am a little bit more limited to less ram and a 1070 Ti but all in all it points into the same direction.

I don't know wether my question fits here and if not, i am very sorry but I just want to know if building this hackintosh really gets me into the speed dimension I imagine right now. Currently I am really disappointed by my rendering times and scrolling through and working with big image databases in Lightroom or CaptureOne. Also I really want to have some thing I can work on for some years and I do not expect my Mac Pro to be future proof any longer. I am assuming that now it is the last moment to sell this bad boy while getting something out of it. Next year maybe Apple will bring out a new Mac Pro which would be really harming the price tags for the older machines (Even when Apples Machine will cost over 10 grand).

So to sum up my question a little: I saw the Cinebench and other benchmarking numbers just for the 8700K in comparison to my E5620 for example. 780 points to 1500 points and I do not really actually know what this means for actual "feelable" performance. I am not that thrilled of my single core performance as well because all Adobe software rely on this but I also want to have better rendering times in Cinema. Do you think a setup like yours would get me the productivity i am looking for?

I would be really thankful for an answer by any of you guys! Thanks a lot and a wonderful Christmas time to all of you!

I'm a content creator who uses Cinema4D and I switched to Hackintosh 3 years ago for the single core performance of the i7 and the cuda opportunities of particle simulations in Nvidia cards. Specifically TurbulenceFD. My 12 core mac pro is now strictly a rendering machine turned on when I need to do an all night team render. Cinema4D relies almost exclusivally on the power of a single core while working in your scene. More single core power means more polygons, More memory means more textures. So your Mac Pro is actually holding you back on that front. It's still a great a machine for rendering and I would hold on to it if where you but you'll be much more satisfied with your day to day workflow on a Hackintosh.. at least I am anyway.

PastryChefs build here is really a great balance between single core power and multi core rendering, team this thing up with your mac pro and you're render times should be reduced by 50% if not more. I've ordered all my parts for this one and can't wait to see what kind of pull it's going to have with my current Hackintosh / MacPro render farm.

 

[pastrychef]

My old Mac Pro with dual X5680s (12 cores @3.33GHz) struggled to break the 30K multicore score in Geekbench while this build does it quite handily with my 5GHz overclock. I no longer have that Mac Pro but I don't ever remember my handbrake conversions being nearly as fast as they are now.

Also, even with all cores running at 100%, this build uses significantly less power and generates much less heat than the dual X5680s. I had to run custom fan profiles on the Mac Pro to keep the dual X5680s from overheating.

I would be very interested to hear your experiences on how this build renders your C4D scenes vs your Mac Pro.

 

[jeandossantos]

So, I'm having a difficult time installing Win10 for dual boot, and, one of the threads I came across, someone had mentioned turning on CMS for the installation process. Well, it turns out now that I can't get any picture. When I boot my machine I don't even see the mobo screen - can't choose boot menu or BIOS. Any suggestion?

Update: I was able to get into bios to turn CMS off by moving my DisplayPort from the GPU to the mobo. All is back to normal including my struggle on successfully installing Windows 10.

 

[jeandossantos]

I know Pastrychef hasn't spent much time in Windows, but I was wondering, has anyone had success with WiFi and Bluetooth in Windows 10 using the BCM94360CS2/adapter?