@HackaShaq
It's been about two months since you posted this build. Talk a little about how it's affected your workflow. Do you get more work done ? Are you doing better work than you used to with the cMP ? Has all the time and effort you put into making this happen been worth it ?
That's a good question.
Just to recap from my first post, I went from a Mac Pro 5,1 running El Capitan that had been in use for approximately 7-8 years, had a variety of old software that had been chugging along for years, (software like Adobe CS6), and was primarily used for Photoshop/Lightroom work when editing photographs. My old machine was also a dual-display setup, but the displays were HD only not 4k. I own a small business, and I also use a custom FileMaker Pro database to manage my business, lots of email, Apple Scripts, automated tasks (saved as Finder "services") to really maximize my work flow.
This new "2018 Mac Pro" is complete dream machine for me. Everything just works, and works well. I was expecting the mere jump from El Capitan to High Sierra would cause issues with some of my Apple Scripts and/or automator tasks not working, but nope. They work perfectly. I also started this machine off completely fresh. That means I never installed Flash on it, and never installed any apps I didn't need. That alone is a feeling of computer-related cleanliness that I can't describe. It's a bit like moving from an old house of seven years with tons of clutter into a brand new house that is totally clutter-free. I purged a lot of unnecessary junk. It's just clean.
But in terms of the productivity of machine, the speed alone has been dramatic. In Photoshop for photography, I have a pre-set series of photoshop actions that are applied to each photo I edit. It's a series of maybe 20+ different layers that are created with different specific needs, including a gaussian blur that is applied to a specific layer and so on. (Frequency separation for beauty retouching.) When I click the automation of this action, this new machine just creates everything almost instantaneously. (I almost thought it didn't work the first time I tried it.) But oh yeah, it works.
Also, when using the clone stamp tool in certain areas of an high resolution image with lots of layers, my
old machine would sometimes lag, creating a "pause" when clone stamping items, and then it would resume and sort of "jump" back as probably the machine couldn't handle the necessary speed needed for the processing/cut/paste. It made the tool sometimes unusable, and there's nothing like that with this new machine. Again, it just works. Even email is more efficient, because I'm one of those weirdos that used POP on my own domain and has 20,000+ emails. The new machine has much much better read/write speeds, and thus, finding/viewing email is night and day.
I often tweak FileMaker Pro layouts to create custom items for my needs. Well, with the old machine, when you add content like a new field to the database, the app usually has a progress bar that takes forever to update the database with the new field. Well, now it's no more. The processing and read/write speeds of the machine dramatically change the time waiting for those functions too.
Also, in creating a hackintosh, it has really forced (in a good way) the importance of quality backups for all HDs. Now more than ever, I have a backup system in place that's pretty darn good. I have a USB 3.0 docking station for hard drives, and pop one in to backup. My old cheese grater machine didn't have
true USB 3.0 (and that was accomplished via a USB 3.0 card that would cause the machine to stutter when engaged with a USB 3.0 device.) So now, with
true USB 3.0 on this hackintosh, my local backups with SuperDuper are SO MUCH faster, and that saves an incredible amount of time. And the idea of potentially adding USB 3.1/Thunderbolt to this machine down the line? For backups that would save even more.
And lastly, there's no machine out there like this from Apple. None. I just watched a video of a disassemble/reassemble of the new Apple iMac Pro. Since this thing is made to not be user-repairable, that's a non-starter for me. And for that machine, the costs of the repair parts are double the cost of the machine if you were to rebuild it with replacement parts, with a 1-3 week turnaround as the parts aren't in-store. Insane for a Pro machine. This machine gives me the confidence that I could honestly like use it for another 8 years. If something goes down, I can replace a part within the day most likely, without an Apple Store visit. That's an immeasurable confidence I have in making the time and effort of building this worth it.
...and I haven't even started that I will likely get into editing video soon, and that would have realistically been a no-go or time drain with my old cheese grater.
Even just browsing the web. Pages basically just pop into view, and don't even feel like they are "loading" any more. You take a minimal time savings there, and the multiply that over hundreds of times a day, and then multiple days a week, and then by the month and so on, and there's likely a huge time savings there, making me able to view so many more memes on ******. LOL
And the time I spent writing up this build guide has already paid me back in multiple ways. It not only allowed me to create a guide written for somewhat beginners like me who definitely aren't experts, and that alone makes me happy that people used the guide to build away. But as been shown, it allowed me to connect with a community that showed me, "Hey dude, your RAM is in wrong" (LOL!) and I would have never known that without taking the time to write this guide. It's all good karma all around.
So to answer your question, yeah. It was definitely worth it.
