Recent content by Dan Wells

I forgot to post my Geekbench scores earlier - I get somewhere between 20350 and 20700 in Geekbench 64, which I attribute to slight variation based on background tasks (did Spotlight index something when Geekbench was running?). It beats any non 12-core Mac Pro, including the fastest 8 core...

I'm on the road right now, and not carrying my 60 lb tower Mac :-) When I get back, I'll try and snap some pics, especially of the (very clean) motherboard wiring - one of the great advantages of the Fractal case is that it has a lot of room around back for cable management, so very little...

The Mac Pro Apple should have built - RIVE-3930K-Radeon 7970 6 Cores at 4.2 Ghz, Mountain Lion 10.8.3 A derivative of the mk500/shilohh build Many thanks to mk500 and shilohh for their superb guide to building a very similar machine - this is a slightly more conservative version of the...

How hard is it to edit the DSDT for a similar graphics card? I'm building essentially the same machine, but had ordered a 7870 instead of the 7970 on the GPU to save a couple hundred bucks... The whole reason I picked this build (I've modified a couple other things, but nothing that should...

I've been looking at that same processor for a high-end photo machine, and the Gigabyte board is one option, but the ASUS Rampage IV Extreme also seems to Hackintosh well. The ASUS board is substantially more expensive, but it seems to be more stable with 64 GB of RAM, or when overclocked...

Hi Jake- Look into what Adobe's doing with OpenCL (both AMD and NVidia) vs. CUDA (NVidia only) - I think CS7 (or is it CS6.5 that they'll be releasing in a couple months) may be moving to OpenCL? I remember this from NAB coverage, and here's a reference to it - Adobe has officially...

I'm looking at a very similar build for photography, and I have run across a couple of things that might be relevant... 1.) The Gigabyte motherboard has had some trouble with heat throttling (on some of the PC sites) - it seems to be set to throttle performance at EXTREMELY conservative...

I'm about to embark on a relatively similar photography build, probably x79/3930, and my one remaining question is the GPU... Lammergeier has a GeForce 650 - is that a reasonable choice for Photoshop, Lightroom, Capture One and Final Cut Pro X (neither gaming nor 3D is an issue), or will I see...

I'd be very surprised to see any of the "smart cooling" or "smart power supply" software, not to mention Windows-based overclocking utilities, ever show up in an official Mac OS X version. Maybe the protocols are simple enough that some Hackintosher can figure out how to write an equivalent? A...

On the CUDA question, I've been looking at Adobe and NVidia's websites, and it looks like they may be limiting CUDA to Quadro GPUs in CS6.. If anyone knows that consumer GeForces will still work, let me know (the 570 is supposed to be a nice board for CUDA without getting too expensive or power...

Have Dual Xeon beasts like this been confirmed to work (they should - they are close relatives of a Mac Pro)? The Deep Thought build on here took some effort to get working (and Geekbenched around 34000)... This is a 16-core, while Deep Thought (and the biggest Mac Pro) is a 12 core. I actually...

A powerful Hackintosh should beat most 2008 Mac Pros (pre Nehalem) easily (your very high end machine may be the exception), and will offer performance better than a low-end or midrange 2010 mac pro (which is what Apple's still selling) for a fraction of the cost). The fastest iMac, which is...

I like Vendetta's case possibility - not much bigger, handle helps, and 120 mm fan support means that a small, sealed watercooler is an option (Corsair H60 or the like). I might be willing to overclock modestly on water - one reason I said "no overclock" was the low-profile CPU fan. Can a sealed...

I just looked up the Gigabyte motherboard that mister_spaccato recommended, and it looks good, except that it uses VIA audio, which doesn't seem to be popular for Hackintoshing, and Atheros LAN, which opinions are mixed on... Among Gigabyte's four (confusingly specced) Micro-ATX boards with the...

32 GB is a must for really large image files, pretty much anything above 24 MP (there are few enough D800/D800e's out there, and they're new enough, that I haven't seen the comment specifically about those models, but all the medium format photographers seem to use 32)... The new Nikons are the...