A $2,800 Hackintosh video editing rig

[alegomaster]

I am not sure how much power 4k video editing will need but I think a 3770k will not be that amazing. Thats the situation where a dual xeon would be nice. But I can't tell from experience.

It depends on if he will work with uncompressed footage or not. For example 1080p @ 24fps uncompressed is about 600GB per hour. 4K would be about twice as much. Compressed is a lot less. So that will determine the size of the hdd. I guess that is what Solidww wanted to say.


In the end it will all depend on how "professional" he is going to work/wants to be.

That is the great thing about the hackintosh. You can always add more storage to the computer in the future. Raw footage if I am right, tends to require better disk i/o speeds then actual processing power (compared to something like AVCHD). This build will provide a good amount of disk i/o so it should work decently with 4k. Plus 4k is only about twice the number of pixels of 1080p, so it should theoretically only take twice as long as render. Dual xeons would be nice, but it is out of his price range.

 

[jimbo75]

Yes you can add a couple of disks and yeah it should take theoretically twice as long. But I don't know how all this will perform as I a have only worked with 1080p compressed video which worked perfectly fine. And yeah of course the more data, the more speed is required for the same performance.

Does he have an opportunity to test an i7 build with 4k? Or reading tests, because I can't tell for sure how this will perform.

 

[alegomaster]

Yes you can add a couple of disks and yeah it should take theoretically twice as long. But I don't know how all this will perform as I a have only worked with 1080p compressed video which worked perfectly fine. And yeah of course the more data, the more speed is required for the same performance.

Does he have an opportunity to test an i7 build with 4k? Or reading tests, because I can't tell for sure how this will perform.

I actually have a Windows-based computer that has a 4.4 Ghz 3770k and a Gtx 660. I can let him test it (I use CS6 as well), however the only issue is that I use a 1 TB WD Black drive, which is definitely not going to have as fast of a disk i/o. He can definitely see how it can handle extremely compressed AVCHD footage though without as large of a performance disadvantage.

I will probably show him the speed of the processor when running Cinebench for an approximate speedup of just the processor. Of course, computer system design is a very difficult thing to typically quantify speed gains.

 

[jimbo75]

Well.. yes but HDDs aren't fast anyways and the difference between those isn't big. I mean there are a few ones which are ok, but they are really expensive. Thats where the SSDs win. But yeah if he can test yours that would be nice to find out if it will be fast enough. Next step would be 3930k, and later the Xeons.

Maybe he also wants to wait the 1-3 months for the new Mac Pro. There will be one for 2800 for sure. Maybe it will be a real good price (though I wouldn't count on it). Only thing is expandability...

But yeah depending on how he is going to use his build testing would be very nice.

 

[alegomaster]

Well.. yes but HDDs aren't fast anyways and the difference between those isn't big. I mean there are a few ones which are ok, but they are really expensive. Thats where the SSDs win. But yeah if he can test yours that would be nice to find out if it will be fast enough. Next step would be 3930k, and later the Xeons.

Maybe he also wants to wait the 1-3 months for the new Mac Pro. There will be one for 2800 for sure. Maybe it will be a real good price (though I wouldn't count on it). Only thing is expandability...

But yeah depending on how he is going to use his build testing would be very nice.

The entry level Mac Pro will probably be slightly inferior to this build as it would probably use a stock clocked quad-core xeon and an AMD card which is not as good for CS6 as a Nvidia one.

My friend is currently deciding whether he wants this build or a $2800 iMac. His main concern with the hackintosh is that there may be concerns with compability. He also wants to be able to get the latest OS updates. Is there anything that I can show him that can help him feel more secure about spending a large amount of money into a hackintosh system?

 

[jimbo75]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88r4IVqDLMI

Let him watch this video. He has a lot of videos about hackintoshes and answers a lot of questions.

 

[alegomaster]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88r4IVqDLMI

Let him watch this video. He has a lot of videos about hackintoshes and answers a lot of questions.

He is going to watch it later when he has time.

 

[Solidww]

Alright this topic took off well.

Here is the first concern. The friend in question doesn't seem like a geek. Therefore, a Custom Mac may be not worth it. If something should happen he won't know how to boot the computer back up. Of course if your going to be around to fix his computer then that will help. It gets tiring though. If this happens during a mission critical moment where work needs to be turned in. That is the wrong time to have a machine go down. (It has happened to us ) It could also happen with an Apple Mac computer as well just less likely since they control everything and will warranty the item.

Secondly, why is he working on RAW 4K? Even the pros don't do that! They use Proxy media for editing and basic color correction then use the RAW media IF needed for final output.

A 4TB drive is nice but what about redundancy? It's not if but when will your drive fail. That happens more then we like to admit. Even SSDs. Getting two 2TB drives and using a RAID 1 would help with this issue.

CPU - 6 Core is oh so nice! With the proper workflow an i5-K will be fine, though. We have been using Three computers for our 4K workflow. Two with i5-ks and one 8 Core with Dual Xeon processors. The difference in performance is yes, about Drive i/o and RAM! We recently upgraded the Z68 machine to an i7-2600K. All we got was faster render times. Oh Jolly good!

Your on the right track alegomaster. We did exactly what your original thought process is when we built our first machine. Now, after shooting ourselves in the foot a few times we are a little more cautious with our builds.

So, if he can wait then build an X79 machine with an i7-3820(OC it of course ), 32GB of RAM and a GTX 660TI or something like that. As his needs grow then, he can upgrade to 64GB of RAM, and whatever he needs beyond that. Like a Drobo backup which we just spent 1600 dollars on. Nice huh!

Lastly, I really just want to say. A lot of money can be saved and re-used by buying a lesser processor and GPU. That money can be used toward more drives, better cooling, or other misc. hardware needs.

Good luck to you and your friend. The editing and media world is a fun and stressful industry.

 

[alegomaster]

Alright this topic took off well.

Here is the first concern. The friend in question doesn't seem like a geek. Therefore, a Custom Mac may be not worth it. If something should happen he won't know how to boot the computer back up. Of course if your going to be around to fix his computer then that will help. It gets tiring though. If this happens during a mission critical moment where work needs to be turned in. That is the wrong time to have a machine go down. (It has happened to us ) It could also happen with an Apple Mac computer as well just less likely since they control everything and will warranty the item.

Secondly, why is he working on RAW 4K? Even the pros don't do that! They use Proxy media for editing and basic color correction then use the RAW media IF needed for final output.

A 4TB drive is nice but what about redundancy? It's not if but when will your drive fail. That happens more then we like to admit. Even SSDs. Getting two 2TB drives and using a RAID 1 would help with this issue.

CPU - 6 Core is oh so nice! With the proper workflow an i5-K will be fine, though. We have been using Three computers for our 4K workflow. Two with i5-ks and one 8 Core with Dual Xeon processors. The difference in performance is yes, about Drive i/o and RAM! We recently upgraded the Z68 machine to an i7-2600K. All we got was faster render times. Oh Jolly good!

Your on the right track alegomaster. We did exactly what your original thought process is when we built our first machine. Now, after shooting ourselves in the foot a few times we are a little more cautious with our builds.

So, if he can wait then build an X79 machine with an i7-3820(OC it of course ), 32GB of RAM and a GTX 660TI or something like that. As his needs grow then, he can upgrade to 64GB of RAM, and whatever he needs beyond that. Like a Drobo backup which we just spent 1600 dollars on. Nice huh!

Lastly, I really just want to say. A lot of money can be saved and re-used by buying a lesser processor and GPU. That money can be used toward more drives, better cooling, or other misc. hardware needs.

Good luck to you and your friend. The editing and media world is a fun and stressful industry.

His inexperience with computer hardware will probably end up not going well for him, so the iMac will probably be better choice for him then as it is still pretty decent. I am typically an hour away from where he lives so helping him would not be possible in most cases.

He may or not be editing raw 4k video, as the University does have cameras that can do that, but they may end up compressing it instead.

My friend can backup his work externally of the computer, but I am thinking that he may not need that much internal storage and 2 TB would be good enough for him.

The GTX 660TI could also work, however the i7-3770k would be nice to use as it does render items faster which is useful for him.

 

[Solidww]

His inexperience with computer hardware will probably end up not going well for him, so the iMac will probably be better choice for him then as it is still pretty decent. I am typically an hour away from where he lives so helping him would not be possible in most cases.

He may or not be editing raw 4k video, as the University does have cameras that can do that, but they may end up compressing it instead.

My friend can backup his work externally of the computer, but I am thinking that he may not need that much internal storage and 2 TB would be good enough for him.

The GTX 660TI could also work, however the i7-3770k would be nice to use as it does render items faster which is useful for him.

As the kid in that video that was linked to earlier said. The whole hackintosh experience has improved a lot but it still isn't like having a real Apple computer and getting their support.

Has your friend looked into getting a used Mac Pro? They can be found now for very reasonable prices.

Lastly, if he is still willing build his own machine then as he at least willing to learn a little bit about the process? Maybe, dual boot so that he has Windows 7 to fall back on?