A hackintosh on par with a top spec 12 core Mac Pro... possible?

[moMowlam]

Hello all.

I want to build a hackintosh and I would like to know how close I could get to a full spec Mac pro.

my primary use of the computer will be 3d animation and design so the dual 6gb graphics cards are very appealing, how high can hackintoshes go?

The spec for the Mac pro is

2.7GHZ 12 core, with 30mb of L3 cache
64gb ram

Dual AMD firepro d700 gpus with 6gb gddr5 ram on each.


Its worth mentioning I have not built a hackintosh before and minimal building experience.

thank you very much in advance if you can offer any advise.

 

[trs96]

What are the limitations of your build budget ?

 

[moMowlam]

I don't have a fixed budget, the bigger the gap between the £7000 price of the Mac pro and the hackintosh the better.

 

[trs96]

I don't have a fixed budget, the bigger the gap between the £7000 price of the Mac pro and the hackintosh the better.

You can build a really nice, capable system for much less than that.
The main decision is whether to go with AMD or Nvidia graphics
cards then. If you need to run FCP X for video editing then dual
AMD cards are best. Otherwise you could get two GTX 980's for
around 1,200 USD. Not sure what that is in GBP. The Core I7
Extreme 5960X can easily perform on par with a twelve core
Xeon which is in the Mac Pro 2013. Just needs a very moderate
overclock. As far as X99 motherboards go you'll have to research
what will best accomodate your peripherals. Many are already using
an Asus X99 Deluxe board in their builds. Gigabyte has quite a few
good X99 options as well. Of course you'll spend a good chunk of
your money on 64 GB of DDR4 ram. This will be much faster than
what ships in the current MP. Try putting some potential builds
together and post all the components here so we can evaluate for you.

 

[moMowlam]

Thanks for the detailed reply.

I don't use Final cut these days, mainly Adobe After Effects and Cinema 4D.

I will have to research and see which card type C4D works best with.

thanks

 

[trs96]

Thanks for the detailed reply.

I don't use Final cut these days, mainly Adobe After Effects and Cinema 4D.

I will have to research and see which card type C4D works best with.

thanks

I know that the C4D software doesn't utilize the graphics card(s) for rendering.
Other than that I can't say whether AMD would give any advantage over Nvidia or
vice versa. For anything in the Adobe line of products the Nvidia 980s will be your best bet.

Also, get the fastest SSD or M.2 or PCI-e SSD you can afford and you'll have a very
fast and capable system for much less than the Maxed out Mac Pro.

 

[moMowlam]

Hello,

yes you you are right about C4D not using the graphics card for rendering , helps when working on the project though.

i might somewhere down the line learn to use this renderer for C4D which uses gpu to render http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhqf1n2xq80

but for now, I need the best CPU and the one you suggested looks good. When rendering, the more cores and threads you have makes C4D render faster (you can see each thread as a square rendering away) would I be right in thinking the core i7 5960x extreme has 16 threads, with 8 cores, and the Mac pro has 12 cores, with hyper threading taking it to 24 threads?

thank you kindly

 

[Silizium]

You can build a really nice, capable system for much less than that.
The main decision is whether to go with AMD or Nvidia graphics
cards then. If you need to run FCP X for video editing then dual
AMD cards are best. Otherwise you could get two GTX 980's for
around 1,200 USD. Not sure what that is in GBP. The Core I7
Extreme 5960X can easily perform on par with a twelve core
Xeon which is in the Mac Pro 2013. Just needs a very moderate
overclock. As far as X99 motherboards go you'll have to research
what will best accomodate your peripherals. Many are already using
an Asus X99 Deluxe board in their builds. Gigabyte has quite a few
good X99 options as well. Of course you'll spend a good chunk of
your money on 64 GB of DDR4 ram. This will be much faster than
what ships in the current MP. Try putting some potential builds
together and post all the components here so we can evaluate for you.

Why two graphic cards? To attach two monitors? I'm using E-on Vue and would be happy to have a better performance then on my Core2Duo. So I decided to go in this direction. I think 32 or even 16 GB RAM is ok. But tell me if I'm wrong. I have no periphery, but I need WiFi so its important that this works. I try to get the Asus X99 Deluxe board now.

 

[moMowlam]

I want two graphics cards as I might end up using Octane render.

Check out this guys setup.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhqf1n2xq80

 

[moMowlam]

I don't fully understand this but it's from the Octane renderer website. How many graphics cards can a Mackintosh handle?

Yes! Octane Render completely relies on the GPU for rendering performance and scales extremely well. If your motherboard can accept more than one video card, adding additional video cards will greatly improve Octane's rendering speed because Octane's performance scales perfectly with the number of GPUs (e.g. rendering with four GTX Titans will be 4x faster than using only 1 GTX Titan), without the need for SLI. The cards can be different models, allowing GPUs from two completely different architectures to be used in a machine with multiple PCI-E slots (such as a GTX 560 in the primary slot and a GTX 780 in the second).