Advice on budget design build

[DMA]

Hi!

I'm looking to build a budget friendly hackintosh that will be used predominantly for design work (Photoshop and Illustrator). I'm looking at the following components:

Intel Core i5-6500 3.2GHz Quad-Core Processor
Gigabyte GA-Z170M-D3H Micro ATX LGA1151 Motherboard
Crucial Ballistix Sport LT 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR4-2400 Memory
Crucial MX200 500GB 2.5" Solid State Drive
BitFenix Phenom M Arctic White MicroATX Mini Tower Case
Corsair CSM 550W 80+ Gold Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply

I just have a couple of questions:

1.) These have mostly been chosen from the build guide, but are there any obvious incompatibilities I'm missing? Will the Crucial MX200 SSD be okay?

2.) Will the integrated graphics be sufficient for now? Or do I have to get a graphics card?

Many, many thanks in advance!

 

[trs96]

Hi!

I'm looking to build a budget friendly hackintosh that will be used predominantly for design work (Photoshop and Illustrator). I'm looking at the following components:

Intel Core i5-6500 3.2GHz Quad-Core Processor
Gigabyte GA-Z170M-D3H Micro ATX LGA1151 Motherboard
Crucial Ballistix Sport LT 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR4-2400 Memory
Crucial MX200 500GB 2.5" Solid State Drive
BitFenix Phenom M Arctic White MicroATX Mini Tower Case
Corsair CSM 550W 80+ Gold Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply

I just have a couple of questions:

1.) These have mostly been chosen from the build guide, but are there any obvious incompatibilities I'm missing? Will the Crucial MX200 SSD be okay?

2.) Will the integrated graphics be sufficient for now? Or do I have to get a graphics card?

Many, many thanks in advance!

Looks great to me. You can use the HD530 should work with your apps well. I would move up to a 2 x 8GB ram kit as you will need that for work with photos that have large file sizes. Ram is cheap so why not ?

 

[DMA]

Looks great to me. You can use the HD530 should work with your apps well. I would move up to a 2 x 8GB ram kit as you will need that for work with photos that have large file sizes. Ram is cheap so why not ?

Fair point, will do that. Thank you so much man! Can't wait to get started.

 

[DMA]

I've bought everything but the SSD and PSU. I recently saw a Cooler Master Vanguard V550S going for decidedly less money than the Corsair CS550M. Is there any reason I should avoid this PSU and stick with the Corsair? I've read good reviews.

There is also a Corsair RM550X going for the same price as the CS550M...so I'm just a bit confused as to what will serve me best.

Thank you!

 

[thedrumdoctor]

The HD530 chip on my GA-Z170-HD3, as I have found out, does not wake an HDMI connected monitor up from sleep. The board wakes, but not the monitor. Apparently, according to other threads on this forum, Nvidia GPU's are the best for waking a Hackintosh monitor from sleep so I'm now looking for a compatible but not overly expensive Nvidia card.

 

[DMA]

The HD530 chip on my GA-Z170-HD3, as I have found out, does not wake an HDMI connected monitor up from sleep. The board wakes, but not the monitor. Apparently, according to other threads on this forum, Nvidia GPU's are the best for waking a Hackintosh monitor from sleep so I'm now looking for a compatible but not overly expensive Nvidia card.

Thanks for the heads up. Will look out for this.

 

[thedrumdoctor]

Thanks for the heads up. Will look out for this.

I ended up with a Geforce GE 740 GPU, then found out I had to install NVidia web drivers for the correct version of El Capitan and finally, use Clover Configurator to add nvda_drv=1 to the Boot arguments in config.plist. I let the machine go to sleep and the screen now wakes up after a couple of bashes on the (wired) keyboard. Haven't tried it with a Bluetooth keyboard yet though...

 

[mintran]

You should go with at least 16G of RAM .

 

[kiiroaka]

If it's a tight budget I was working with I would choose a board that didn't have the capability to over clock. Will you over clocking? If not, will you be running 2, or more, video cards? (There are advantages to a Z board, one of which is being able to use the memory XPM file to set memory timings, another being the amount of available PCI-E lanes.)

On the GA-Z170M-D3H Micro ATX I see no reason why current tech mobos need to support PCI when they could be better off supporting PCI-E X1. Chances are that the slots will remain empty, anyway, so it may not matter.

Before committing to any mobo you will want to download the QVL certified memory list and price out the RAM. Certain mobos can't accept 64GB of RAM, or the RAM that they can use may be more expensive than another mobo's RAM.

I think the semi-modular Seasonic SSR-650RM has better build quality than the Corsair CS550. I know it's $10 more, but it's better quality (all Japanese capacitors, gold plated modular pins, etc.) The non-modular Seasonic S12G-550 can be had for $80 and $4 shipping. (And, no, I don't like fully modular PSUs - what's the point? you will always need the ATX and 6+2 connectors.)

To save money I'd go with a 1TB WD "Blue" HDD for about $50 - $55. I bought four such drives for less than the price of one SSD. ymmv. Imagine if you had Windows 8 and OSX on your drive and MS went and updated you to Windows 10 and it blew up the booting, and now you can't boot into OSX or Windows. I've worked on half a dozen such machines, although they were older machines that should never had been updated in the first place. When installing an SSD the more memory you have the better. When you have Photoshop and Illustrator, the more memory you have the better.

Whatever that mobo can take, that's what I would fill it up with. If it became a matter of money, say where 64GB of 2133 cost less than 2 sticks of 8GB 3200, I'd go with the slower, but twice as much, slower memory. Figure 64GB will cost about $250.

http://www.newegg.com/MemoryFinder/#NGBFlBE0bWJAAED Select SIZE: HIGH TO LOW and you will see that you only have 4 choices for 4x16. $230 - $280. Sometimes faster memory will cost less than slower memory, with perhaps 2400 being a sweet spot. Newegg's mem finder only does 2133 so you will have to manually research other speeds. Price-wise, 4x4 goes for $80. 2x8 is $75. I'd go with the 4x4 kit. ymmv.

Why would you pay $155 for 2x16 Crucial when you can get 4x8 for $135? Because guys who built ITX mobos, which only have 2 mem slots will have to pay it... You could think that you can install 2x16 now and add another 2x16 later on. But chances are that the 2 kits would be incompatible. Never install more than 1 kit, with a kit of 4 being optimal, or a kit of 2 if ITX, 2 slot uATX, etc. (I can remember ordering 4 DS 1G 3200 sticks from Crucial and what they sent me were SS, single sided. I had the tech download the Intel website White Paper to prove that DD had 50% more throughput. Today, that may have changed; idkfs.)

My trinity is: always buy the fastest processor, install max mem, install the best built PSU. And never buy a mobo without comparing the availability and price of RAM. As far as the mobo goes, it needn't have PCI slots, must have an Intel NIC and AC audio, and it needn't have a secondary SATA controller.