immapc said:
My UD3R has been flawless ever since I got the new ASUS DVD. It is a great choice for Stability!
If you use the ATI Experimental you won't need to select any other Graphics Kexts like I had stated earlier. Again that is an experimental Graphics Enabler for ATI and I believe 64Bit also. If you want Stability like I have had for over 4 months of Rendering and Editing with Final Cut Pro then let me know and I can walk you through Multibeast. I run 32Bit but other applications that are 64Bit still run fine and list as 64Bit.
The Video cards can only really go so fast because of QE/CI, and I am not sure if CUDA cores have made it worth getting NVidia 4xx series. The single slot is all you need if you just want dual DVI as there is no Crossfire SLI support for OSX anyways and the single slot won't have the artifacts on boot up and shut down like the SLI cards do.
Thanks again for your tips. I'm finding this is kind of like many other DIY processes. You come into it with a some previous experience/knowledge and so you sort of 'start in the middle' and work your way outward.
It's amazing how a component as seemingly 'simple' as a burner/ROM drive can cause so many problems, but apparently a number of people have experienced your woes. Glad you got yours stable. I know I had a vexing stability issue once on a Windows machine and it turned out to be a burner (like it was sending out jibberish or stray voltages on the cable or something). Once it was out the system was happy. I have an ASUS DVD on a Win 7 machine that works fine as well. In the current build, the $18 OEM Sony Optiarc seems to be okay, but I'll keep an eye on it.
This first HacPro of mine will be used for design work. I'm going to be building another for myself for video editing, AE, etc. Actually, I've heard great things about the Mercury Engine in CS5 in conjunction with Cuda on the nVidia cards. I have to put together a list of stuff for a new Mac Pro we'll be buying at work for our main edit room. But since I myself really can't afford that right now I'm going to take the DIY route at home, especially now that I see what's possible. (I might take you up on your offer for tweaking that system when I get to it.) The new Premiere and AE apps seem pretty compelling, but now that there's all this buzz about the new FC it will be interesting to see what Apple will offer in terms of utilizing the GPU.
It's good to know that my choice of videocards, although not as 'educated' as it probably could have been, has turned out okay. Even though that adjacent PCIe slot isn't really usable, I just couldn't see putting in some honkin' dual slot card in this machine. Glad I decided not to.
Can't work on it today, but I still have to put in the remaining drivers for audio and other drive controllers. Are you able to actually use the 6Gbps SATA ports, or just the Gigabyte 3Gbps ports? I'm contemplating making a Scratch disk (for Adobe design apps) using one or two Raptors, and if I can actually use the 6Gb ports I'll get the newer Raptor to take advantage of that.
Since the eSATA ports aren't hot swappable (and I need to use them), I will probably put in a Sonnet card I have. They make good controllers for Macs so the drivers should go in nicely.
I gotta say one of the great kicks of this process goes by quick but it's still worth a chuckle...and that's when the OS X install finishes and it says "Enjoy your new Apple computer." I'm sure others have commented on this.