Best Hackintosh for Da Vinci Resolve ? (and other Cuda based Video applications)

[Nej]

Hi everybody!

First, sorry if i'm not making sense or making mistakes, English is not my native tongue (I'm French).

I've owned Macs for Five years (iMac 24" Core2Duo , iMac 27" Core i7 and Macbook Pro 15" Core i7). I've been very pleased with them but I'm becoming very frustrated by the non-upgradable aspect of those Macs and I don't have the budget for a Mac pro. I already put a SSD and more ram in my MB but it's graphic card is no where near powerfull enough...

So I've made the decision to join in the fun of building a hackintosh . My goal is to have a powerful computer that is fully upgradable and has all the bells and whistles of a modern "pro" computer (USB 3, e-Sata, Thunderbolt...).

I'm using DaVinci Resolve which relies only on cuda power. So the video card (cards?) is gonna be a very important aspect.

So my questions are mostly related to the video card. Which compatible card would be the best for Cuda Power? I've read that the latest GTX are crippled to incite people to buy more expensive Quadro's. So I'm a little lost in the jungle of cards that's in front of me. Same old question: which is the best??

Other than that is you have recommendations regarding Motherboard, CPU or any other component I would be very glad to hear them

For the moment I think I'm gonna go the Core i7-3770K way with the maximum ram I can buy (determined by what are the other components of course...)

Thank you in advance for your advices and time.

 

[ggeorge]

Hi everybody!

First, sorry if i'm not making sense or making mistakes, English is not my native tongue (I'm French).

I've owned Macs for Five years (iMac 24" Core2Duo , iMac 27" Core i7 and Macbook Pro 15" Core i7). I've been very pleased with them but I'm becoming very frustrated by the non-upgradable aspect of those Macs and I don't have the budget for a Mac pro. I already put a SSD and more ram in my MB but it's graphic card is no where near powerfull enough...

So I've made the decision to join in the fun of building a hackintosh . My goal is to have a powerful computer that is fully upgradable and has all the bells and whistles of a modern "pro" computer (USB 3, e-Sata, Thunderbolt...).

I'm using DaVinci Resolve which relies only on cuda power. So the video card (cards?) is gonna be a very important aspect.

So my questions are mostly related to the video card. Which compatible card would be the best for Cuda Power? I've read that the latest GTX are crippled to incite people to buy more expensive Quadro's. So I'm a little lost in the jungle of cards that's in front of me. Same old question: which is the best??

Other than that is you have recommendations regarding Motherboard, CPU or any other component I would be very glad to hear them

For the moment I think I'm gonna go the Core i7-3770K way with the maximum ram I can buy (determined by what are the other components of course...)

Thank you in advance for your advices and time.

The basic buying guide is here. Though the vengeance ram recommended has stupidly large heat sinks and those interfere with most of the top end air coolers.

http://www.tonymacx86.com/100-building-customac-buyer-s-guide-2012.html

I also favor the non-reference cooler cards over those in the guides.

As far as CUDA power cards, if you don't have or want to spend the cash for the quadros. A 580/570 is probably your best bet, but check the Da Vinci Resolve support forums. They should be able to tell you there.

Apparently, Da Vinci supports processing on multiple computers. So a bunch of cheap machines networked with a moderately powerful one, might be as good or better than trying to cram everything into a single machine.

I would check benchmarks, but an x79/2011 build might well work. I have one, check the build by MK500 in the golden builds section. They have up to 6 core chips and many (though not all) motherboards support 8 dimm slots for up to 64gb ram. The x79 boards also do much better with multiple graphics cards, due to having 40 PCIe lanes vs 16 on a z77 machine. There are z77 boards that have a multiplexer chip to improve use of multiple graphics cards, but most of those are as much or more money than an x79 board.

Their primary limitation is that sleep and power saving modes are not fully supported, though that may be changing. It may also be less important if it's a work machine that will be constantly in use.

 

[Nej]

Thanks for the detailed answer!

I did read the build guide and learned the basics but as you pointed out, people tend to have different experiences so I'm looking for feedbacks like yours that contradict (or not) the guide. Always good to get as much opinions as possible.

Blackmagic does give recommendations for building a Resolve station ( http://www.blackmagicdesign.com/media/4746565/Resolve_Win_Config_Guide_2012-08-30.pdf ).

They do recommend the ASUS P9X79 PRO. I wasn't sure if it was totally compatible with a hackintosh build but there's some successful build on the forum. 3-way SLI is sure great for an upgradable build.

Thanks for the tip, MK500 build is a little too expensive for my budget but a x79 Mobo might fit my budget with a Core i7 3820.

They also state that:
"The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 3072 MB is the most
powerful and lowest cost GPU card for Resolve.
NVIDIA Quadro and Tesla cards provide less
performance to Resolve but can be used if other
software on the same computer requires Quadro or
Tesla cards."

So it seems that it is the card of choice but I was looking for feedback on the best Cuda card when running a hackintosh cause I fear that compatibility issues could cause different performance...

 

[Midphase]

Go with this build:

http://www.tonymacx86.com/user-buil...pro-3930k-gtx670-sabertooth-x79-56k-warn.html

It's what I use as well, except I got the GTX 660ti card which is probably the best bang for the buck.

 

[Nej]

Hi!

Seems to be a pretty good build indeed.

So you're saying BMD's recommendations are a bit Overkill?

What kind of performance do you get from your hackintosh ? (realtime or not? from which source and in which software?)

This build would fit my budget way better.

 

[ggeorge]

Hi!

Seems to be a pretty good build indeed.

So you're saying BMD's recommendations are a bit Overkill?

What kind of performance do you get from your hackintosh ? (realtime or not? from which source and in which software?)

This build would fit my budget way better.

My machine (oc'd to 4.2 ghz) pulls about 20K on Geekbench.

I would strongly recommend the 3930k over the 3820 as a CPU, if you go with an x79/2011 build. The 6 cores in the 3930k vs 4 in the 3820 are half the reason to go with the x79/2011.

If you don't have the budget to get that, you are basically going to be better off with a z77/1155 build. It will be just as fast or faster, with just as many cores and you probably aren't going to buying multiple graphics cards, so you won't benefit from extra PCIe lanes as well.

I've done some poking around it looks like for the tasks Da Vinci Resolve does, a 6XX card will perform about the same as a 5XX card. Also it does apparently benefit from more ram on the graphics card, unlike most other tasks.

 

[Nej]

I'm currently calculating the price of different configurations based on Z77 (4 cores) or x79 (6 cores) I'll then decide which is the most effective...

I've done some poking around it looks like for the tasks Da Vinci Resolve does, a 6XX card will perform about the same as a 5XX card. Also it does apparently benefit from more ram on the graphics card, unlike most other tasks.

That's exactly where I was getting at after a bunch of reading and specs comparing, a GTX 660TI 3GB seems to be better bang for the buck than a GTX 580.

 

[ggeorge]

I'm currently calculating the price of different configurations based on Z77 (4 cores) or x79 (6 cores) I'll then decide which is the most effective...

That's exactly where I was getting at after a bunch of reading and specs comparing, a GTX 660TI 3GB seems to be better bang for the buck than a GTX 580.

FWIW, the 6XX cards and the AMD 7XXX cards are the only ones that can take advantage of the PCIe 3.0 capabilities on the IB chips, which do let you get the performance of a x16 PCIe 2.0 slot, out of an x8 PCIe 3.0.

 

[newimaging]

Trying to also build a DaVinci Resolve system.
Any reason you guys don` recommend the

Gigabyte​

GA-X77X-UD5 motherboard from the Socket 2011 Custom Mac Pro Build.
​

I like the option of the Thunderbold, or are there others for that.
Otherwise I`ll go with the recommended ASUS Sabertooth X79
The other option I was looking at is the GA-X79X-UD5 since it takes the 8 Core Processor.

Christian​

 

[Nej]

The two options I'm considering mobo/CPU wise is Asus P9X79 PRO/i7 3930K (or 3820) and Gigabyte GA-Z77MX-D3H TH/i7 3770K (or 2600K)

Two different pricepoint, there's about a 320€ (~400$) difference between a X79/i7 3930K build and a Z77/i7 3770K.

Seeing what BlackMagic just announced at IBC: UltraStudio Mini Monitor http://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/ultrastudio4k/models Thunderbolt is going to be a must have, it's a really cheap and efficient monitor solution!

So is there any x79 based card with native thunderbolt? I have to say that having a MBP with Thunderbolt makes my want my hackintosh to have it too so that I can transfer files from one to the other blazingly fast! Moreover, Thunderbolt based peripherals are getting cheaper so I want to have that option for the future.