Buy a Comet Lake build or be crazy and go for Alder Lake?

[Icaro82]

Hi everyone,

A short question here. I hope it doen't bother you ...

I'm a proud owner of a Hackintosh Xeon 5675 with Big Sur running great. Although it was a great companion all these years, I want to change and update my build. I thought about buying a z490 board with 10th Gen Intel, but I'm really mad because the price is still very high despite the time. And now I read the amazing thread Z690 Chipset and Alder Lake CPUs and I have many doubts about what to do. What to choose? Maximum compatibility of the 10th generation or the breakthrough of the 12th generation?

This is an example of the small price difference between these two options:

Intel 10600k
Asus Prime z490-A (I bought it from Amazon Warehouse second hand) (I can return it)
Corsair 32 GB Vengeance Pro 3200
Price: € 485 (approx.)

Intel 12600k
Asus Prime z690-P D4 (I think it's the board @Middleman is using)
Corsair 32 GB Vengeance Pro 3200
Price: € 625 (approx.)

Less than € 150 difference (and without second-hand components on the second option)!!!

A few notes about me: I'm not afraid to play with Opencore and settings. It's kind of fun (when it starts to work haha). I want my build to work on graphic design (Photoshop, illustrator and sometimes After Effect) and ocassional playing videogames on Windows.

 

[trs96]

I want my build to work on graphic design (Photoshop, illustrator and sometimes After Effect)

The Z690 based hackintosh is still in the very early R & D stages. The resident "mad scientists" are working feverishly to get their new systems up and running. Yes, it is exciting but it's not for everyone in this community.

In my personal opinion it's still much too early to be using either Monterey or Z690 for a build you rely upon to get work done, especially with Adobe CS. I'm sure you know how they (adobe) lag behind in their support for the latest macOS version. The good news is that it looks like Catalina and Big Sur will run on a Z690 build. Even then, I would go with a supported Z490 build now and then upgrade in a year if that Z490 doesn't get the job done in relation to your workflow. In that time there will be User Builds and a few Golden Builds you can emulate. Buy the same hardware used in one of those that looks the best for running Adobe apps.

It does also look like any P / E core 12th gen CPU must either disable E cores or at least hyperthreading so that's another negative when you go with Z690. I'm sure you've been happy with the stability and reliability of your GA-EX58-US3R board, legendary for their hackintosh longevity. Z690 is the latest bleeding edge chipset so if you make the leap don't expect the same kind of results that you had with EX58 in the past. You'd be going with a CPU and Chipset that don't have native support from Apple.

 

[Jamesbond007]

Hi everyone,

A short question here. I hope it doen't bother you ...

I'm a proud owner of a Hackintosh Xeon 5675 with Big Sur running great. Although it was a great companion all these years, I want to change and update my build. I thought about buying a z490 board with 10th Gen Intel, but I'm really mad because the price is still very high despite the time. And now I read the amazing thread Z690 Chipset and Alder Lake CPUs and I have many doubts about what to do. What to choose? Maximum compatibility of the 10th generation or the breakthrough of the 12th generation?

This is an example of the small price difference between these two options:

Intel 10600k
Asus Prime z490-A (I bought it from Amazon Warehouse second hand) (I can return it)
Corsair 32 GB Vengeance Pro 3200
Price: € 485 (approx.)

Intel 12600k
Asus Prime z690-P D4 (I think it's the board @Middleman is using)
Corsair 32 GB Vengeance Pro 3200
Price: € 625 (approx.)

Less than € 150 difference (and without second-hand components on the second option)!!!

A few notes about me: I'm not afraid to play with Opencore and settings. It's kind of fun (when it starts to work haha). I want my build to work on graphic design (Photoshop, illustrator and sometimes After Effect) and occasional playing video games on Windows.

Alder Lake is not, and will not be, supported on MacOS due to the Apple Silicon transition. Comet Lake (10th generation) is the last Intel platform supported on MacOS.

You may be able to get MacOS (Big Sur / Monterey) running on an Alder Lake system, but there will almost certainly be issues and application incompatibilities, and when those occurs there may be no fixes available. Future MacOS versions may not even work correctly and you may not be able to upgrade.

Do you really want to take such risks when you know that Alder Lake will never be supported, especially if you want your build to work correctly with graphics applications like Photoshop and Illustrator?

It is your decision, but if I were you and depended on the new build for work I would certainly choose a Comet Lake system for maximum compatibility.

 

[Icaro82]

Thank you very much!!!

I know that the logical option is to go for Comet Lake but I was angered by the little price difference between having a system of two previous generations to the last one (which is much more powerful). I need to keep a cool head and think that what I want is stability and Mac OS updates for at least 2 or 3 years.

Thanks again!

 

[Middleman]

I know your question was directed to me earlier, but I'd have to agree with the two gentlemen's views above.
Alder Lake is definitely at the very early stages of macOS testing at the moment, and we don't really know what the long term effects of it are. Some of us are already thinking ahead there could be some potential issues with Alder Lake (likely DRM).

As it goes we still don't know the full picture as we are still testing out a lot of the functionalities on Alder Lake. One of the biggest (for me at least) will be Adobe Photoshop compatibility and see whether it runs Photoshop smoothly via AVX-512. I seriously do not know what it will be like, but I'm hoping (and expecting) that it should be okay. Other areas will be USB/Thunderbolt connectivity, wireless/BT/networking and backwards compatibility with older macOS and Windows softwares. These all will need to be tested for us to finally say whether Alder Lake is a good platform (or not).

Aside from the speed boost, I could say there is one caveat by moving to Alder Lake and that is, if you do go for it, you would have all of the latest tech upgrades available to you, namely, DDR5, PCIe 5.0 and Thunderbolt 4 - effectively future-proofing your system for a many few years at least. For Comet Lake you can however get PCIe 4.0 on Z490 board via a Rocket Lake chip upgrade - that would be the only upgrade you could make to the system aside from storage, GPU and RAM.

 

[Icaro82]

I know your question was directed to me earlier

No problem. That thread wasn't the right place to ask that question either. I was carried away by emotion. Although I will be following the thread and supporting all of you in the adventure that you are with these new CPUs.

 

[Middleman]

No problem. That thread wasn't the right place to ask that question either. I was carried away by emotion. Although I will be following the thread and supporting all of you in the adventure that you are with these new CPUs.

Thank you, and you too, do let us know how you get on with your new build!