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First Hackingtosh - newbie checking in!

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Joined
Jul 3, 2014
Messages
8
Motherboard
GA-Z87X-D3H
CPU
i7 4790K 4.0 Ghz
Graphics
Asus Radeon HD 7950
Mac
  1. MacBook Pro
Classic Mac
  1. 0
Mobile Phone
  1. Android
  2. iOS
  3. Other
To start, i'm from the Netherlands and i'm a student/photographer (little bit of video editing).

If my english gets to bad, sorry in advance!

This build should get me thru 4 years of study. It should be on a 1000$ budged and stil future proof.

After watching a few hours of Hackingtosh builds on Youtube and reading this forum i'm going for it :D!

I just want to verify with you guys if this is actually a proper build and that my thoughts about upgrading/expanding in the future are correct!


If you guys could give your opinion/tips or warn me for anything stupid it would be awesome!!
;)




Parts:

CPU: Intel Core i5 4670K

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z87X-D3H (The Ethernet port is working right? I don't want WiFi)

RAM: Crucial Ballistix Sport XT (2x8GB) Leaving 2 slots open on the motherboard for future expansion.

Drive 1: SSD Samsung 840 EVO 250GB

Drive 2: 3 TB, WD Black SATA 6 Gb/s

Drive 3, 4, 5 and 6 for future expansion for a raid setup. Is that possible? to add 4x 3TB drives and set it to raid? What about fusion drives? is this a good idea in raid?

Power supply: Corsair CS550M. Would I need to get a 650 watt just to be sure it wil hold up in future expansion?

Case: a big bad boy ATX. Haven't made a choice yet. What would you do?

FUTURE PART: GPU: GeForce GTX 760 (to expansive right now)

FUTURE PART: RAM: 2x 8GB RAM (Crucial Ballistix Sport XT) And I would like to over-clock to a higher Mhz. Is this ram right for that? Do I need more cooling?

FUTURE PART: CPU COOLER: I want to over-clock thei5 4670K to 4.xGhz to a stable point. I don't know to much about it at this point. Is the Corsair H60 a good choice?

Did I forget something? Possibly some fans? I don't have Bluetooth do I haha ?:|





I hope it makes cense! I would really like to become a Hackintosh guy haha! :lol:

Best regards from the Netherlands :thumbup:

p.s sorry about this same post in the wrong section of this forum! listen to your mom and always read the rules first :rolleyes: :confused:








 

Your parts selection looks fine. Assume you will be using built-in HD4600 graphics for the time being.

GTX760 works OOB so will drop in with minimal fuss later.

You should put the OS and Apps on the Samsung SSD, and use the mechanical HDD's for storage for the best performance.

You could fusion your SSD and a mechanical drive if you needed that much storage for boot. The simpler method is as described above though, as a newbie hackintosher you probably want to keep it simple to begin with.

Raid is possible but not using bios soft-raid. You would need a hardware controller to do real raid. But, you can use the OSX built-in soft-raid if raid really is that important. WD Blacks have decent performance on their own, so I wonder why ? Is your planned video editing really going to demand more than 3Tb on a single unit at any one time ?

Overclocking is relatively simple but as a new hackintosher, you should concentrate on getting your build up and running, stable, and without overclocking to begin with. Once it all works as expected then you can tinker with overclocking.

And yes, make yourself aware of the site rules.

:thumbup:
 
To start, i'm from the Netherlands and i'm a student/photographer (little bit of video editing).

If my english gets to bad, sorry in advance!

This build should get me thru 4 years of study. It should be on a 1000$ budged and stil future proof.

After watching a few hours of Hackingtosh builds on Youtube and reading this forum i'm going for it :D!

I just want to verify with you guys if this is actually a proper build and that my thoughts about upgrading/expanding in the future are correct!


If you guys could give your opinion/tips or warn me for anything stupid it would be awesome!!
;)




Parts:

CPU: Intel Core i5 4670K

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z87X-D3H (The Ethernet port is working right? I don't want WiFi)

RAM: Crucial Ballistix Sport XT (2x8GB) Leaving 2 slots open on the motherboard for future expansion.

Drive 1: SSD Samsung 840 EVO 250GB

Drive 2: 3 TB, WD Black SATA 6 Gb/s

Drive 3, 4, 5 and 6 for future expansion for a raid setup. Is that possible? to add 4x 3TB drives and set it to raid? What about fusion drives? is this a good idea in raid?

Power supply: Corsair CS550M. Would I need to get a 650 watt just to be sure it wil hold up in future expansion?

Case: a big bad boy ATX. Haven't made a choice yet. What would you do?

FUTURE PART: GPU: GeForce GTX 760 (to expansive right now)

FUTURE PART: RAM: 2x 8GB RAM (Crucial Ballistix Sport XT) And I would like to over-clock to a higher Mhz. Is this ram right for that? Do I need more cooling?

FUTURE PART: CPU COOLER: I want to over-clock thei5 4670K to 4.xGhz to a stable point. I don't know to much about it at this point. Is the Corsair H60 a good choice?

Did I forget something? Possibly some fans? I don't have Bluetooth do I haha ?:|





I hope it makes cense! I would really like to become a Hackintosh guy haha! :lol:

Best regards from the Netherlands :thumbup:

p.s sorry about this same post in the wrong section of this forum! listen to your mom and always read the rules first :rolleyes: :confused:









So, your parts look okay. Ram is not over clocked anymore, only the processor, you want a K series, like a i7-4770K for over clocking. K means you can set the cpu multipliers, the nonK parts are locked by Intel. Ram kits are sold as a system, what I mean by that is when you buy a dual channel kit with 2 sticks of ram rated for say 1600, and you later add another kit rated at 1600, because you are combining them, the expectation is that they will work reliably at 1333. DDR3 has been in production so long that you likely will luck out and still be able to run them at 1600.

You do not need to use bluetooth, and will save your self some work by not using it. The Apple interface I think is better using the gestures on the trackpad or mouse. But that completely optional. I use a K750 keyboard that comes with it's own usb dongle, best apple keyboard there is, even for a real apple. This is because it's wireless, has the number pad, never needs batteries, and is still wireless. For a mackintosh it is even better because it has superior range to the thumb bluetooth adapters, requires no hacking, and works in the motherboard bios.

Don't bother buying a motherboard with built in WiFi, it won't work anyway.

Do yourself a favor, if you are not going to use HDMI audio, and be aware it can be a lot of work to use HDMI audio, buy a USB audio device to drive your speakers/headphones. You are looking for something with USB audio profile 1.1 or 2.0 This is different from USB 1.1 or 2.0 The profiles are standards that usb devices can conform to that are supported natively by apple. It's why a generic usb keyboard just works. Using the motherboard audio is the biggest source of trouble on a Hackintosh. Just us a 10 dollar usb dongle and turn the audio off on the motherboard.

The last 2 things you should be warned about are Fusion drives, and raids! Fusion drives are really cool, and not for the new Hackintosher, don't do it! Besides, 256 should hold all of your apps and the operating system just fine, you can move your iTunes library over the the Spinning drive after setup. You can also google to find out how to make file system links in OSX, it's easy. As long as you use Apples software raid in Disk Utility, and only use it to hold data, don't boot from it, it's really easy and reliable. I've had no errors in 2 years using my raid 0 through multiple OSX installs.

Motherboard raid is useless in OSX, because it uses the cpu to do the work, faking it. No drivers in OSX for motherboard raid.

The reason Fusion and bootable raids are bad for Hackintoses is because the boot loader files are on partitions that can't be accessed through the boot process so Chimera can't fake the Apple nonvolatile ram properly, and you have to manually access these areas just to setup up the boot loaders. It would not be too bad if you are highly technical, but I am, and it's not worth the effort. This relates to iMessage functionality. With the speed of SSD's, Raids just aren't justified as system drives. I like the idea of fusion drive, but it really caters to people who don't want to know or deal with the technology. They just want it to work when they click the mouse, and they are best served by buying a real Apple computer. Hackintoshers can decide which files need to be on which drive themselves. Besides, big SSD's just don't cost what they did even a year ago.

As far as cases, I am a fan of the Silverstone FT03 for a small build, and the Silverstone Raven RV03 for a full size system. It is SO NICE not crawling under my desk and reaching around to connect something. Having the motherboard rotated helps a lot with cooling, and I use a fan controller to slow the case fans down in the bottom of my RV03 to a whisper. The filters keep the insides nice and clean, and the smallish window, and design of the case make it look really neat and tidy inside. I use a water cooler, and have the radiator mounted to the top fan mount. Mounting hard drives sucks though, so not good if you are constantly moving hard drive-in and out, but then you shouldn't be doing raid. The RV03 can hold a absurdly powerful system, in a surprisingly small chassis.
 
Guys you are amazing! The tips help a lot.

The case (RV03) you are suggesting is awesome! A bit expensive but probably worth it.

After some googeling i'm not going to overclock my ram anymore. I get it. The benefits are not that big anyway.

After some thought i think i can better spend some more money on a i7 4770K than taking the risk of overclocking. I wil first get it up and running and see from there. The water cooling I wil take anyway. I like it quiet.

The K750 keyboard looks perfect! I'm thinking about an apple trackpad as wel because i have been working on my MacBook Pro for over 3 years now and cant imagine working without it.

HDMI audio won't be necessary. I only have one screen:
Iiyama ProLite XB2779QS. (WQHD) connected by DVI.

The USB audio device is a great tip. I thought I dit quite some research but i didn't know this.

I wil stay away from raid and fusion drives now. Great explanation! I will just use my 250GB SSD as boot disk. When I need to work on big files and I would need them fast I wil just move them between the drives internally. The 3TB hdd will just be for archiving, movies etc. I have a lot of pictures in my archive on an old 4TB NAS. Its incredibly slow and I want all the files on a fast system. The motherboard has (only) 6 sata ports and I want a lot more storage in the future.

I'm thinking about moving all the files from my NAS on portable HDD's and take out the 2x 2TB HDD's drom my old NAS and put them in the Hackingtosh.

I'm feeling a lot better about this build now i have some answers! So thanks a lot. If i'm still missing something, please let me know!

I'm going to make a little video about the build as wel! Looking forward to edit it in my Hackingtosh.
 
Guys you are amazing! The tips help a lot.

The case (RV03) you are suggesting is awesome! A bit expensive but probably worth it.

After some googeling i'm not going to overclock my ram anymore. I get it. The benefits are not that big anyway.

After some thought i think i can better spend some more money on a i7 4770K than taking the risk of overclocking. I wil first get it up and running and see from there. The water cooling I wil take anyway. I like it quiet.

The K750 keyboard looks perfect! I'm thinking about an apple trackpad as wel because i have been working on my MacBook Pro for over 3 years now and cant imagine working without it.

HDMI audio won't be necessary. I only have one screen:
Iiyama ProLite XB2779QS. (WQHD) connected by DVI.

The USB audio device is a great tip. I thought I dit quite some research but i didn't know this.

I wil stay away from raid and fusion drives now. Great explanation! I will just use my 250GB SSD as boot disk. When I need to work on big files and I would need them fast I wil just move them between the drives internally. The 3TB hdd will just be for archiving, movies etc. I have a lot of pictures in my archive on an old 4TB NAS. Its incredibly slow and I want all the files on a fast system. The motherboard has (only) 6 sata ports and I want a lot more storage in the future.

I'm thinking about moving all the files from my NAS on portable HDD's and take out the 2x 2TB HDD's drom my old NAS and put them in the Hackingtosh.

I'm feeling a lot better about this build now i have some answers! So thanks a lot. If i'm still missing something, please let me know!

I'm going to make a little video about the build as wel! Looking forward to edit it in my Hackingtosh.

Overclcoking has a certain value if you are strictly limited by budget, and is sometimes done 'just because its possible', but the majority of todays desktop chips dont really NEED to be overclocked as they will normally provide perfectly acceptable performance for the majority of tasks anyway. Sometimes people think it is necessary to achieve a powerful system, when in reality its not the case.

And whats the point in potentially reducing the life of your processor for the sake of shaving a couple of seconds from processing time for a given task, or trying to get record numbers in a benchmarking test that has little or no value in the real world.

The K750 is a good choice for a keyboard. It is comfortable to use and works 100% in the bios setup and also the Chimera boot screen, which you dont always get with bluetooth.

I agree with Shiitaki's sentiment except for one minor point. The audio on your chosen motherboard is the ALC892 which is fully supported through Multibeast, whether or not you are using HDMI audio. It gets difficult when people dont fully read or understand the instructions to enable it, but if you take your time and go one step at a time, it should work just fine. And if you dont like the way it works, you can always opt for a usb audio dongle at a later stage. Our resident audio expert Toleda has a great knowledge of these things and has written many very detailed guides to help you along the way.
 
Thanx for all the great tips.

Next week i am going to order the stuff. First i am going to build it inside a cheap case because I am thinking of building my own wooden case.

Then i found a great thing for in a 5.25 inch slot! A "media dashboard" (<link). Connected by a PCI/E connector. On the box it has a apple compatibility logo so I am guessing it would work!

Dot you guys know if it works, could work or that this is just not compatible at all?

This would be awesome :headbang:
 
Thanx for all the great tips.

Next week i am going to order the stuff. First i am going to build it inside a cheap case because I am thinking of building my own wooden case.

Then i found a great thing for in a 5.25 inch slot! A "media dashboard" (<link). Connected by a PCI/E connector. On the box it has a apple compatibility logo so I am guessing it would work!

Dot you guys know if it works, could work or that this is just not compatible at all?

This would be awesome :headbang:

It should do, at least in theory, but there are no guarantees.
 
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