First Hackintosh Build

[gsteiner]

Hello everyone!

Getting ready to build my first Hackintosh. Planning on going the easy route and using only equipment from the recommended list on this site. I have a few questions I was hoping people could answer regarding my choice. I have selected the following motherboard because I needed a minimum of 2 PCI (PCI-X) slots to accommodate my ProTools HD PCI-X cards:

GIGABYTE GA-Z77-DS3H LGA 1155 Intel Z77 HDMI SATA 6Gb-s USB 3.0 ATX Intel

My questions are as follows:

1. I have seen a thread stating that you do not need a custom DSDT file for this motherboard. I am interpreting that to mean that I could use the "easybeast" option when setting up the system. Am I interpreting that correctly?

2. I have seen a few people reference that the Ethernet wasn't working. I do need to be able to connect to my network with this machine, so can anyone confirm whether it is possible to get the Ethernet working on this motherboard, or if there is a PCIe Ethernet card which would work instead? I prefer to not get involved with a wireless unit on this computer.

3. Performance related: I noticed that all of the recommended motherboards in the list are SINGLE CPU boards. OF course, all of my Mac's are DUAL CPU computers... Am I going to be noticing a major performance hit on this machine by only having a single cpu, or is there technology in these motherboards that gives a comparable performance to apple's dual CPU design? I know that I'm not using anywhere near the processing power of my Mac systems, but I would hate to spent $1,000 on parts only to find that the computer was painfully slow compared to my actual Mac machines.

4. Finally, does anyone know of another Hackintosh compatible motherboard which offers 3 PCI-X slots? I would never need more than three, and right now I only will need 2, but if there was an option with 3 slots it might be worth considering for future expansion.

Thanks everyone. Looking forward to any info or ideas anyone has on the subject!

Best,

Greg Steiner
Producer

 

[nobodynose]

Hello everyone!

Getting ready to build my first Hackintosh. Planning on going the easy route and using only equipment from the recommended list on this site. I have a few questions I was hoping people could answer regarding my choice. I have selected the following motherboard because I needed a minimum of 2 PCI (PCI-X) slots to accommodate my ProTools HD PCI-X cards:

GIGABYTE GA-Z77-DS3H LGA 1155 Intel Z77 HDMI SATA 6Gb-s USB 3.0 ATX Intel

My questions are as follows:

1. I have seen a thread stating that you do not need a custom DSDT file for this motherboard. I am interpreting that to mean that I could use the "easybeast" option when setting up the system. Am I interpreting that correctly?

No, I you would most likely use the UserDSDT option, but without supplying a DSDT file.

2. I have seen a few people reference that the Ethernet wasn't working. I do need to be able to connect to my network with this machine, so can anyone confirm whether it is possible to get the Ethernet working on this motherboard, or if there is a PCIe Ethernet card which would work instead? I prefer to not get involved with a wireless unit on this computer.

I don't know about getting the on board ethernet working, but if you can't there are quite a few PCIe cards that will work. An inexpensive option (which I'm using myself) is the Rosewill RC-401-EX (Yukon chipset), which works OOB.

3. Performance related: I noticed that all of the recommended motherboards in the list are SINGLE CPU boards. OF course, all of my Mac's are DUAL CPU computers... Am I going to be noticing a major performance hit on this machine by only having a single cpu, or is there technology in these motherboards that gives a comparable performance to apple's dual CPU design? I know that I'm not using anywhere near the processing power of my Mac systems, but I would hate to spent $1,000 on parts only to find that the computer was painfully slow compared to my actual Mac machines.

They're single CPU, but depending on the CPU you buy you get 2 or 4 cores on that CPU, and each core usually has 2 execution threads, so it works as if you have up to 8 CPUs (again depending on which CPU you choose, and depending on how well your software implements multi-threading).

4. Finally, does anyone know of another Hackintosh compatible motherboard which offers 3 PCI-X slots? I would never need more than three, and right now I only will need 2, but if there was an option with 3 slots it might be worth considering for future expansion.

Can't help you on this one.

 

[DBP]

3. Performance related: I noticed that all of the recommended motherboards in the list are SINGLE CPU boards. OF course, all of my Mac's are DUAL CPU computers... Am I going to be noticing a major performance hit on this machine by only having a single cpu, or is there technology in these motherboards that gives a comparable performance to apple's dual CPU design? I know that I'm not using anywhere near the processing power of my Mac systems, but I would hate to spent $1,000 on parts only to find that the computer was painfully slow compared to my actual Mac machines.

As nobodynose mentioned, it's single-socket but each socketed chip will have 2 or 4 cores. The only Macs with two sockets are the Mac Pros. There are a few motherboards not on the recommended list that have two Socket-2011 sockets and can take two 8-core Xeon processors. But the price of those goes up a lot, and there may be some more "adventure" in the configuration (look around, there'll be info about builds like this).

For reference, the current top-of-the-line iMac uses a 3.4 GHz quad-core i7 processor. This is the i7-3770. The i7-3770K which is popular as a top-end processor here is the 3.5 GHz version of this (and which is unlocked so some people over-clock it further). So you can consider the processing power of that iMac as a baseline.

 

[JorEL]

Hi, did you succesfully built your customac to run ProTools PCIX into an Intel machine? I'm looking forward to do the same hence I'm stuck with my G5 dual 2.5 and I want to upgrade my software. I thought about the Virtuavia ATX box but I read it limits the accel cards performance.

Let us know!

Thanks!