GPU Upgrade VS System Overhaul

[lainemac]

I'm trying to help out a friend whom I built a hackintosh for a few years back. It's for video editing and now 3D modeling.

Current specs:
i7-4790k
32GB ddr3
Titan X(Maxwell)
Gigabyte UD7 TH
500GB Samsung 850evo

Wondering if an AMD card would be a solid upgrade, as the system can't keep up with 4K video edits and what not anymore. They are using the adobe 2018 suite for editing needs.

I'm just wondering if it would be worth it to go with a newer GPU like a Vega 64(since NVIDIA support is pretty bad) or should I just go for a whole new system? I.E. 8700k, 64GB ram, Vega 64, z390 board. What do you guys think? I'm not in the video field so I don't know how well AMD cards are supported in Adobe software.

 

[Adrian B]

Adobe and Apple have really got macOS and Adobe software running very well on mac. While a Vega 64 will give you a lot of potential hardware acceleration, the real issue is starting to become the older Haswell architecture, with much slower DDR3 RAM against what is currently available in 2019.

Doing 4K video well and quickly is a very different proposition to working with 1080P. Z97 hardware is now 5 years old and around this time working with 4K was rare - those that did work with 4K day to day adopted X99 rather than the consumer boards and processors. 500GB SSD can get eaten in a single small project - good job that prices of the larger drives have dropped - NVME offers that fastest speeds.

For productivity, the i9-9900K is worth having over the i7-8700K - the price difference is small in relative terms. 32GB RAM should be considered the minimum, so 64GB likely the sweet spot for now.

 

[Gigamaxx]

I'm trying to help out a friend whom I built a hackintosh for a few years back. It's for video editing and now 3D modeling.

Current specs:
i7-4790k
32GB ddr3
Titan X(Maxwell)
Gigabyte UD7 TH
500GB Samsung 850evo

Wondering if an AMD card would be a solid upgrade, as the system can't keep up with 4K video edits and what not anymore. They are using the adobe 2018 suite for editing needs.

I'm just wondering if it would be worth it to go with a newer GPU like a Vega 64(since NVIDIA support is pretty bad) or should I just go for a whole new system? I.E. 8700k, 64GB ram, Vega 64, z390 board. What do you guys think? I'm not in the video field so I don't know how well AMD cards are supported in Adobe software.

Get a Vega 56-64 and a PCIe to NVME adapter card and put a Samsung 970 (non + ) model NVME for an instant boost in rendering. The NVME with an adapter on a Haswell system will get about 1500 read/write vs 500 for the Sata drive.

If you upgrade later the Vega and NVME drive will still be useable.

 

[lainemac]

Thanks guys! Will I lose any performance going from the Titan X to the Vega 64 in adobe since I'm loosing CUDA support?

 

[Gigamaxx]

Thanks guys! Will I lose any performance going from the Titan X to the Vega 64 in adobe since I'm loosing CUDA support?

Some users report AND cards work better in adobe, others claim Cuda is better. The Vega card even in windows will perform similar to the older Titan in compute functions. Anyways, if you plan on updating to Mojave the Nvidia card won’t work. If adobe eventually requires an update and to use Mojave you won’t have a choice. The Vega is a future proof card for MacOS and it has native drivers so MacOS updates won’t be a problem. It will only run in High Sierra and Mojave though because it is a new card.

 

[lainemac]

Are there any reports of Vega 7 support? I haven't done too much research on that card.

 

[Gigamaxx]

Are there any reports of Vega 7 support? I haven't done too much research on that card.

I have one, we are currently running on 10.14.4 beta to get it to work. The device ID is present in 2 of the 3 essential Kexts, so we edit it into the missing one. Currently the performance is less than the Vega 64 in MacOS, and it has random freezes. Best to wait on this one, maybe even 10.14.5, or possibly the 10.15 beta due in June/July?

 

[lainemac]

Thank you for all the info, everyone! You guys are awesome. The current plan is to go 9900k, 64gb ram, Vega 64 and nvme ssd for boot. I'll probably keep the sata boot drive they have currently as a scratch disk and they also have a 4tb in the machine for more storage, as well as external storage so I think they're good on that front.

 

[lainemac]

Is there an easy way to move programs and plug-ins from the current hack pro to the new one without interfering with kexts and system files? Would time machine work for this? Sorry for the noon questions, not a Mac user myself at the moment.

 

[Gigamaxx]

Is there an easy way to move programs and plug-ins from the current hack pro to the new one without interfering with kexts and system files? Would time machine work for this? Sorry for the noon questions, not a Mac user myself at the moment.

You can actually use disk utility to format the new disk and use restore tab to copy existing working drive to the new one. Then just mount the EFI folders and drag a copy of the working drive EFI to the new drive EFI folder.
Since your using a new system you can use your old drive and make changes to it mainly the EFI folder and Library/Extensions (remove web drivers, then rebuild caches). Then do the above copy instructions. This will give you an exact copy of the original drive and leave you with a nice backup drive.