Help building ultimate Video Editing Hackintosh

[Mellti5]

This will be my first home build.

I am a professional video/film editor and visual effects artist who is looking to build a top of the line hackintosh. I've always been a Mac person, but I realize I can save a bundle by building a PC and also have the ability to easily upgrade it a few years down the line.

I plan to use Final Cut Pro 7, Avid Media Composer, After Effects, and Nuke. Its for very intense workflow, stuff that my current Macbook pro just can't handle anymore. Cutting extreme HD footage (RED, 2k, 4k possibly), and hardcore compositing in After Effects.

Would love some advice on what kind of build I should consider. My budget is anything under $5,000.

So far I am thinking:
Dual 6-core 3.06GHz processors
One GTX 560 Video card
6x4GB memory
and 1tb system drive (possibly 500gb SSD depending on how much $$ I have left over)

I have no idea where to start with motherboards and their compatibility with Hackintoshs. I'm not even sure if these processors are supported?

Other things to consider are, OpenGL (which programs like After Effects use extensively but I'm not quite sure how that affects my options), E-SATA, Firewire ports, or anything else helpful with video postproduction.

Thanks in advance y'all!

 

[morganb]

This will be my first home build.

I am a professional video/film editor and visual effects artist who is looking to build a top of the line hackintosh. I've always been a Mac person, but I realize I can save a bundle by building a PC and also have the ability to easily upgrade it a few years down the line.

I plan to use Final Cut Pro 7, Avid Media Composer, After Effects, and Nuke. Its for very intense workflow, stuff that my current Macbook pro just can't handle anymore. Cutting extreme HD footage (RED, 2k, 4k possibly), and hardcore compositing in After Effects.

Would love some advice on what kind of build I should consider. My budget is anything under $5,000.

So far I am thinking:
Dual 6-core 3.06GHz processors
One GTX 560 Video card
6x4GB memory
and 1tb system drive (possibly 500gb SSD depending on how much $$ I have left over)

I have no idea where to start with motherboards and their compatibility with Hackintoshs. I'm not even sure if these processors are supported?

Other things to consider are, OpenGL (which programs like After Effects use extensively but I'm not quite sure how that affects my options), E-SATA, Firewire ports, or anything else helpful with video postproduction.

Thanks in advance y'all!

Hi and Welcome.
I found this

viewtopic.php?f=81&t=22660&hilit=supermicro

Let me know how you go.... I might try this for next hack...

Bear in mind that my i7 Sandybridge build with a very conservative OC solidly beats that benchmark however, I may not be seeing the whole picture here and benchmarks don't always mean much in the real world.

My hack (with only a HD6850 in it) cost me just over a grand (AUD). Might want to factor that into your plan and also the fact that there is a new architecture on the horizon.

**added: I just checked out cinebench and my score is about 20% slower than a 3.33 Ghz 8C/16T Xeon.

Cheers and good luck.

 

[jshore]

I'm wondering whether you went ahead and built this. I'm a bit late to the topic.

I recently built a dual xeon hackintosh based on the Asus Z8PE-D12X motherboard with 2 x E5520s. This system is a bit dated as had built the hardware a couple of years ago and used as a linux box. At some point I may upgrade to much faster E56XX processors OR alternatively buy a new mac pro if the next is compelling.

Assuming you have not already gone out and purchased hardware for the build, word of caution: the dual cpu motherboards are not as well supported in the community as there are not many people with dual xeon setups. So be prepared to do *a lot* of work.

If you do chose to do the build and use a Asus Z8PE-D12X motherboard, I can post how I did the build and possibly save you a lot of time. You will need to have a way of writing to a SATA disk from another mac though.

I was not able to do the setup off of USB for this particular motherboard, rather created a installer partition and OS partition on a SATA disk using my mac pro before installing into this machine.