The sluggishness of your build concerns me. Has this problem been resolved in 10.13.2 for you? Especially Final Cut Pro X. How about your Kaby Lake build, how does Final Cut Pro do in that? FYI, I haven't built my system yet, still deciding to go with Kaby Lake or Coffee Lake parts.
Okay, here is what I think about Final Cut Pro X performance, first making the disclaimer that I am no expert in either FCP or Hackintosh stuff. Just basic knowledge, that's all.
When I built my system, I built it for Windows only. I selected newish technology not yet supported by Hackintosh guides.
I tried installing macOS 10.13 but I couldn't get things to work properly, so I abandoned that project.
Recently, Apple started supporting Coffee Lake processors and things seem to work well with my 300-Series motherboard, so I tried again, this time using a 10.13.1 installer.
I got a Gigabyte NVIDIA 1050 2GB video card. The whole install process went smoothly.
The system ran great. It was fast and stable. No complaints — until I installed Final Cut Pro X.
The performance of FCPX was deplorable. Totally Unusable. Playback of clips and timelines, even optimized clips, was horrible. Nothing played back smoothly. Not even 720p clips. Nevermind 1080 or higher.
So I returned that card and tried with another Nvidia 1050, but now with 4GB. There was absolutely no improvement whatsoever.
After further research, I found that it was not a lack of memory in the GPU issue. It was the type of GPU.
FCPX is written to take advantage of hardware acceleration, but specifically from AMD GPUs.
So I went ahead and replaced the NVIDIA card with an AMD and WOW! The performance improvements were immediate.
I was able to playback 4K clips and timelines with absolutely NO sluggishness. Smooth as butter. All with the original 1080 clips with no optimization.
BruceX_Test went from around 150 seconds to 61 seconds on the first try. Then, after further tweaks to the system, eliminating unnecessary kexts and properly setting up the config.plist's Graphics section, It went down to 32 seconds.
Sure, the new AMD card has 8GB. And I'm sure that helps. But everything I read pointed to AMD being the right card to use when running FCPX. No other way around it.
The bonus is that you won't have to deal with the NVIDIA drivers dance. My AMD card was supported natively by Apple, without me having to install any third-party drivers.
So, that's my take, based on my experience with my system. Results for others may be different. I can only speak about my own system and my own experience with it.
Good luck.
