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Mac Pro Hackintosh advice needed

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I use Logic and Ableton as well. No way you are ever going to need dual XEONs for a VST or any plug-in. Or even one XEON. I can understand that maybe you have had a slow computer, but I can't see what would require all that power.

This is one of those situations where it really comes down to what you're making, if you're just bringing in recorded stems from say, a rock band recording then you certainly don't need a lot of CPU.

But in my current project I've only got about 30 tracks but a number of instrument racks. One instrument rack with two instances of alchemy & one instance of Kontakt, eq'd, compressed & verbed is using 40% of my CPU (q6600). Add an instance of Zebra2 with oscillators set to quad, another 10% - Virus TI with 3 input audio tracks for individual processing of its 3 audio outs, another 20%, ARC2, another 7% - try to use Reflektor on a send, another 30% and I'm maxed. And this isn't even taking into account the effects chains that are built or Waves plugins..

A lot of time is spent Freezing & bouncing & it can really drive me nuts.
 
Yikes, so this is a situation where I am at the cusp of a change with the new Mac Pros, sigh.. I am starting to think that the 3770K route is the best option & I use the money I save to get a quad core uad (dsp) instead of the dual core & a few more uad plug-ins.

I am definitely glad I asked this Forum for help & I appreciate everyone's answers so much, thank you!!
 
This is one of those situations where it really comes down to what you're making, if you're just bringing in recorded stems from say, a rock band recording then you certainly don't need a lot of CPU.

But in my current project I've only got about 30 tracks but a number of instrument racks. One instrument rack with two instances of alchemy & one instance of Kontakt, eq'd, compressed & verbed is using 40% of my CPU (q6600). Add an instance of Zebra2 with oscillators set to quad, another 10% - Virus TI with 3 input audio tracks for individual processing of its 3 audio outs, another 20%, ARC2, another 7% - try to use Reflektor on a send, another 30% and I'm maxed. And this isn't even taking into account the effects chains that are built or Waves plugins..

A lot of time is spent Freezing & bouncing & it can really drive me nuts.

The Q6600 is at best 30% and at worst 27% of the processing power of the 3770K:
Screen shot 2013-01-11 at 10.30.24 AM.png

Here is the 3770K without overclock:
Screen shot 2013-01-11 at 10.30.56 AM.png

3770K with overclock (I know that you are not into overclocking, but just for reference sake):
Screen shot 2013-01-11 at 10.31.41 AM.png

You can check out these charts at:
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html
 
This is wonderful information, thank you.

I might try and overclock a little bit as I am getting a Corsair Hydra cooler. This does seem a bit more promising now though. 3 times would certainly allow me to get a lot further without having to bounce down as much, that would really be nice!!
 
For my line of work I do not need so much power (graphic design, DTP and pre-print prod), so I choose to make a hack with 1155 Xeon E3v2 + ECC ram.

Power is similar than high-end 27" iMac (quad-core 3.3/3.7 GHz), but with Xeon+ECC (MacPro) reliability.
I use sleep (no problem at all for sleep/wake) and speedstep (limited, 7 PStates including turbo), rig is rock-stable, no KP, crashes or any problem.

It is way cheaper than a genuine MacPro, performance is sufficient for my work but YMMV.

Depends also if you are in a hurry: MacPro should be revamped later this year, so new HackPros will be supported.


Hey Francis, I have the same E3 1230v2 + GTX660ti on GA-Z77M.

What did you do to get powermanagement working?

I have not been able to get wake/sleep working ever. Something to do with SSDT/DSDT?

Any help would be appreciated
 
Hey Francis, I have the same E3 1230v2 + GTX660ti on GA-Z77M.

What did you do to get powermanagement working?

I have not been able to get wake/sleep working ever. Something to do with SSDT/DSDT?

Any help would be appreciated

I did my own DSDT edits "by hand" on dumped ACPI tables.
I make the SSDT with Pike ssdtPRGen script (kudo RevoGirl).
I use latest Chameleon and Kozlek latest FakeSMC

As I use an Asus board (description in my sig) I cannot really help you with our configuration, I do not have any Gigabyte board.
 
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