My first Hackintosh build - What do you think?

[kindasketch]

This system will be used mainly for Video Editing. Any suggestions or advice would be much appreciated. Should I get a liquid cooling system? I don't think I'll be doing any overclocking right away..

I originally wanted to get a Thunderbolt Motherboard because I have the newer Retina Macbook Pro with a 512GB SSD. I do use Thunderbolt for my external Seagate Hard Drives. But I heard Thunderbolt Motherboards for the Hackintosh are difficult to setup.

Setup:

Intel Core i7-3770K Ivy Bridge 3.5 GHz Processor
Corsair Special Edition White Graphite Series 600t
Corsair Enthusiast Series TX750 Power Supply
Corsair Vengeance 32GB (4 x 8GB) DDR3 1600 Desktop Memory
EVGA SuperClocked GeForece GTX 660 Ti 2GB Video Card
GIGABYTE GA-277X-UD5H Motherboard
2x Seagate Barracuda 2TB 7200 RPM Internal Hard Drives
Samsung 840 Series 250GB Internal SSD
2x Samsung LED displays
Apple Magic Trackpad
Apple Wireless Keyboard
Apple Magic Mouse
Clique Dock

 

[ashman70]

If you are not going to do any over clocking then don't bother with liquid cooling, even then, there are air coolers that can handle over clocking just fine.

 

[StickyS]

If you are not going to do any over clocking then don't bother with liquid cooling, even then, there are air coolers that can handle over clocking just fine.

Noctua NH-D14 is equivalent to the H100i with upgraded fans in terms of performance and acoustics. It is NOT compatible with your ram, however...Corsair's new H90 looks to be a really nice closed loop water cooler, the pump is better and quieter, and the read is thinner yet performs almost the same as the H80i. Get a H90 w/two Noctua NF-F12's, if you don't care about the color of the fans.

 

[kaithefinn]

Hi kindasketch,

you choose very well your system, very good and quick components !

SSD: please don´t forget that there are two series of Samsung 840 drives: PRO is very quick, BASIC is slower than the 830 series drives

My Motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-B75M-D3H and it took also four attempts to set it up correctly. From this motherboard it is said it is very easy to setup, I can confirm that now. But if you buy a motherboard that is difficult to setup, than you have to look for any information here on the webpages to get any information how the problems that you even did´t think about were solved, especially motherboard-/graphics cards combinations can be very painful. You should do this before buying ... returning a configured - but not working - hackintosh-system is - so I think - more difficult than giving back a not working Windows system. The informations you get here from these webpages are outstanding good ...
If it is your first build, I would take that into consideration. Also please start to learn and to get an idea about patching a dsdt.aml-file with the dsdt-editor - without that knowledge I couldn´t succeed getting HDMI-sound over my HD4000-graphics card - just a little example. And that was easy, because all of the neded patches were already done, I needed only to implement these.
If you have no experience I would start with an easy thing, the Gigabyte GA-B75M-D3H motherboard is also very cheap and everything neccessary for a desktop is inside and it can be sold later easily if you want to upgrade to a more complicate or powerful system. But for learning and getting in contact with the whole hackintosh-stuff it is a very good starter motherboard. And less frustrating, also very good for further motivation, when you see positive results ...

Good luck and best regards,
kaithefinn