Pros & Cons: z77 vs. x79 Platforms

[omega8870]

Hello fellow Hackintosh'ers!

I have been looking around and reading about Hackintosh's for about 7 months or so. I am a digital audio producer, gamer, hardcore user. Fortunately, I have started a business in the past months and I finally have some money and time to spend working on a new build. Its seriously time to upgrade beyond this 3-year-old MacBook Pro (3.06 ghz Core 2 Duo, remember when those were awesome? LOL!) to a dedicated desktop.

There are two builds I have in mind, here are some of the common components:

1x/2x Geforce GTX690
16/32gb Corsair Vengeance 1600+mhz DDR3 ram
4x Intel 520-Series SSD 180gb
2x+ Seagate Barracuda 3TB
1x PCIE TI chipset based firewire card (to run my external firewire audio interfaces)
1x Corsair AX1200 PSU

Bunch of monitors I haven't decided upon. (3x 1440p would be awesome!)

Cooling is to be done by a custom watercooling loop.

The builds differ specifically on their platform:
Intel i7-3770k with Asus Maximus V Extreme LGA1155
or
Intel i7-3930k with Asus Rampage IV Extreme LGA2011

From what I understand, the z77 platform seems to work more 'natively' with OSX. Whereas the x79 is much less supported, the lack of power management features, speed-step, sleep, etc. are most noted.

I wanted to open a new thread inviting current hackintosh users who have any experience with these different platforms to discuss the advantages/disadvantages concerning these recent platforms.

How does the lack of power management features effect the use of your computer? Is there an impact on heat, stability, or compromises in daily workflow/usage?

This build will be heavily overclocked. How does a hackintosh build respond to overclocking? Are there any additional limitations?

As owners of such computers, what are some specifically unique characteristics that one platform provides, if any?


Thanks for your time. I have spent a lot of time just reading up on the various builds here on the forums and the general evolution of the Hackintosh platform and community. Thanks for creating such an amazing resource. With your help, I can build this new machine! And with that, I can begin to contribute back to the community.

Thanks!

 

[ggeorge]

Hello fellow Hackintosh'ers!

Hi.

1x/2x Geforce GTX690

The GTX 690 will only function as two 680s.

SLI does not work under OSX and probably never will. So unless you plan on doing a LOT of gaming under windows, it's probably not worth it to get even one 690, never mind two. Two 690s even for gaming under windows are going to be vast overkill except for games that will support a triple 2560x1440 monitor set up, which is not a large number. The "surround" gaming feature doesn't completely over come that either. In my test with WoW, it really only effectively doubled the real "width" of what was displayed, the sides were distorted and stretched.

The 6XX cards are somewhat of a mixed bag for GPU acceleration if that is what you are looking at them for. The 5XX cards can be dramatically better for applications that use double precision math (3d work mostly). I always recommend checking the support forums for the software you will use to see what they recommend.

16/32gb Corsair Vengeance 1600+mhz DDR3 ram

Works fine, but the heatsinks on them are stupidly large and will interfere with most of the top end air cooler. You are using water cooling so that's probably not nearly as much of an issue.

4x Intel 520-Series SSD 180gb

I would look at the Crucial M4, Samsung 830 or 840 pro or possibly Plextor. Faster and cheaper. That is also a sandforce based SSD, they do very poorly with highly compressed data like video. I would probably go with 256gb drives given the price drops.

1x Corsair AX1200 PSU

Vast overkill if you don't get the dual 690s. 850w is plenty for a single 690 or 680/580 combo.

Bunch of monitors I haven't decided upon. (3x 1440p would be awesome!)

I assume these are 2560x1440? Auria has a very decent IPS 27" at the rez for just $400 at MicroCenter (if you have one near by). You can get some other similar Korean models off of ebay.

Cooling is to be done by a custom watercooling loop.

The main limitation to one of these custom watercooling loops, is that they do seriously reduce your flexibility in terms of swapping hardware in and out or even moving them around. Watercooling, depending on exactly what you get, may also be no quieter or even louder than good air cooling. It does work better with an heavily overclocked system, but that has serious limitations, especially with the Ivy Bridge chips (google that + thermal paste) and tends to only provide a marginal improvement.

The builds differ specifically on their platform:
Intel i7-3770k with Asus Maximus V Extreme LGA1155
or
Intel i7-3930k with Asus Rampage IV Extreme LGA2011

I actually have both of these setups (well a 3570k on the MVE, though I haven't tried hackintoshing it yet). The RIVE does work very well. Are you filling up all the ram slots on both machines (I assume the 16 gb is the MVE and the 32gb the RIVE)?

I used MK500's build in the golden builds thread as the basis for my RIVE. I think a MVE should be largely similar though.

http://www.tonymacx86.com/golden-bu...page-iv-extreme-core-i7-3930k-successful.html

From what I understand, the z77 platform seems to work more 'natively' with OSX. Whereas the x79 is much less supported, the lack of power management features, speed-step, sleep, etc. are most noted.

I wanted to open a new thread inviting current hackintosh users who have any experience with these different platforms to discuss the advantages/disadvantages concerning these recent platforms.

How does the lack of power management features effect the use of your computer? Is there an impact on heat, stability, or compromises in daily workflow/usage?

I just shut down my RIVE when not in use and power saving modes are less of a factor on a machine which is in use rather than sitting idle for long stretches of time.

The big advantages to the RIVE is basically the 6 core chip (assuming you will be doing highly threaded tasks, which gaming is generally not) and the 64gb max ram. If you were going to use an x8 raid card with the RIVE machine and/or some other PCIe cards in addition to the twin 690s, that would do better than a MVE due to the 40 PCIe lanes. With just the graphics cards it would pretty much be a wash, the PCIe 3.0 on the MVE pretty much negates the advantage of the greater number of PCIe 2.0 lanes on the RIVE. The RIVE does in theory support PCIe 3.0, but not yet, that would really only factor into things if you were going with 4 x 680s and there is really a negligible advantage to an x8 slot vs an x16. Though with a dual 690/quad 680, you would probably be hitting processor limitations on a Socket 1155, but maybe not.

This build will be heavily overclocked. How does a hackintosh build respond to overclocking? Are there any additional limitations?

The limitations are basically the same as they are on windows, with the caveat that there simply isn't the overclocking software that is available on the windows side, for use under OSX. But with boards like this they are designed primarily to be overclocked from the bios screens AFAIK. IANAEOCer.

As owners of such computers, what are some specifically unique characteristics that one platform provides, if any?

See above. I may try to hackintosh my MVE tonight or maybe next week. I haven't seen any hackintosh builds for the MVE, FYI.

Thanks for your time. I have spent a lot of time just reading up on the various builds here on the forums and the general evolution of the Hackintosh platform and community. Thanks for creating such an amazing resource. With your help, I can build this new machine! And with that, I can begin to contribute back to the community.

Thanks!

YW