Teaching an old Hackintosh new tricks...

[apostolosn]

I have a Hackintosh that's six years old going on seven. It has a Gigabyte motherboard, a 2.7 GHz i7 in it, 12 GB of DDR3 RAM and and Nvidia card with 896 MB of VRAM. I know, it sounds like a relic, but it still runs and I can do Photoshop in it. I can't do 4k video, so I've already upgraded to a new machine for my 4k video work. But I'd like to see if I can extend this machine's life a bit. One of the problems I constantly have is that when I surf the net, it tends to stutter a lot on video, and I'm wondering if that's due to the old graphics card. So, what would be a good way to upgrade/refresh this machine and extend its life a bit. I was thinking maybe putting an SSD (it has all spin drives in it) as the boot drive, a newer/faster graphics card, and maybe a bit more Ram. I would like to spend around $300 or so for the upgrade if I can. You can get a 500 GB SSD for about $130-140. Any suggestions about a card and RAM? How do I find how much RAM this motherboard supports (it has six slots)?

 

[trs96]

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[juiseman]

I have a Hackintosh that's six years old going on seven. It has a Gigabyte motherboard, a 2.7 GHz i7 in it, 12 GB of DDR3 RAM and and Nvidia card with 896 MB of VRAM. I know, it sounds like a relic, but it still runs and I can do Photoshop in it. I can't do 4k video, so I've already upgraded to a new machine for my 4k video work. But I'd like to see if I can extend this machine's life a bit. One of the problems I constantly have is that when I surf the net, it tends to stutter a lot on video, and I'm wondering if that's due to the old graphics card. So, what would be a good way to upgrade/refresh this machine and extend its life a bit. I was thinking maybe putting an SSD (it has all spin drives in it) as the boot drive, a newer/faster graphics card, and maybe a bit more Ram. I would like to spend around $300 or so for the upgrade if I can. You can get a 500 GB SSD for about $130-140. Any suggestions about a card and RAM? How do I find how much RAM this motherboard supports (it has six slots)?

Can you run a geek bench 4 64-bit on it? or is it not working? That would give you an idea of how fast the chip is by today's standards. Also which I7 is it? 870? 970? I would look up some passmark scores too....it may be worth using that money and getting a coffee lake i3, cheap motherboard and 8GB of ram...those new i3's are most likely going to smoke the old i7....some of those i3's are hitting 4.5+ GHZ....with 4 real cores no HT. That might be a better way to spend that $300 IMHO.

 

[andwhy81]

I have a Hackintosh that's six years old going on seven. It has a Gigabyte motherboard, a 2.7 GHz i7 in it, 12 GB of DDR3 RAM and and Nvidia card with 896 MB of VRAM. I know, it sounds like a relic, but it still runs and I can do Photoshop in it. I can't do 4k video, so I've already upgraded to a new machine for my 4k video work. But I'd like to see if I can extend this machine's life a bit. One of the problems I constantly have is that when I surf the net, it tends to stutter a lot on video, and I'm wondering if that's due to the old graphics card. So, what would be a good way to upgrade/refresh this machine and extend its life a bit. I was thinking maybe putting an SSD (it has all spin drives in it) as the boot drive, a newer/faster graphics card, and maybe a bit more Ram. I would like to spend around $300 or so for the upgrade if I can. You can get a 500 GB SSD for about $130-140. Any suggestions about a card and RAM? How do I find how much RAM this motherboard supports (it has six slots)?

You are in the exact same boat i am in and trying to decide how to upgrade.. then i saw how much ddr 4 was and i may wait.