what's the closest to a real mac pro motherboard?

[shredhead]

what is the closest i can get to a real mac pro motherboard.. what i have read it seems they are a slightly different than a intel board...but does anyone know which model they use and tweak it?

can you buy a 'real' one anywhere?

 

[Akubichan]

Mac Pros use Intel Xeon processors, so you'd be looking at one of the server motherboards.

The Mac Pro I use at work (2007 version, dual 3GHz Clovertown) uses the Intel 5000X chipset, and its closest is something like the Supermicro X7DAL I think. The current Mac Pros use Intel Tylersburg chipsets (X58 Express for single processor and 5520 for dual) so you might look at motherboards featuring these chipsets from Supermicro, Tyan etc. These boards are pricey.

 

[shredhead]

i want to build this machine..what do you think?

MB:Intel S5520SCR
2- Intel Xeon E5620 Westmere quad cores... 8-core total
use my pre-existing geforece 8800 GT(for now)
4 TB western digital hard dive...already been using
4 - Patriot Signature 4GB DDR3 PC3-8500
CoolMax RM-1000B 1000W
sony dvd/writer

will this setup work right after setup? looking for a 'right out of the box' setup...well you know what i mean

 

[Akubichan]

Hi shredhead - Hope I can give you a useful answer, although I'm not sure if I can since I don't have a direct experience with a dual Xeon hackintosh. At work I use this Mac Pro as well as a dual Xeon 5560 Linux workstation, but I haven't tried hybridizing the two So just consider this one non-expert opinion.

It seems there are very few instances of a hackintosh build at this high a spec level, so if you are to go with this, you'd probably have to expect to be on your own. Don't expect that the two machines (a Mac Pro and your setup) being similar in physical specs translates to a 'right out of the box' experience. Things like LAN and sound chips are bound to be different. You can probably make it work, eventually and if you are willing to tinker; but it may not be a trivial task.

If you need a powerful hackintosh computer that works reasonably out-of-the-box, why not adopt the plan of Tonymac's Customac Pro? There's a lot of experience/expertise for that here, and it seems the processor could be replaced with a Gulftown 980X (see MacMan's post towards the end of the thread). That would be US$720 more (Newegg); but the total would still be much less than the price of a dual CPU Mac Pro, it would give you three-quarters of the processing cores, and given its higher clock speed (3.3GHz vs. 2.4) the actual processing power could well be on a par.

 

[rx7dude]

Akubichan: I'm curious how your '07 Mac Pro compares with your Hackintosh. Is the old dual processor is faster than your core 2 duo?

 

[Akubichan]

The two machines seem very similar in terms of per-CPU-core processing power. The X6800 was also bought in 2007 and is the same generation CPU (Conroe) as the Xeons in the Mac Pro. In terms of Geekbench numbers, the single thread performances are almost identical - for example, image compress/decompress is 2107/1782 on the Mac Pro and 2111/1879 Mpixels/sec on the Hackintosh; sharpen/blur is 6129/7715 and 6153/7740 respectively. For multithreaded benchmarks, the Mac Pro has four times the number of processing cores, so one would expect it to outperform by a factor of four. This bears out: the multithreaded sharpen/blur is 48122/60809 on the Mac Pro as opposed to 12389/15232 on the Hackintosh.

The Hackintosh's memory benchmarks are about 25% better when compared with the Mac Pro. Average memory/stream scores for the former are 2790/2287 as opposed to 2200/1818 for the latter. Mostly this is due to the memory speed difference (DDR2 800 rather than 667) I think.

The overall Geekbench score is 4105 for the Hackintosh and 10519 for the Mac Pro. At work, I do a lot of technical computing involving parallelism so multithreaded performance is important, but for day to day and personal tasks both machines are similarly (and plenty) capable.

 

[rx7dude]

Thanks for the info!