Will it blend, euh work? GA-X79-UD3 + i7-3930K

[Quagh]

So I'm moving from a MacBook Pro that's nearly five years old to a Hackintosh build due to the immense cost of a decent Mac system. I've been reading, searching and reading some more to come up with the most affordable, but still powerful enough system that will help me not to get frustrated over how it's taking five minutes to open Photoshop or ten to get Illustrator display something recognizable.

What I'll be using it for:

- Video editing, both pre- and post-processing: Adobe After Effects, Houdini, Cinema 4D, RealFlow. Very intensive programs, especially the fluid/smoke/fire simulations and the rendering in 1080p full settings.
- Design: Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign.
- (Creative) coding.
- Gaming: on Windows via dual boot. Not that much really, but I kind of dislike it when I have to play the game any lower than very high or ultra settings. Think RTS rather than FPS (BF3, CoD).

What I've come up with so far:

Bluetooth
ASUS USB-BT211

DVD-reWriters Serial-ATA
Sony Optiarc AD-7283S-0B

Harddisks 3,5 inch SATA
Seagate ST2000DM001 Barracuda 7200.12 2TB SATA600 7200 rpm 64MB

Motherboards Socket 2011
GIGABYTE GA-X79-UD3

CPUs Socket 2011
Intel® Core™; i7-3930K

Memory DDR3-1600
Corsair 16 GB DDR3-1600 Quad-kit

Solid State Disk 2,5 inch SATA
OCZ AGT3-25SAT3-120G

WLAN-Adapters
TP-LINK TL-WDN4800

Power
Seasonic M12II-750 Bronze

CPU Coolers
Noctua NH-D14 SE2011

Casing Midi Tower
Antec Performance One P-280

—
Still doubting over which graphics card is best, so advice is more than welcome! Remember that I'll be constantly working (and gaming) on a resolution no less than 2560x1440. As I've read the more VRAM, the better (when using a resolution higher than 1920x1080), I suppose the ASUS with 2048MB is the best choice? But its speeds are inferior to others...

Also, over time, I might buy another one and put them in SLI, so I can add a few years to the system's lifespan.

MSI N560GTX-Ti Twin Frozr II/OC @ 220EUR
180 Watt max usage
384 Stream Processors / 256bit interface
880 / 1760Mhz
1024MB VRAM

MSI N560GTX-Ti HAWK @ 250EUR
180 Watt max usage
384 Stream Processors / 256bit interface
950 / 1900Mhz
1024MB VRAM

ASUS ENGTX560 DCII/2DI @ 270EUR
180 Watt max usage
384 Stream Processors / 256bit interface
830 / 1660Mhz
2048MB VRAM

MSI N570GTX Twin Frozr III PE/OC @ 300EUR
218 Watt max usage
480 Stream Processors / 320bit interface
770 / 1540Mhz
1280MB VRAM

To conclude: will it all work? Onboard audio, USB2&3, WiFi, Bluetooth, eSata, DVD-writer, no bottleneck, ... ? And will I be able to run every game on ultra settings (see it as a benchmark for my 3D programs)?

I guess I'll be okay if I follow the tutorials and read the experiences of others? Don't want to buy all this stuff and then find out it's rubbish. That DSDT creature and those multibeast settings are quite impressive right now, but I'll probably manage?

Many thanks and looking forward to some advice!

 

[Quagh]

Anyone?

 

[juanmaaaaa]

I don't know much about this but I think 2011 socket is not natively supported by Mac, so you won't have native power management, meaning you won't be able to generate P or C-states which means your processor will be on full load all the time. If i were you I will go with an Ivy or Sandy Bridge build (ie socket 1155). You will see lots of speed and work improvement, and there's a lot of difference from your 5 years old macbook. I think you should do more reaserch to see if socket 2011 is supported, to avoid buying something that doesn't realy work well for a day to day basis. Just my 0.2 cents.

P.D.: If you still want lots of power, you can go with dual xeon proccessors, matching the actual Mac Pro hardware.

 

[ggeorge]

Actually there are a number of 2011 socket builds that are working just fine, though the power saving is not working currently everything else (sound/networking/sata/USB) is working fine. Some people have some problems, but no more so than I've seen with most hackintosh builds.

Most of them seem to be ASUS, but there's been at least on Gigabyte

Asus X79 Rampage IV Extreme | Core i7-3930k | XFX HD 6870 2GB | 6 Cores at 4.2Ghz
viewtopic.php?f=264&t=58573

Asus X79 Sabertooth | Core i7-3960x | MSI GeForce GTX580
viewtopic.php?f=264&t=57962

DaveyWavey's Pro Tools HD 10.1.2 Build: i7-3820K - GA-X79-UD3 - Sapphire Radeon HD 6850
viewtopic.php?f=54&t=58219&p=381479&hilit=gigabyte+x79#p381479

As far as the graphics card goes, you do want nVidia for the CUDA/OpenGL. I would look for a 560 ti 448 core, essentially a slightly cut down 570. So they're a decent bump up in performance and I have seen prices on them as low as $230 or so. Not sure about Europe though.

They're not always clear about if they are a 448 core in the description, but they will have 1280mb ram (like a 570) vs 1024 mb for a conventional 560 ti.

Though if you want to play at > 1080p resolution, you might want to look at a 580. OTOH, it is most likely a bit less than 2 weeks till apple announces new machines and it seems highly likely they'll have some sort of support for the nvidia 6XX series.

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2011 ... .html?prod[4835]=on&prod[5379]=on&prod[4834]=on&prod[4975]=on

You can also get benchmark comparisons here and they do 2560 x 1600 rez results
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/330?vs=499

The 6XX nvidia cards are not NEARLY as good at double precision CUDA/OpenGL, but they are at least as good or somewhat better than the best of the 5xx series for single precision. Which is what I believe is what you'd be doing, but I'm not an expert on such things. So if the CUDA/OpenGL is more important than gaming, essentially you'll be nearly as well off with a 5xx as a 6xx.

However if you need it working NOW, I would stick with a 5xx and upgrade some time in the future when support is nailed down, as that can take a full year or more some times.

More ram than baseline on a graphics card, like with the Asus is essentially just a marketing ploy. It really only helps at higher resolutions than the cards are designed for. If it made a significant impact on the performance, that amount would be the standard unless they were deliberately crippling it for some reason.

SLI is not supported under OSX currently. It seems unlikely that will change, but you never know. It does complicate the set up at least somewhat, but I think support for just using them as 2 separate cards is much better currently than it once was. It used to cause nothing but problems.

 

[dsc106]

Guys, to clarify I am in a similar situation (video editing, etc.) and debating between socket 2011 3930k and a Ivy Bridge 3770k. I could go either Gigabyte or Asus for motherboard. I would be using this as hackintosh for FCPX/FCP7/Adobe. I need it to be reliable for work, easily updateable, and work with sleep mode and over clocking.

Is the socket 2011 really that problematic? I hate to give up 6-core of the SB-E but if I need to go Ivy Bridge for a more reliable experience, I will.

 

[jester969]

Guys, to clarify I am in a similar situation (video editing, etc.) and debating between socket 2011 3930k and a Ivy Bridge 3770k. I could go either Gigabyte or Asus for motherboard. I would be using this as hackintosh for FCPX/FCP7/Adobe. I need it to be reliable for work, easily updateable, and work with sleep mode and over clocking.

Is the socket 2011 really that problematic? I hate to give up 6-core of the SB-E but if I need to go Ivy Bridge for a more reliable experience, I will.

Support for Ivy is here but if I were you I would wait until Mountain Lion (a month or you can hop onto Lion now and upgrade later).

You won't get any sleep with the 2011 setup so wishful thinking.

 

[Quagh]

So a socket 2011 processor and motherboard are out of the question if I want a decent build? Ok. Too bad, because I really wanted the 6-core Sandy Bridge, but I'll guess I'll have to settle with something else then.

And I'm wondering if this is it, after searching the forums etc:

Motherboard: GA-Z77-DS3H
CPU: Core™ i7-3770K (4x 3500 MHz)
GPU: MSI N560GTX-Ti HAWK
Startup disk: Samsung MZ-7PC0128D/EU SSD
Data disk: Seagate ST2000DM001 2TB 64MB Cache 7200RPM
Memory: Corsair 16 GB DDR3-1600 Quad-kit

Bluetooth: USB-BT211
WLAN: TL-WDN4800

Power: Seasonic M12II-750 Bronze
Casing: Performance One P-280
CPU Cooling: Noctua NH-D14

I'm reading there are problems getting common programs to work, like FaceTime, iCloud and mail. Are those resolved or am I, again, out of luck? Any other suggestions or things I should know that I don't know of? Sleep, power management, USB (2&3), audio, wi-fi, ... ? If I'm right, it should all work?

I'm also looking into getting the OC'ed 560GTX Ti with 448 cores, but I'm wondering if it's a huge performance boost, or just a minor?

Anyway, to all who responded: many thanks! Great community

 

[jester969]

You can still build a 2011 socket machine but just no power management.

Check User Builds or Golden Builds.

The Ivy Bridge system needs low profile RAM with that big Noctua.

Sleep won't come until a native kernel comes down from Apple. Everything else like iCloud will work with BH 5.0.

 

[Solidww]

Getting a Sandy Bridge build will be your best bet for now if you want it act as Apple like as possible.

As for the cards I will have to look at em again. If you are going to get GTX5XX cards you will have to stay Lion just an FYI.

 

[djblastyfone]

If you're working largely with OpenCL/CUDA-enabled apps, I'd recommend doubling up your graphics card. SLI may not work in OSX, but it can absolutely use the compute performance of all your cards to use. A 2x 560Ti or 2x 570 build would fly through any app that puts CUDA/OpenCL to use, and would probably make up the performance difference between a 3930k build and an ivy, for about half the cost difference .

With the rest of the price difference I highly recommend buying two hard drives and putting them in a RAID array for disk performance. Even with the OS running off an SSD, HD video in ProRes or any other editing format eats up disk speed pretty quickly and can lead to dropped frames and other unpleasantries.

With RAID for video editing, you have two options:

• A RAID 0 array, which essentially doubles your disk speed and capacity (2x2TB HDD = 4TB RAID 0), making full 1080p+ editing much smoother, especially when working with multiple streams. The biggest downside to this is that if one drive fails you lose the data from both, so if you go this route be sure to do regular backups. Or you could add a third hard drive and set up...

• A RAID 5 array, which is almost as fast as RAID 0 and can handle a drive failure without data loss. You don't gain any disk space from 2 drives in RAID 0 (3x2TB HDD = 4TB RAID 5), but your data is safer.

If you want a better explanation, you can read up here.

Hope this helps!