New hackintosh buid

[joan2404]

I had a lot of fun this weekend setting up my build. 10 years ago I had a mid-tower PC and I have upgraded some parts from it but I've never build a completely new PC. Picking up the parts is an experience itself (especially when ordering from internet, which is my case because where I live internet prices are much lower than local stores). Anyway, let's start taking a look to the completed setup.

 

Here you can seesome interesting things: clean setup, running OS X and Apple Keayboard and Magic Mouse. Yes, it's a hackintosh. I plan to do video editing, audio editing, and 3D rendering on that machine so I need great horsepower to do it in acceptable times. I'd have preferred to buy a Mac Pro but it's very expensive for my needs as I'm not a professional and I'm not editing or rendering 24/7. I have a 13" retina MacBook Pro from 2014 and does these concrete tasks but it's very hot (CPU max temp arround 98ªC), I don't want to end up with dead laptop in a few years.

 

Next let's see what's inside the case (if reflections allow you... )

This is a Haswell build. Inside there's the 4790K Intel Core i7 with the Gigabyte Z97X-UD3H motherboard, 8gb of ram and a couple of HDDs. This is because of budget: I've bought the i7, motherboard, CPU Cooler, power supply and a stick of RAM. This costed me about 600€ (but could have been 700€ because I get 15% off in CPU, lucky me ) and it's a funcional computer. Right now I use some old HDDs and believe me when I say that it's not bad at all, but later on I'll add an SSD (850 Evo 265GB) and graphics card. It's not as snappy as my MacBook Pro when opening programs and boots up but this cpu speeds up a lot of things that struggle on my MacBook Pro. In the next weeks (or months) I'll put in an AMD graphics card (probably the R9 280X or similar, depending on price) because AMD cards are better than Nvidia performing OpenCL operations to take full profit of Final Cut Pro X and Blender. I'm very confident that this will be a very powerful computer for my needs.

 

So in total this tower will be arround 800-850€ and I have room for upgrades, maybe 32Gb of RAM, more SSD storage and a new graphics card. The CPU is already the best that can fit on this motherboard socket.

 

Overclocking:

This CPU I'll probably not overclock this cpu because I need stability and I need OpenCL compute power which is provided by the graphics card, so the overclocked cpu won't make a big difference. Also the 212 evo cooler is great for near silent operation and much greater cooling capacity than stock intel cooler, but for overclocking it's very limited. I'll try and if I see an improvement in render times I'll overclock but I'll get a Noctua cooler.

 

Monitor and periferials:

Currently I use a budget 21,5" monitor from Hanns-G. It's not bad at all, but has to be very good calibrated. Viewing angles could be better but for less than 100€ four years ago it's more than acceptable. I also have a HP Pavilion 23xi, maybe I'll swap these monitors but in long term I'll buy a 1440p 27" or 25" monitor.

I'll stay with the Apple Keyboard and i'll see what happens with the Magic Mouse. It's very good for Final Cut Pro but in Blender it's not the best mouse. I have a MX Master but I'm still learning how to take 100% profit from it. 

I also have a Lacie external HD. I can't remember the model, but has 2TB and has usb 3.0, fw 400/800 and e-Sata. This will be used for backup.

Under the monitor there's the Apple USB SuperDrive. Works natively with the hackintosh and with Windows there's a driver available.

At the moment I have 2.1 Altec Lansing speakers. They sound very good but they produce audible white noise when nothing is playing. In the future i'll buy 2 monitor speakers.

 

Noise and temperatures:

Compared to the old mid towers I had, this is very silent, and more that will become. Most part of the noise comes from the HDDs (especially one that is very noisy). I plan to get the 850 evo and get rid of that HDD so it will be more silent.

During Prime95 stress test on windows max temp is about 66-67ºC, ambient temperature 22ºC. I'll tweak the cpu cooler fan settings to be maybe 3 or 4 degrees lower but if it becomes much noisier, 67ºC under load it's not bad (but could be better with another cooler). On idle temps are between 28-32ºC and nearly silent.

 

OS X installation and usability (follow the installation guide on http://www.tonymacx86.com):

Installing OS X on a custom build is much easier than some years ago. I got it working at first try and I only had to install 3 drivers. The first driver is the sound, this motherboard comes with ALC1150. This driver can be found on Multibeast installation and can't be much easier. Second, ethernet. The motherboard comes with Intel Ethernet controller and the installation is the same as audio. Third, USB 3.0. This is not as easy. USB 2.0 works fine but 3.0, if works is at 2.0 speeds. To solve it I followed these instructions: http://www.tonymacx86.com/user-builds/175075-success-lewyss-build-el-capitan-ga-z97x-ud3h-i5-4690k-16gb-ram-gtx-970-256gb-ssd-bcm94360cd-wifi-bluetooth.html

Everything is working fine except audio, when the computer wakes up from sleep there're some issues. But I don't like having desktop computers on sleep mode so it's not a very big issue for me.

 

Some benchmarks:

Geekbench 3 64 bit. On my MacBook Pro I get 3421 in single core and 7224 on multicore. This is a very good result. These results are very close to the 5K iMac.

Cinebench R15

 

I'm very excited to have this computer. I have used it all the weekend and the experience it's fine, both in Windows 10 and OS X. The SSD will make the entire system faster to load and open programs and the overall experience will be even better. I have written a lot of text but if anyone has a question just ask! Very happy to finally be in LTT forums, I've been watching Linus videos to help me pick the parts and assembly the computer.

 

List of parts:

Case: NZXT S340 White

Motherboard: Gigabyte Z97X-UD3H

CPU: Intel Core i7

RAM: HyperX Fury Black

PSU: Corsair VS650W

CPU Cooler: 212 Evo Cooler Master

 

[Matty2hatty]

Looks great! Hope it holds up in the future

[GoZone]

Epic

[Claryn]

Awesome dude. Love the setup.

As a former owner of a Hackintosh, I congratulate you. Seems like the compatibility and stability has come a long way. This might be enough inspiration to attempt a second Hackintosh and get rid of my ghetto eGPU setup on my rMBP13".

[DaltonM]

I thought this build would be Christmas theme'd because there's.... noel.

 

 

(get it? NO EL? NO L?) 

[joan2404]

4 minutes ago, Claryn said:

Awesome dude. Love the setup.

As a former owner of a Hackintosh, I congratulate you. Seems like the compatibility and stability has come a long way. This might be enough inspiration to attempt a second Hackintosh and get rid of my ghetto eGPU setup on my rMBP13".

I'll tell you how it works with the GPU but even now it's much faster than the MacBook Pro

[Claryn]

3 minutes ago, joan2404 said:

I'll tell you how it works with the GPU but even now it's much faster than the MacBook Pro

Please do! 

I had an i7 2600k on a MSI mPower Z77 board that was not originally supported. Had to find a custom BIOS for it to even have the machine post into OS X. 
The 780 I had at the time worked great, but not too good compared to results on Windows. 

 

If I were to do a new build, I would get 4x 120GB SSDs in Raid 0 or an NVMe SSD for that sweet, sweet Gbit/s read/write that I have on my rMBP. 

I would also check out the possibility for a Xeon processor, as they are cheaper compared to i7s. Might be slightly tricky to do the install without an iGPU, so you would need to get the discrete graphics working without drivers. 

[joan2404]

In theory select AMD cards run natively and perform great because Apple provides drivers. I have been looking the Sapphire R9 280X Vapor-X Tri-X as some posts in tomymacx86 suggest that for the moment is the best compatible card for hackintosh. Low noise and temperatures but great performance. Some have dual graphics setup with this cards. Depending on the software you use, it's better AMD or Nvidia. If instead of Final Cut Pro I'd use Premiere Pro, I'd go with Nvidia. The great thing about Nvidia is that provides drivers for OS X, the bad thing is that seems that those drivers are not as good as they are in windows. 

 

I've also thaught about putting in an NVMe, they are much faster than conventional SSD. I'll see what I do but I have to investigate if there's good support for NVMe drives in hackintosh.  About the Xeon, I didn't get it because I found that offer and was only for the i7 4790K. But even without that discount I get for the i7,the price of the Xeon in Amazon Spain or other online stores is higher (don't know why). 

[Claryn]

6 minutes ago, joan2404 said:

In theory select AMD cards run natively and perform great because Apple provides drivers. I have been looking the Sapphire R9 280X Vapor-X Tri-X as some posts in tomymacx86 suggest that for the moment is the best compatible card for hackintosh. Low noise and temperatures but great performance. Some have dual graphics setup with this cards. Depending on the software you use, it's better AMD or Nvidia. If instead of Final Cut Pro I'd use Premiere Pro, I'd go with Nvidia. The great thing about Nvidia is that provides drivers for OS X, the bad thing is that seems that those drivers are not as good as they are in windows. 

 

I've also thaught about putting in an NVMe, they are much faster than conventional SSD. I'll see what I do but I have to investigate if there's good support for NVMe drives in hackintosh.  About the Xeon, I didn't get it because I found that offer and was only for the i7 4790K. But even without that discount I get for the i7,the price of the Xeon in Amazon Spain or other online stores is higher (don't know why). 

Interesting. I know Apple has shifted over to using AMD GPU's in products like the iMac, so it makes sense that they have better driver support. The problem is that I have an Nvidia Shield that only works with an Nvidia GPU, so I guess it would have to be that. 

 

I think NVMe SSDs should work out of the box. All newer Macs are using PCIe SSDs, and while the tech is different, the OS shouldn't have any problems recognizing it. Would be worth looking into before buying one though. 

[joan2404]

Just now, Claryn said:

Interesting. I know Apple has shifted over to using AMD GPU's in products like the iMac, so it makes sense that they have better driver support. The problem is that I have an Nvidia Shield that only works with an Nvidia GPU, so I guess it would have to be that. 

 

I think NVMe SSDs should work out of the box. All newer Macs are using PCIe SSDs, and while the tech is different, the OS shouldn't have any problems recognizing it. Would be worth looking into before buying one though. 

The NVMe compatibility has more to do with motherboard than operating system. In theory if MB suports NVMe boot should be fine. I have read very few posts and some had success at first try, others can't make it work and don't know why. I'll do some research on that to figure it out.