Hackintosh Stability

[Peterson Mark]

Hackintosh Davinci users, any of you are doing real long form project (feature film for instance) on a Hackintosh system? Do you have any stability problem?

My system configuration:

Gigabyte X58 UD3R
Core i7 950
12G Corsair DDR3
GTX9600 for GUI, GTX480 for Cuda
OSX 10.6.5, Davinci 7.1

My davinci behave quite strange, that sometimes it works for hours with alot of heavy grading flawless, but sometimes it crashed and jump to desktop without any notice.
Is it the problem of a Hackintosh system? How can I debug the problem why it crashed randomly.

Mark

 

[Ben Brainerd]

That's the nature of a Hackintosh, and why it's not supported by any Mac software developers. They're great as long as they're stable, but when things go wrong they tend to be random and hard to diagnose.

 

[Dan Kanes]

If I was a betting man I'd say it was a buffer overflow on the graphics ram.

What chameleon version are you running (graPhics enabler?)

Don't use nvenabler.

Are you on a 64 bit kernel?

1.Back your system up
2. Update to 10.6.6
3. Install snow leopard graphics update
4. Do a lot of clicking around in davinci.

Any clues based on what happens right before you crash?

Turn sleep off.
Turn off allow disks to sleep.
Are your scratch disks on Sata or esata? FireWire blows by comparison.

I remember when redcine x used to crash on my real MacBook pro, my Mac pro, and my hack pro.

Now it crashes the least on my hack of the three.

 

[Jose Lomeña]

Do you overclock your system?... Decklink 3d can be the problem too, try without this. Think that a hackintosh is like a mac. The only difference is the boot process, because you must say what hardware you have... but if all is working ok... its like a mac.

saludos.

 

[Alex Hastings]

I have had 3 hackintoshes in various forms, and one real one that I used day in and day out for production FCP/COLOR/AE/SHAKE/NUKE. I will say that I will not use a Hackintosh again for production. I am a geek and the engineering side of me drooled over being able to build a super computer, but the grueling .kexting and loading of boot DVD's and reformatting and backing up drives drove me insane. Of course this is only when stuff went wrong and I had to manually fix the Hackintosh. When the computer was stable it was a good MacPro. I eventually figured my time was too valuable to use a Hackintosh anymore and I back to a Apple Made MacPro. I figured if I was going to build a SuperComputer, it was going to be LINUX and maybe WIN7. PLEX Media Server, OS X server, those are places where I can see a Hackintosh really working out. For production, I have since abandoned that dream. IMHO its not worth it for production.

 

[David Kellermann]

I can't report any bugs or instability on my hackintosh system, but I'm rarely grading any long form projects.

 

[Alex Hastings]

I can't report any bugs or instability on my hackintosh system, but I'm rarely grading any long form projects.

All computers will become unstable, have hard drive frag problems, memory go bad, hard drive failure, gpu break. Anything can happen, the point is when you have a Hackintosh those small problems become huge ones. You basically have to build the whole system from scratch when things break.

 

[Colin Sheldon]

All computers will become unstable, have hard drive frag problems, memory go bad, hard drive failure, gpu break. Anything can happen, the point is when you have a Hackintosh those small problems become huge ones. You basically have to build the whole system from scratch when things break.

Carbon Copy Cloner is a hackintosh's best friend. Then all you need to do is spend $52 for a backup TB drive with all of your system and application files on it. Makes repairs quite a bit easier.

I've found my hackintosh to be more stable than my MBP. Less crashes, less kernal panics, and less hardware failures.... though maybe that's just me...


Colin

 

[Jose Lomeña]

All computers will become unstable, have hard drive frag problems, memory go bad, hard drive failure, gpu break. Anything can happen, the point is when you have a Hackintosh those small problems become huge ones. You basically have to build the whole system from scratch when things break.

Alex... all of that occur to me with a G5 quad core... the last problem was a cpu failure of 2200$, when new computer cost 2500$. I'm a hackintosh user because this cpu problem. When you are in a middle of a project you can't send the computer for an apple care. Or at least i can't here in spain. I prefer to change procesors, hard drives, mother board, cpu or whatever myself before send the computer to any warranty replacement like applecare.

I have now 15 hackintosh with i7970 6 cores with gtx480 and touch screen and all are stable. All have the same hardware. All in server boxes. I can't think to back to macpro era. Now, I have what I really need, not what apple want. And I can update any cpu, any motherboard or any box without lost of warranty at any time. And all at half of apple price.

 

[Alex Hastings]

Alex... all of that occur to me with a G5 quad core... the last problem was a cpu failure of 2200$, when new computer cost 2500$. I'm a hackintosh user because this cpu problem. When you are in a middle of a project you can't send the computer for an apple care. Or at least i can't here in spain. I prefer to change procesors, hard drives, mother board, cpu or whatever myself before send the computer to any warranty replacement like applecare.

I have now 15 hackintosh with i7970 6 cores with gtx480 and touch screen and all are stable. All have the same hardware. All in server boxes. I can't think to back to macpro era. Now, I have what I really need, not what apple want. And I can update any cpu, any motherboard or any box without lost of warranty at any time. And all at half of apple price.

When I was in my 20s I loved taking apart computers, building systems, saudering, etc. At one point I was a engineer for SUN Microsystems Parts company. We took old SUN computers took them apart and made good working computers. I loved going to work every day. Now that I am in my 40s. The allure of building systems and swapping out components has losts its thrill. I barely have enough time to keep the studio running as it is.

I'm glad you guys are doing it, its great, keep up the work, seriously, maybe down the road when I get more time on my hards I'll start building Hackintoshes again. I still might build a Hackintosh server to replace some Xserves, but not to replace my 12 core MacPro.

Anyway, I am just giving my opinion, HACK away, if it works for you great, have fun and Hackintosh your world.

 

[Ben Brainerd]

And I can update any cpu, any motherboard or any box without lost of warranty at any time.

Except the warranty you lose on your software. Personally the thing that's keeping me from going the Hackintosh route is the fact that none of the software companies will give you support on a hack. You might get basic support, and if you're lucky a tech will like you enough to bend the rules. But most of the time when you call up and say "My software crashed" they're gonna be like "Unsupported system. Sorry"