BUILDING A BEAST HACKINTOSH, NEED HELP

[Bobby Dalsey]

Hey Gang,

I'm having a friend build me a Hackintosh and I would love someone looking this over and letting me know if it is all compatible with Mac OS. If you see any issues or have any recommends for better components let me know. I'm trying to build a beast for coloring and transcoding.

Intel Core i7-4770K Haswell 3.5GHz LGA 1150 84W Quad-Core Desktop Processor Intel HD Graphics BX80646I74770K

ASUS Z87-DELUXE/DUAL LGA 1150 Intel Z87 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard

EVGA 06G-P4-2791-KR GeForce GTX TITAN SuperClocked 6GB 384-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 HDCP, SLI Ready Video Card

G.SKILL Ripjaws Z Series 32GB (4 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 2400 (PC3 19200) Desktop Memory Model F3-19200CL10Q-32GBZHD

CORSAIR AXi AX1200i 1200W Digital ATX12V v2.31 and EPS 2.92 SLI Ready CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS PLATINUM Certified Full Modular Active PFC Power Supply New 4th Gen CPU Certified Haswell Ready

Corsair Force Series GS CSSD-F360GBGS-BK 2.5" 360GB SATA III Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

CORSAIR Hydro Series H100i Water Cooler

Western Digital WD Black WD4001FAEX 4TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive

Corsair Vengeance Series C70 Military Green Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case

ASUS PA279Q Black 27" WQHD LED Backlight True Color Professional Monitor


I'm also considering an apple monitor, any recommends?


Thanks in advance to anyone who helps!

-Bobby

 

[Jett He]

I'd Personally opt for a 6core minimum such as the 3930k, which offers up to 64gb of ram limitation versus 32gb on the 4770k. Since the 4770k are the latest haswell chips, performance might be close. I'm sure you'll overclock the cpu anyways, but the 6core option will give you more headroom with 50% more cores.

 

[Shiblon Wixom]

There isn't support yet for TB on the hackintosh side. Asus is releasing a TB2 board, as well as Gigabyte will soon release their TB boards. So I'd wait if you really need TB on the Z87 platform. The 4770k is still going to be quite a bit slower in overall rendering times vs the 3930k, the only main advantage is lower power consumption and slightly better gaming performance that uses only 1 or 2 cores.

 

[Mike Halper]

There isn't official support in OS X for Haswell yet... or at least nothing has been released other than betas and hacks. You'd have to run a beta of 10.8.5, 10.9.0, or a hacked 10.8.4 kernel, so you're bound to have issues until an official release that supports Haswell.

The Titan will be crippled a little until 10.9.0... although there may be better support in 10.8.5. Until then, no OpenCL and Premiere CC and RecCine-X Pro 18 Alpha won't run.

If you're only running OS X, there's no reason to get the i version of the PSU. The software that comes with it won't run in OS X. If you're going to run Windows also then it's fine, otherwise you might be able to save a little money. I an an AX1200 non-i myself.

The audio chipset on the motherboard you picked is not yet supported in OS X and I don't think there's 3rd party drivers from the Hackintosh community to get it working. Same with a lot of Z87 motherboards, so it's something you want to look at along with the other chipsets on the motherboard.

Asus just announced that new Z87 motherboard with Thunderbolt 2. Should be out in the next couple months. The motherboard you listed is Thunderbolt 1. Keep in mind that Thunderbolt is not hot-pluggable on a Hackintosh. I found it rather unusable because of that personally, so I switched to the Maximus V Extreme. That's a Z77 board, but they have a Z87 version in the Maximus VI Extreme. It gives you more x16 slots, more lanes, and has a Thunderbolt header (the port/board for it isn't available yet though). No one knows if that's Thunderbolt 1 or 2 on that header.

 

[Mike Halper]

There isn't support yet for TB on the hackintosh side.

Thunderbolt does work on a Hackintosh. It just isn't hot-pluggable.

 

[Bobby Dalsey]

There isn't official support in OS X for Haswell yet... or at least nothing has been released other than betas and hacks. You'd have to run a beta of 10.8.5, 10.9.0, or a hacked 10.8.4 kernel, so you're bound to have issues until an official release that supports Haswell.

The Titan will be crippled a little until 10.9.0... although there may be better support in 10.8.5. Until then, no OpenCL and Premiere CC and RecCine-X Pro 18 Alpha won't run.

If you're only running OS X, there's no reason to get the i version of the PSU. The software that comes with it won't run in OS X. If you're going to run Windows also then it's fine, otherwise you might be able to save a little money. I an an AX1200 non-i myself.

The audio chipset on the motherboard you picked is not yet supported in OS X and I don't think there's 3rd party drivers from the Hackintosh community to get it working. Same with a lot of Z87 motherboards, so it's something you want to look at along with the other chipsets on the motherboard.

Asus just announced that new Z87 motherboard with Thunderbolt 2. Should be out in the next couple months. The motherboard you listed is Thunderbolt 1. Keep in mind that Thunderbolt is not hot-pluggable on a Hackintosh. I found it rather unusable because of that personally, so I switched to the Maximus V Extreme. That's a Z77 board, but they have a Z87 version in the Maximus VI Extreme. It gives you more x16 slots, more lanes, and has a Thunderbolt header (the port/board for it isn't available yet though). No one knows if that's Thunderbolt 1 or 2 on that header.

Thanks Mike, Premier wont run with a Titan right now?

 

[Mike Halper]

No. It seems to me that Premiere CC requires OpenCL to be working if using a card that should have OpenCL support. The problem is that the current drivers built into OS X 10.8.4 and earlier don't support OpenCL on the Titan. Nvidia's web driver also doesn't get OpenCL working. So Premiere CC will not run, but Premiere CS6 will. That's an odd one, but it's because Adobe didn't have OpenCL support in CS6. Same goes for RedCine-X 18 alpha. It won't run, but v17 will.

That said, I got hold of the drivers from OS X 10.9 Developer Preview 5 and installed them in 10.8.4. That made Premiere CC and RCXP 18 alpha run, but I must have missed a driver or there's some other under-the-hood change that I'm missing because it did break OpenGL, so I reverted back. I'm okay running RCXP 17 and CS6 for now. OS X 10.8.5 may get released tomorrow, and it's possible that will add OpenCL support for the Titan so we'll see. At worst, 10.9.0 is only a couple months away.

 

[Bobby Dalsey]

Awesome, thanks Mike!