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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Hackintosh Guidance Requested

C

Craig Allan

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Hi All

I have resisted this direction for a while. Unfortunately due to circumstance I can't see any alternative. Currently using a 2013 Trashcan Pro - so software and workflow is Apple based. However I need to add an additional workstation. Budget prevents the normal alternatives, which are - either ditch Mac and go PC completely (would require multiple computer replacements) or purchase new spec iMac Pro (can't afford the Apple tax). It looks like Hackintosh is the only option. Maybe some of you have found yourselves in a similar position . . .

I have researched a portion of what the internet has to offer - and given the quantity of information and opinion, the water in some ways gets muddier not clearer. Accordingly, I concluded it best to reach out to those who may be using one, who have built one for the same purpose and who have the same goals as I do.

I am comfortable that I have enough ability and understating to build a system that is not going to require excessive problem solving on parts that may not be best suited to Hackintosh. My limited understanding is that a Hackintosh will work MOST smoothly and MOSTLY trouble free when components that are Apple friendly are used. This will likely mean AMD GPU?

With that in mind I would appreciate thoughts and or component recommendations that are current and going to give me the fastest machine possible - with in reason. I don't want to put a specific dollar figure on it - but lets say around 4K (USD). Thinking at present would like to run fastest dual GPU card possible (given AMD restriction and Apple friendly spec), 1TB SSD for OS and software, 2TB SSD for work files, and likely 128G RAM.

At present I am working with 4K, but would like to have ability to work with 8K files on a UHD timeline - all on Davinci Resolve.

Please forgive any conflicting information above - happy to receive correction and direction.

I guess ideally someone else who has similar specs who has just completed a build would be kind enough to share?

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

Craig
 
When it's only Resolve you are working with there is no real reason not to choose for a PC, for Resolve it doesn't matter if you run MacOS, Windows or Linux.

-When you want to work with 8k in the near future your GPU's will need atleast 16 GB.
-When you need Thunderbolt 3 you have to go the intel way (when not, AMD Threadripper is also an option).

When you want 2 GPU's(16 GB), 128 GB RAM, 1TB SSD system and 2 TB SSD scratch + the rest of the material 4k USD is on the low side at the moment.

Try to play a little with this site https://pcpartpicker.com/ and you'll get a more realistic view on current prices.
 
Thanks Misha

I understand your point regarding Resolve. However it is a little more complex than that - I think. We will need to dual station Resolve - using the existing Mac (sharing projects, same raid or NAS). Further, there are some tasks that I use Adobe for as Adobe handles those tasks better. There seems to be a lot more 'arghhhh' in having to try and make 2 different platforms co exist rather than deal with the drawbacks of a Hackintosh.

Yes - I would like thunderbolt 3 - BUT I know beggars can't be choosers.

As for cost maybe we need to be a little more realistic. How much more brings it to a more realistic budget?

I will take a look at the website given and see. . . .

Thanks again.
 
If the next MacPro isn’t up to snuff, Hackintosh will be my last ditch effort before moving to Windows. There are reasons so many of us prefer Mac, telling us to just switch doesn’t help.
 
I run hack machines now. Took some time, to get it right. But mostly because I did not know how to do it right. But these run smoother than any real Mac and are seriously fast.

Basically:

Corsair case.
Corsair PS AX1600i
Asus x299 deluxe MOB´s
i9 18 core uncapped Corsair 2 fan water-cooler.
128Gb ram
Sata 500Gb SSD for OSX operating system.
Sata 500Gb SSD for windows operating system.
Sata 500Gb SSD for backup of OSX operating drive.
2xM2 1Tb drives as a raid for flame stone wire super fast storage.
Asus 10GBe PCIe network card
BM decklink exreme 4k video board.

Think with BM card and all price is about 6k USD.

Then I got a pegasus r8 raid on TB3. And 6x12TB QNAP raid connected on the 10GBe.

The cool thing is that they boots both windows and osx so the 3D guys can use it as a windows rendering station over night. So for us that alone is way better than having real Macs. And the speed is simply outstanding on this configuration. the CPU is overclocked to be pretty much twice as fast as Imac pro and still runs cooler.

You could run the above with dual GPU´s but I don't really see the need, it slash trough 8k like nothing.

Install if fairly easy. Now when I know how. I think I can do one machine in something like an hour.

First install windows on one drive. Needs to be done on the actual machine / MOB.
In windows you need to flush the firmware of the ASUS 10GBe card (a little strange procedure that needs to be done twice for some reason.)
Then when windows is installed you flush the bios with special sauce Bios Hackintosh firmware from a memory stick.
Plug in a SATA SSD with prebuilt iso and a customized EFI folder.
Reboot and load a Overclocker setting from memory stick.


Boot up select windows or OSX in the boot and go.

I'm really trying to improve the TB3 preformance to have hot swap and any kind of TB2 device first in chance. Spent all day today trying to figure it out. The sick thing was I got it to work for a little while on a Alpineridge Gigabyte card but then it simply did not want to do it any more... Might give it up as the original deluxe card works fine if yo know the pits of it. Simply shut down computer, unplug power count to 10 and insert what ever new tb3 device and boot back up again. If you hot plug you might burn the bios install so you have to flush it again which took some time to get use to as Im one of those that think life is to short to unplug drive safely :)

There is offocurse a million + 1 ways to setup a hackintosh and I'm far from a pro on this but had some help from people with great knowledge that has done a tons of them and they simply adviced me that the above setup is best option. As its pretty much what a Mac Pro is but faster.
 
Here is a shopping list. As you can see there is some items that are doubles. Like the case and the GPU. Case you can ofcourse by any but these I find good.

And also the SSDs and memory etc you can off course buy different brands / Size. If you click on the memory link you can choose how fast memory you want. Mine are the ones on the link, but there is also faster and slower that is compatible.

Mine are plenty fast and I got 128Gb but one can argue that 64GB is enough and its better to buy 64GB faster memory than 128GB slower. 128GB fast is ofcourse the best possible. But possibly a not needed cost.

The CPU is avaialable with a delid from Der8auer and others but the one on the link is plenty fast and works well.


A few things to mention so you don't get disappointed. This is possibly things that has easy fixes but I have not bothered.

TB3 is working. But with some hot plug in/plug out limits so far. and I have not managed to connect TB3 to Qnap as 10GBe network connection. But all TB3 drives I tried works well and most TB2 drives. Sometimes its problem with some TB2 raids if they sit closest to the machine in the chain. You can have up to 6 TB3 devices in the chain.

Wifi should work. I have not cared to turn it on as its not something I use and not sure how to do it. But Im told its a simple fix.

Bluetooth I found to be weak on these machines maybe I do something wrong. But there is also bluetooth adapters that works well if thats a need.

The GPU HDMI out does not give sound. I use sound out of the BM card and also got sound out of USB speakers hooked up to my screens.

Link: https://app.frame.io/presentations/e13a8289-a4b1-4722-ac19-c367bf07d4ff


Edit and all these AMD´s work fine with the above config:

Amd Radeon Vega Frontier - 16Go
Amd Radeon Vega 64 - 8Go
Amd Radeon Vega 56 - 8Go
Amd Radeon RX580 - 8Go
Amd Radeon RX560 - 4Go
 
Thanks Bjorn! Huge effort.

Once the mental hurdle of a Hac is overcome, there is so much going for them. The complete flexibility is pretty close to the top of the advantage list but really, when the new pro is released the price difference is surely going to be mind blowing . . . not to mention the wait . . . .
 
I have a $30 garage sale find of a Dell XPS 8300 running Sierra and that has been pretty good for the most part. I mostly wanted another machine because all I have is my 2007 Mac Pro 1.1 tower for old projects and certain VFX plugins in FCP7. It works as well as it can, needless to say, without a RAID card and higher end GPU, 4K is a little challenging let alone 8K but it does pretty well regardless for when I need it. Mac OS updates become a scary thing though as I’ve had moments where I needed to redo my Multibeast from command line in order to have everything work again. I don’t know about building one for the current Mac OS, it would be smart to go by the guides posted above if they’re stable but if you could do with perhaps the previous Mac OS for stability’s sake then that may be a better way to go until the kinks get worked out with the latest release. Like I said, updates can mess with installations and things that worked just fine before may not work after an update until somebody whips up a new Kext file or Multibeast/Clover/etc. release. It’s like the old saying, if it were easy, everybody would be doing it. But once it’s up and running, it really is satisfying and surprising how much better performing certain things are than the equivalent Mac system and all for a fraction of the price!
 
I usually have a Hackintosh system around, but would not recommend one overall... Or more honestly, I usually have one system used most as a Hackintosh build, but I often will put an OSX install I can boot into on my more powerful workstations. Just because. I prefer Mac OS over Windows any day, but the reality is that the latest and greatest hardware and support for that hardware needs Windows. I find it's best to just run Windows on your PCs as you'll get the most out of the hardware.

Running Resolve, Adobe, shared storage systems, etc.. here. No issues getting it all to play nicely amongst Windows and Mac systems. It's far easier to set up a SAN used by both Mac and Windows systems than it is to set up and maintain a well-running Hackintosh. My biggest issue of late is there's just no support for the latest GPUs and certain CPU platforms. So the system is compromised before you even get to running your apps. Sure OSX will run just fine on an X299 build, but it's not 100% supported for full functionality and performance is pretty much 'meh..' You won't have support for the new nVidia RTX GPUs and you won't benefit from the stuff that nVidia and RED are working on while running OSX. Need Windows for all that.

You don't need to go to a bigger X299 build to get the best performance. Some of the best-performing builds I'm assembling lately look like this:

Gigabyte Z390 Designare motherboard (TB3, ac WiFi, etc..)
i9-9900K CPU (8 cores, 5GHz turbo, easily OC'd)
Gigabyte RTX 2080 OC GPU
4 x DDR4 3200MHz (Corsair or G.Skill) get at least 32GB total, but 64 would be best.
Samsung 970 Pro 1TB M.2 SSD (OS/ apps)

Anyway, that's the basics and build out from there. You don't need to de-lid the CPU to get good clocks as long as it's well cooled and there are 2 M.2 sockets on the motherboard as well as a lot of other storage connectivity. Integrated Thunderbolt 3 with two ports right on the rear panel. There's also the Gigabyte Aorus Extreme motherboard, which is double the price, but has a few more things onboard, including integrated 10GE. I prefer the Designare one above for cost and overall utility. Can add an ASUS 10GE PCIe card for about $100. Although, I would recommend a good one like Intel or ATTO. Have had the ASUS one overheat itself. Likewise, that's also why I lean away from the integrated motherboard 10GE options. They tend to suffer under big loads if your doing hours of big file transfers.

OSX does run fine on these builds with some tweaking. Follow the guides at Tonymacx86. An X299 build can get you more cores and more RAM, more PCIe slots, etc.. But you're also spending a lot more money. The build above, complete with water cooling and 64GB RAM should still be well under $3000. Also super easy to pick up that or a very similar configuration from most any PC builder if you don't want to do the build yourself.

Going Hackintosh is also a strong argument for using an AMD GPU. You can save a bit of money with the AMD, but they're also not as powerful as the latest nVidia offerings. Which makes little difference in the Mac world as there are no drivers to support nVidia's latest. While support for AMD's latest is present to some degree in the newest OS beta releases.

The one other option you may want to consider is a system like the new Dell/Alienware Area 51. Similar to the above build and very much performance tuned. They have the Dell tax on them, as with any name brand PC offering. In that regard, you may as well just buy the iMac Pro -- which is a truly awesome system. Have a few iMac Pros here and love them. Best desktop display you can get, married with a pretty decent little workstation PC. 10-core / 128GB RAM / Vega64 GPU and 1TB SSD (2TB if budget allows) is the sweet spot. They are expensive, but not as bad as you think when taking the display and 4x TB3 + more USB 3.1 ports into account.
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
[...] In that regard, you may as well just buy the iMac Pro -- which is a truly awesome system. Have a few iMac Pros here and love them. Best desktop display you can get, married with a pretty decent little workstation PC. 10-core / 128GB RAM / Vega64 GPU and 1TB SSD (2TB if budget allows) is the sweet spot. They are expensive, but not as bad as you think when taking the display and 4x TB3 + more USB 3.1 ports into account.
Click to expand...

I was feeling pretty smart about having bought just such a system until last week. It seems that the Apple OSX updates are slowly breaking stuff that's not well maintained, and it seems that RED's new focus on nVidia GPUs has left RR-X in the category of "not well maintained". Furthermore, Apple's problems with nVidia means that there's not a great path to the future, and the updates that have been necessary to keep Resolve working well have begun to break my RR-X. It works OK within Resolve, but long transcodes in RCX-Pro have stopped working. (Shorter transcodes work fine, and long ones complete successfully without RR-X--they just take 4x longer.)

"It sucks to be me...la la la la" -- Avenue Q
 
The imacs screens are good but I acctually found them to be to small / resolution densed. Had the lg equlent 5k screens and traded for bigger UHD screens. And sure there is a lot of good things with the imacs but considering they are not upgradeable and they are pretty far from latest and greatest hardware I find them to be a quite bad investment. The need for external enclosures for raids, video cards etc does not make it better. Then added to that the poor cooling design which means shit will likliy fry if overclocked.
 
Well, you can upgrade the RAM. ;) Technically, the SSD is upgradeable too, but it’s proprietary and not directly available from Apple other than as repair components, not sure if there’s enough demand for a third party like OWC to offer their own.

I do expect the iMac to see an update here in a couple months, probably at or around WWDC in June. Intel should have updated Xeon CPUs to offer for this platform around then or shortly after and I expect a shift to AMD Navi GPU since support is in the beta OSX builds.

The non-upgradeablility is a factor for some, but we have to look at this systems for what they are: an all-in-one. No one makes an AIO that is fully upgradeable, and the market for upgrades on these systems is very small.

I understand about the screen, some people just like larger and/or fewer pixels. I personally would love 6K at the 28” or so size or better yet 8K at 30~32” size. My Dell 8K monitor is pretty nice in terms of pixels and overall screen size, but it’s a shit monitor with distortion, light leaks, terrible contrast, etc.. But cool nonetheless and can be picked up at a decent price when Dell runs sales.

I would never use or recommend the iMac Pro as a primary station for doing lots of transcodes. Makes no sense, it’s a primary workstation. Build a PC with a decent CPU and one or two good GPUs to handle the transcodes and grunt work.

External storage doesn’t bother me. Actually it’s preferred most of the time these days. A few of my iMacs have TB RAIDs on them, but most use SAN storage over 10GE. Managing a dozen or more systems with big local volumes and trying to handle backups, data accessibility amongst systems on larger projects, etc.. you’ll go for that SAN real quick unless wasting time moving files about and keeping track of duplicate data is something you really enjoy.

It all comes down to what people need on an individual level. And threads like this make me cringe at times as it’s very difficult to recommend a single solution to someone. There’s no possible way I could work on a daily basis with one or two workstations. And I’ve had so many multi-processor Xeon PCs and Mac Pro towers and laptops and everything else that it’s all just a blur.

@ Michael — I’ve had a few of my iMacs start acting up with various OS X builds lately. Often a reinstall (total wipe, not just install-over) seems to cure most. Biggest regret I have with the iMac Pro systems here is I should have bought all 8 and 10 core systems. Apple has always had issues like this with most of their systems... The MacBook Pro doesn’t have the same amount of problems most of the time because they focus all their efforts there as it’s where all the sales are.
 
There will likely come a dual CPU Macpro quite soon. But then again one could probably build two such hacks with better spec for the same cost.

For me it's esential to have the machine and all the other shit away from the screens. 7 screens / computer heads in the same room... All with thier own pile of perefinalia. Trying to make that with 3meter thunderbolt limitation makes it look like a bunch of kids having a quake lan. It would simply not fly well with clients. Machines need to be moved out of sight in a cooled cabinet close to servers and all the other stuff. 10GBe is great but we simply also need dedicated much faster raids on each machine. 16bit EXRs and a lot of people pushing and pulling at the same time makes the servers choke.

But yes everyone got different needs of course and for lot of people the iMacs are great. But personally I just love my hacks playing back full 16bit 8k in a UHD timline with a grade on it without cache like it was a freaking pal clip. It blows my mind every time.
 
"Where there is no counsel, the people fall; But in the multitude of counselors there is safety."

I appreciate the discussion - it's helpful.
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
........

You don't need to go to a bigger X299 build to get the best performance. Some of the best-performing builds I'm assembling lately look like this:

Gigabyte Z390 Designare motherboard (TB3, ac WiFi, etc..)
i9-9900K CPU (8 cores, 5GHz turbo, easily OC'd)
Gigabyte RTX 2080 OC GPU
4 x DDR4 3200MHz (Corsair or G.Skill) get at least 32GB total, but 64 would be best.
Samsung 970 Pro 1TB M.2 SSD (OS/ apps)

Anyway, that's the basics and build out from there. You don't need to de-lid the CPU to get good clocks as long as it's well cooled and there are 2 M.2 sockets on the motherboard as well as a lot of other storage connectivity. Integrated Thunderbolt 3 with two ports right on the rear panel. There's also the Gigabyte Aorus Extreme motherboard, which is double the price, but has a few more things onboard, including integrated 10GE. I prefer the Designare one above for cost and overall utility. Can add an ASUS 10GE PCIe card for about $100. Although, I would recommend a good one like Intel or ATTO. Have had the ASUS one overheat itself. Likewise, that's also why I lean away from the integrated motherboard 10GE options. They tend to suffer under big loads if your doing hours of big file transfers.

......
Click to expand...

Thanks for posting this Jeff. I've been looking at building a new pc and the 9900k/Z390 was the favourite option so far but was struggling to choose a motherboard. I was a bit concerned about adding extra hardware such as a second M2 or a 10GE card given the limited number of PCIe lanes.

Great to hear that it works well with 1xGPU and 2xM2, just wondering if there would be a performance hit if you had to add a 10GE PCIe card as well?

Thanks for all the useful info.

cheers

neil
 
Neil Purcell said:
Thanks for posting this Jeff. I've been looking at building a new pc and the 9900k/Z390 was the favourite option so far but was struggling to choose a motherboard. I was a bit concerned about adding extra hardware such as a second M2 or a 10GE card given the limited number of PCIe lanes.

Great to hear that it works well with 1xGPU and 2xM2, just wondering if there would be a performance hit if you had to add a 10GE PCIe card as well?

Thanks for all the useful info.

cheers

neil
Click to expand...

Try to find a lay-out of the motherboard you want, some PCIe slots are shared.
Z390 has a maximum of 24 PCIe-3 slots. 16 for the GPU, 4 for the NVMe and the 4 left overs are oftened shared with the second NVMe, SATA, NIC, etc...
 
Misha Engel said:
Try to find a lay-out of the motherboard you want, some PCIe slots are shared.
Z390 has a maximum of 24 PCIe-3 slots. 16 for the GPU, 4 for the NVMe and the 4 left overs are oftened shared with the second NVMe, SATA, NIC, etc...
Click to expand...
Yes so seam tight for dedicated bandwidth if there is both TB3 card and 10GBe no?
 
Most of the Z390 boards, will run the GPU slot at X8 in order to deliver enough bandwidth elsewhere. So you can only get X16 on many of these boards if you disable a couple of the PCIe slots. Ultimately, it doesn't really matter. X8 is actually plenty good for 99.9% of everything. Other than a full-bandwidth dump of the entire GPU memory contents, nothing really saturates an X8 pipe.. let alone X16. The GPU itself is still the bottleneck, especially for computationally intensive tasks. The PCIe interface is not what's holding it back. Probably a couple more generations to go before we absolutely need X16 consistently.

That said, if you do want to run one of these systems with a performance RAID card in addition to a 10GE card and GPU, then you best go with an X299 build. Or take a look at some of the AMD offerings as they're giving more PCIe lanes. Overall the systems are about the same cost to build, pretty much all the same components. The exception is the CPU itself. You can get a few more cores for the same, sometimes less money with AMD. Just be aware that Intel's cores are still a bit more powerful on a core vs. core basis and Intel prices climb rapidly with core count.
 
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