How the Hackintosh Suddenly Caught Fire

Anarchy amid the abdication of Mac Pro

By Mark Christiansen

http://provideocoalition.com/mchristiansen/story/how-the-hackintosh-suddenly-caught-fire

@soundgh2 @ninetto TB works but isn't hot swappable--that's not working "fine" to me but acceptable if you're just leaving a video card plugged in all the time.

Oh really? I didn't know that. That's interesting. You're saying Mac TB ports are also not hot swappable? Because my older ASUS-based build was.

I'm holding out hope that Gigabyte fixes this in a firmware update once/if Apple releases their new Mac Pros with similar support.

@jleo

RE that inane provideocoalition article, a better title would be "In Which The Inexperienced, Tech-Unsavvy Author Lets An Air Quotes Friend Build Him An Air Quotes Work Computer With El Agua Pumping In And Out Of It, Almost Comically Bad Cable Layout Implying So Many Worrisome Things About The Builder I Don't Have Room Here To List Them All, And An Optical Drive So Ass-Cheap Its Power Supply Burns Up And Takes The Whole System Down With It". The article actually has almost nothing to do with Hackintosh and everything to do with why it's never a good idea to have a friend build you a work computer you plan to make the centerpiece of your livelihood.

At the very least, I hope the takeaway here from the article is you should absolutely, positively not consider a Hackintosh unless YOU are the one who builds, maintains, and is ultimately responsible for its uptime.

@soundGH2 I have two ML servers built around Z68 boards and i5 Sandy Bridges. They never go down. Most reliable servers I've used.

I just want to make it clear that I build Hackintoshes for a variety of reasons - to own a higher performance Mac Pro than Apple currently offers at a fraction of the price, to deploy media servers and centers, and at home to provide family members with tiny and silent Mac workstations hanging off the back of the monitor. But I go into it fully accepting that I am where the buck stops if something goes wrong. I've been doing this long enough to not have this happen very often but the fact is OSX keeps evolving and you have to keep up with it. This is why it's folly to have someone build you a Hackintosh if you don't know how to design, build, and repair them yourself. It's not the same as building a Windows PC. The friend who builds you a Hackintosh today will not be your friend tomorrow when you've pestered him every time you run Software Update and ankle your rig again.

@Shaveblog

thought it might get a chuckle..

I've had many phone calls in the wee hours from family members who clicked on Hack Killer button ( software update )...Now they have to buy the overpriced Realintoshes!

Thanks for No Update! That'll save a bundle of headaches. Now if I can get the family Hackusers to stop reinstalling Flash player...

@alcomposer I'm not as familiar with the Clover bootloader as I am with Chimera/Chameleon. I understand Clover is purportedly UEFI but what does this really bring in terms of advantages over Chameleon? I'm not dubious, I just don't seem to notice anything suboptimal about my installed base of Chimera builds that might be attributed to the bootloader. But as always I am open to new and better methods if they develop. Interested in what improvements you saw using Clover vs. Chimera.

@alcomposer

Very interesting. I don't follow the Hackintosh fora much but from what I gather from Google, there's a kind of nerd rage between Tonymac on the Chimera side and everyone else moving to Clover. I feel Tonymac did heroic work in consolidating a lot of disparate noise and dev chatter into one unified Hackintosh installer, and I owe much of my comfort level with this stuff to his site and guides. That said, if Clover does the job better and makes for an even more stable and vanilla OSX installation, I'm all for trying it. Any particular guides you recommend?

@ninetto Well, I don't know if the bootloader falls into the same category of secondary tweaks like SSDT. One you can't boot without, and the other is an add-on which even its proponents admit is mostly a cosmetic patch.

If all Clover brings to the table is faster boot, then no, it's not worth it to me in terms of learning a whole new boot loader scheme with all its quirks, care and feeding. Chimera boots my Hackintoshes faster than any real Apple I've ever owned, so boot speed just isn't an issue for me, plus I rarely need to reboot anyway. But if Clover does bring true UEFI boot to Hackintosh, then there are significant reasons to investigate it as a Chameleon/Chimera replacement. Just making Hackintoshes more resistant to Software Update snafus would be reason enough to go Clover.

In researching this over the past few days I feel Clover is more a work in progress at this point than a fully mature AIO installer like Chimera/MultiBeast, but there is impressive work being done and when it's ready for prime time I'll surely give it a try on a test system.

Laptops I've given up on. Mostly because I'm iPad only these days when doing field work, by choice. But also because even when I'd get just the right combo of OSX-friendly laptop and all the right kexts, it still meant dealing with the inherent shitty experience of using an HP/Dell/etc. laptop. I know lots of guys own a single computer and it is a laptop but that's really no way to live and if you do live that way you're far closer to losing all your shit at any given moment due to any number of cost-cutting measures than you should be.

Even when I did manage to align the stars and put OSX on a WinOEM laptop, the cheap construction, the inelegance of every parameter of design, the bendy creaky case, and just the overall dismal MTBF of Windows laptops permanently soured me on trying to find my perfect Hackintosh portable. Closest I came was an Acer a few years ago and even that was a POS compared to just spending a few hundred more and getting a refurb MacBook. I'm much happier on an iPad, and good riddance to laptops. I'll never buy another one as long as I can have a powerful OSX desktop in the studio and an iPad on the road. I've even done FCPX edits from the road using iTeleport to beam into my desktop.

My opinion is for video editing/color correction you are not really going to see that much difference between a 650ti and a 660ti.

The jump in bandwidth would come with the 680 which has 2x as much. (256bit bus vs 192bit and an extra mem controller)

Ohhhh, but just stumbled on this table at tonymac: http://www.tonymacx86.com/graphics/95703-nvidia-performance-benchmarks-10-8-3-geforce-gt-640-gtx-680-a.html

which seems to show rather substansial differences, depending on brand and specific models of the cards you mention.

Depending on your needs you might find the previous GTX 5xx generation more performant, or the 680 being total overkill. That test on tonymac is with a game engine benchmark, doesn't say much about video editing (in case that's what you're after). Have a look here: http://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/3823/graphics-card-for-video-editing/p3

@jclmedia I run an ATI HD5870 in my main video editing Hackintosh, as it's ideal for the apps I work with - FCPX and After Effects for the most part. It's plenty fast for what I do and with an aftermarket cooler it's all but silent. I've used Nvidia cards but I feel for a Hackintosh primarily doing FCPX, it's hard to significantly beat the HD5870 without spending silly money, and then you're dealing with more noise and lots more watts out of the wall.

Apple coded FCPX for ATI GPUs at the high end and Intel HD3000/4000 integrated graphics at the consumer end, and this is what works best in my experience. Getting the very best from a high-end Nvidia GPU is still a bit of a crapshoot with a Hackintosh. Gaming performance and video production performance are not the same thing, and what you want to be looking at is Open_CL performance (Luxmark benchmark) not Open_GL (Heaven or whatever that elf village walkthru benchmark is called). It looks like Adobe is moving away from CUDA toward standard Open_CL as well so that's the benchmark you want to be looking at if you're building a machine to edit video.