Building another PC - Hackintosh

#1

nightwatch

0 Frags – +

I'm building a computer for a friend who knows absolutely nothing about computers. It will be used professionally for motion graphics and video editing so it needs to be pretty decent and last a good while - I don't want to have to build another computer for this particular person again soon.

The catch is that it must run MacOS (either Lion or Mountain Lion) as the primary operating system. I fought a long time trying to convince my friend that a Windows machine would be easier to build for, but she's convinced she needs a Mac for the kinds of things she's doing. We looked at the options to buy a Mac from the Apple Store or a 3rd party retailer but they're much too expensive for what you get (in my opinion) and they're much too expensive for her wallet.

So it will have to be a Hackintosh. I've looked into the options for getting a clean install without any problems and it looks like it can be quite finicky to set up. You also have to be picky about the parts you choose. I've used the 2013 Pro build from Kakewalk as the base, but I need some help selecting a few pieces. I'd prefer to buy from newegg because of their excellent customer support but if I have to buy from Amazon or somewhere else I will.

Here's the current setup:

CPU: Intel Core i7-3770

I'm building a computer for a friend who knows absolutely nothing about computers. It will be used professionally for motion graphics and video editing so it needs to be pretty decent and last a good while - I don't want to have to build another computer for this particular person again soon.

The catch is that it must run MacOS (either Lion or Mountain Lion) as the primary operating system. I fought a long time trying to convince my friend that a Windows machine would be easier to build for, but she's convinced she needs a Mac for the kinds of things she's doing. We looked at the options to buy a Mac from the Apple Store or a 3rd party retailer but they're much too expensive for what you get (in my opinion) and they're much too expensive for her wallet.

So it will have to be a Hackintosh. I've looked into the options for getting a clean install without any problems and it looks like it can be quite finicky to set up. You also have to be picky about the parts you choose. I've used the 2013 Pro build from [url=www.kakewalk.se/computer-builds/]Kakewalk[/url] as the base, but I need some help selecting a few pieces. I'd prefer to buy from newegg because of their excellent customer support but if I have to buy from Amazon or somewhere else I will.

Here's the current setup:

[url=http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116502]CPU: Intel Core i7-3770[/url]

#2

wrecheddddd

0 Frags – +

If she's not doing any gaming, something like a 760 gtx is fine and they are a lot easier to find. They also cost ~400 less. Avoid green drives unless you don't care about speed. Go for the black edition instead.

#3

rQwire

1 Frags – +

Message me on steam or mumble or something so we can go into this a bit more detail if you want, but from you wrote:

Change the Green to a Red Drive - Red drives are made for server-like read/writes and 24 hour operations, which I would assume a video editing machine would have constant encoding and such.

The GPU: I honestly don't know enough about video encoding and editing to even comment on the GPU really. While I understand that 680/780 is very capable, ther are specific lines of GPUs made for the sole purpose of video editing. I heard of people using a CUDA card for the primary editing and using a GTX 780 only for speeding up the process or something alone those lines.

Bottom line, I think this is the wrong place to ask for something like this. There are a lot of professionals in video editing with vast amount of knowledge in hardware and related issues. Better seek help elsewhere?

Message me on steam or mumble or something so we can go into this a bit more detail if you want, but from you wrote:

Change the Green to a Red Drive - Red drives are made for server-like read/writes and 24 hour operations, which I would assume a video editing machine would have constant encoding and such.

The GPU: I honestly don't know enough about video encoding and editing to even comment on the GPU really. While I understand that 680/780 is very capable, ther are specific lines of GPUs made for the sole purpose of video editing. I heard of people using a CUDA card for the primary editing and using a GTX 780 only for speeding up the process or something alone those lines.

Bottom line, I think this is the wrong place to ask for something like this. There are a lot of professionals in video editing with vast amount of knowledge in hardware and related issues. Better seek help elsewhere?

#4

extracrispy

2 Frags – +

here i found the site youre looking for.
http://www.tonymacx86.com/home.php

#5

Fzero

1 Frags – +

I honestly prefer Amazon over Newegg now. It's so easy to get a replacement for anything and it takes two seconds. One of the greatest is if you buy something that has an internal battery, like a surveillance cam, you can't legally ship it back. Bought one with a bad power strip, they gave me a new one without shipping the old one back. Spend 10 bucks for a new one, two for the price of one :)

#6

OCTANE

1 Frags – +

if you dont overclock i would pick a xeon processor rather than a i7
and if you oc get a unlocked processor

#7

nightwatch

1 Frags – +

extracrispyhere i found the site youre looking for.
http://www.tonymacx86.com/home.php

Thanks, I'll take a look over there.

rQwire--advice--

Thanks man!

[quote=extracrispy]here i found the site youre looking for.
http://www.tonymacx86.com/home.php[/quote]
Thanks, I'll take a look over there.
[quote=rQwire]--advice--[/quote]
Thanks man!