OMG I HEART MAC so much.
Of course, I built a Hackintosh, and it has been my faithfully awesome system. 100% perfect, I don't consider it anything but a Mac. yeah, it's no longer the fastest thing around, but my gosh, it runs so sweet and I'm able to do everything I need. And in case you forgot, "Everything" is major stuff; HD video editing for Network Television, a 3D title sequence for a major Cable network, etc.
So, not just blogging to express my continued happiness but rather to talk about the new system I built for some filmmaker friends.
They are about to start on a pretty large movie and, because it's SAG, they are getting sucked dry by that vampiric actors guild. Hence, they were trying to figure out what they could do for a post production system as theirs is quite creaky and old. They had bad luck with a Hack they built several years ago and were thus quite wary, but the closest thing in their budget range was a mid-high end Imac. Nothing against Imacs but == they are what they are. I like modular systems that I can get into. No all in one for me. Oh, and I also like POWER. The iMac is an amazing machine and actually is better than most MacPros these days, but damn, for the price, you sure are giving up a lot of things.
I ran numbers and showed them that I could build a system that would be faster than any iMac on the market for about 1600.00 dollars LESS than what Apple was asking.
They went for it.
I have to say, that in the three and a half years since I got into the Hackintosh thing, quite a bit of advancement in the smoothness of operation has happened. Provided you use the right parts, something that has always been important, you can get a Hackintosh up and running about twice as fast as a windows machine. That says so much for the state of the computer business.
With the aid of Tonymac86 and insanelymac.com, I had a fairly painless installation.
the specs:
| Qty. | Image | Product Description | Unit Price | Savings | Total Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 |  | $99.99 | $99.99 | ||
| 1 |  | $169.99 | -$20.00 Instant | $149.99 | |
| 1 |  | $159.99 | $159.99 | ||
| 1 |  | $74.99 | -$7.00 Instant | $67.99 | |
| 1 |  | $139.99 | -$10.00 Instant | $129.99 | |
| 1 |  | $299.99 | $299.99 | ||
| 1 |  | $284.99 | $284.99 | ||
| 1 |  | $149.99 | -$15.00 Instant | $134.99 | |
| 1 |  | $17.99 | $17.99 | ||
| Subtotal: | $1,345.91 | ||||
I followed the LION INSTALL procedure that Tonymac86 presented, basically installing a (legit) copy of Lion from a thumbdrive. The key is that the thumbdrive is modified slightly by unibeast.
Once this was done, I actually went to Insanelymac and found a beautiful and painless install for the GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3
Upon reboot, etc. I held my breath and then watched with glee as it went right into osx lion (10.7.4). Sound = boom worked. Sleep...
BOOM WORKED!
and so on.
The only real thing that involved working under the hood were were some Pstates because of the 10.7.4 update. The short of the long technical answer is that without these adjustments, the cpu doesn't open up and move as fast as it should.
I am sure that these will be taken care of soon by the genius's out there. And in any case it doesn't matter because the system IS working fine with the pstate adjustment, fast as blazes.
How fast?
geekbench test... (32 bit, cause I'm too much of a cheapskate to buy the 64 but version)
An overall Score of: 12850
Integer Performance
| Integer | 10930 | |
|---|---|---|
| Blowfish single-core scalar | 2520 111 MB/sec | |
| Blowfish multi-core scalar | 17717 726 MB/sec | |
| Text Compress single-core scalar | 3303 10.6 MB/sec | |
| Text Compress multi-core scalar | 17768 58.3 MB/sec | |
| Text Decompress single-core scalar | 3608 14.8 MB/sec | |
| Text Decompress multi-core scalar | 20207 80.5 MB/sec | |
| Image Compress single-core scalar | 2892 23.9 Mpixels/sec | |
| Image Compress multi-core scalar | 15371 129 Mpixels/sec | |
| Image Decompress single-core scalar | 2925 49.1 Mpixels/sec | |
| Image Decompress multi-core scalar | 14019 229 Mpixels/sec | |
| Lua single-core scalar | 5616 2.16 Mnodes/sec | |
| Lua multi-core scalar | 25218 9.70 Mnodes/sec |
Floating Point Performance
| Floating Point | 20005 | |
|---|---|---|
| Mandelbrot single-core scalar | 3309 2.20 Gflops | |
| Mandelbrot multi-core scalar | 24326 15.9 Gflops | |
| Dot Product single-core scalar | 5306 2.56 Gflops | |
| Dot Product multi-core scalar | 31101 14.2 Gflops | |
| Dot Product single-core vector | 6514 7.80 Gflops | |
| Dot Product multi-core vector | 36320 37.8 Gflops | |
| LU Decomposition single-core scalar | 1614 1.44 Gflops | |
| LU Decomposition multi-core scalar | 4006 3.51 Gflops | |
| Primality Test single-core scalar | 7822 1.17 Gflops | |
| Primality Test multi-core scalar | 31524 5.85 Gflops | |
| Sharpen Image single-core scalar | 7331 17.1 Mpixels/sec | |
| Sharpen Image multi-core scalar | 48349 111 Mpixels/sec | |
| Blur Image single-core scalar | 8843 7.00 Mpixels/sec | |
| Blur Image multi-core scalar | 63706 50.1 Mpixels/sec |
Memory Performance
| Memory | 6745 | |
|---|---|---|
| Read Sequential single-core scalar | 7868 9.63 GB/sec | |
| Write Sequential single-core scalar | 11613 7.94 GB/sec | |
| Stdlib Allocate single-core scalar | 4704 17.6 Mallocs/sec | |
| Stdlib Write single-core scalar | 4056 8.40 GB/sec | |
| Stdlib Copy single-core scalar | 5488 5.66 GB/sec |
Stream Performance
| Stream | 6740 | |
|---|---|---|
| Stream Copy single-core scalar | 7536 10.3 GB/sec | |
| Stream Copy single-core vector | 8480 11.0 GB/sec | |
| Stream Scale single-core scalar | 7944 10.3 GB/sec | |
| Stream Scale single-core vector | 8221 11.1 GB/sec | |
| Stream Add single-core scalar | 2957 4.46 GB/sec | |
| Stream Add single-core vector | 8845 12.3 GB/sec | |
| Stream Triad single-core scalar | 3388 4.68 GB/sec | |
| Stream Triad single-core vector | 6550 12.3 GB/sec |
As I said four years ago, I continue to say: Anyone who doubts how well a hackintosh works (as in-- better than a Mac) simply doesn't know the reality of how AWESOME these systems are.
Better
faster
cheaper
wow!
