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Mac Pro Build For a Music Producer; Hackintosh?
- Thread starter HelpMcgee
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What a weird thing to say...
FYI Mick Guzauski, a legendary multiple Grammy winning mixer who also mixed the last Daft Punk album, uses a Hackintosh as his main machine. https://youtu.be/6uugshogPFE?t=510
If your a serious music producer then stability should be one of your priorities which means an Offical Mac. You don't want system crashes whilst recording your once in a lifetime performance. Connecting hardware such as your soundcards require drivers compatible and tested with apple chipsets so it's adding more worms to the can you'll open.
Agreed, If I was a customer I'd be much more concerned about the quality of the mix than what kind of machine was making it.
I've walked out of highly respected studios just because their toilet facilities weren't clean.
If I'm paying hundreds or indeed thousands for studio time I don't want to see someone cutting corners in order to save a few pounds, whether that be from not hiring a cleaner or running a hack. as soon as you've seen one corner cut you'll start finding others that have been cut too.
I know that it is cutting corners if I have booked a studio claiming to be specced with Apple gear only to turn up and find a hack sitting under the desk.
If you want to use a hack in your business then that is totally fine, just make sure that you specify that on the spec list/inventory when you are taking bookings.
How very rock and roll!
Not rock and roll at all, just too much experience to know that if someone can't be bothered to clean their toilet facilities then that will be the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
You may be surprised how often it happens. Often they will just state that they have Logic available, rather than what spec box it's running on.
The point I was making though is that people will walk away from your business if they see a hack in place of true Mac gear. It really doesn't matter if you have the most stable powerful hack ever built, it doesn't look professional and customers often wont trust it.
People meaning customers, and including myself.
I have personally seen recording artists walk out of studios for far more trivial things.
I've seen artists refuse to perform shows because the venue didn't have the specific model of microphone they wanted to use available, even though the ones available were of a higher quality.
The fact is if customers are paying and they don't see what they are expecting then they walk.
Wow…my clients work with me because of ME, not the computer I use. When the time comes to replace my 2012 MP, I will likely be building a Hack. Not because I want to cut corners, but because Apple no longer makes the machine I need and I need something better than they can offer me.
Sometimes it's just better to go with the flow to keep the client happy. If they judge your end result or the overall quality of your work by the amount of available toilet paper, just get a few extra rolls alright. Do your clients require a real Mac? Just get one. In the end they are paying you.
But this is totally different compared to the question if a hackintosh is up for the job vs a real MacPro. And as many posters have pointed out, they surely are up for the job. And they even can do it for a lot less money with more performance. And yes, I tried this myself and installed OS X 10.10.3 on a separate HD so i could switch to windows easy. And no I did not just check my e-mail on it or wrote a letter in Word. I did a big 4K video editing project on it and a 3D animation/rendering project without any issues.
But: (and this is a big one ) They require a lot more effort to get up and running perfectly compared to a real mac that's just plug-and-play. And you can run into unforeseen consequences (yes, thats a half life reference) despite things are much easier nowadays. For example my GA-Z87-UD3H board is on the recommend list of mainboards. Yet I experienced random system freezes and I had to flash the F8m bios (a user modified bios) that would resolve the crashes. However I was already at F9 bios and could't downgrade without the use of another third party tool. After finally installing the bios the crashes were a lot less frequent but not gone totally. I also had to manually adjust some memory subtimings to get it all sorted out. This took at least whole day to figure out and at least another day to check if the solution really worked.
Second example: The TP-Link 4800 PCI express WiFi card works out of the box on MacOSX and is also on the recommended list. However, I experience incidental 'freezes' of the WiFi connection. The icon doesn't show anything wrong and the connection seems good, but there's no data transfer at all. Disconnecting and reconnecting solves the problem for another few hours or even a day. A quick google search shows i'm not the only one. Hopefully this issue is resolved when i receive my PCI Express Aiport adapter + original apple mini PCI-E wifi card. For the moment I use an old router as a wireless client (kinda like an USB dongle) but its connected to the LAN port of my pc. This works ok.
I consider myself pretty tech savvy, but even with recommended hardware the path was not smooth at all. Apart from these two initial issues everything works without any problems. Computer runs 24/7 (including sleep and wake up cycles). After effects, Premiere, Final Cut X, AutoDesk Maya, various games, multiple virtual machines, it all works fine. USB3 speeds are good, my dual 27" monitors work good too.
I even put it head to head with a real MacPro 6 Core from a colleague and it does outperform that machine by a little bit because of its more modern and higher clocked 4 core I7 4790 CPU. I'm not talking about synthetic benchmarks but real scenario's like rendering H264 video or 3D animations. Interestingly enough, the dual FirePro cards on the MacPro proved to be of no performance gain compared to the single GTX780 in the hackintosh. Not in the Maya Viewport 2.0, not in After Effects Raytrace test, not in Final Cut X, not in Motion and not in Premiere Pro realtime preview and rendering. I know this is a different discussion, but I have serious doubts about the real world gains of those FirePro cards. There's no excuse a single GTX780 400 dollar gaming card matches 1500 dollar dual firepro cards. And I'm not talking games here, but real world professional use where the firepro cards should make a difference.
Anyway, the question to ask first is: How do I present myself to my clients? Does a hackintosh 'fit in'? Secondly: Are you willing to spend time and effort (and maybe quite some time and effort) on a hackintosh for the initial set-up and the upgrade process later on when there's a new OS X version? If yes, sure go ahead and save a lot of dollars and buy yourself an extra long summer holiday
But this is totally different compared to the question if a hackintosh is up for the job vs a real MacPro. And as many posters have pointed out, they surely are up for the job. And they even can do it for a lot less money with more performance. And yes, I tried this myself and installed OS X 10.10.3 on a separate HD so i could switch to windows easy. And no I did not just check my e-mail on it or wrote a letter in Word. I did a big 4K video editing project on it and a 3D animation/rendering project without any issues.
But: (and this is a big one
) They require a lot more effort to get up and running perfectly compared to a real mac that's just plug-and-play. And you can run into unforeseen consequences (yes, thats a half life reference) despite things are much easier nowadays. For example my GA-Z87-UD3H board is on the recommend list of mainboards. Yet I experienced random system freezes and I had to flash the F8m bios (a user modified bios) that would resolve the crashes. However I was already at F9 bios and could't downgrade without the use of another third party tool. After finally installing the bios the crashes were a lot less frequent but not gone totally. I also had to manually adjust some memory subtimings to get it all sorted out. This took at least whole day to figure out and at least another day to check if the solution really worked.Second example: The TP-Link 4800 PCI express WiFi card works out of the box on MacOSX and is also on the recommended list. However, I experience incidental 'freezes' of the WiFi connection. The icon doesn't show anything wrong and the connection seems good, but there's no data transfer at all. Disconnecting and reconnecting solves the problem for another few hours or even a day. A quick google search shows i'm not the only one. Hopefully this issue is resolved when i receive my PCI Express Aiport adapter + original apple mini PCI-E wifi card. For the moment I use an old router as a wireless client (kinda like an USB dongle) but its connected to the LAN port of my pc. This works ok.
I consider myself pretty tech savvy, but even with recommended hardware the path was not smooth at all. Apart from these two initial issues everything works without any problems. Computer runs 24/7 (including sleep and wake up cycles). After effects, Premiere, Final Cut X, AutoDesk Maya, various games, multiple virtual machines, it all works fine. USB3 speeds are good, my dual 27" monitors work good too.
I even put it head to head with a real MacPro 6 Core from a colleague and it does outperform that machine by a little bit because of its more modern and higher clocked 4 core I7 4790 CPU. I'm not talking about synthetic benchmarks but real scenario's like rendering H264 video or 3D animations. Interestingly enough, the dual FirePro cards on the MacPro proved to be of no performance gain compared to the single GTX780 in the hackintosh. Not in the Maya Viewport 2.0, not in After Effects Raytrace test, not in Final Cut X, not in Motion and not in Premiere Pro realtime preview and rendering. I know this is a different discussion, but I have serious doubts about the real world gains of those FirePro cards. There's no excuse a single GTX780 400 dollar gaming card matches 1500 dollar dual firepro cards. And I'm not talking games here, but real world professional use where the firepro cards should make a difference.
Anyway, the question to ask first is: How do I present myself to my clients? Does a hackintosh 'fit in'? Secondly: Are you willing to spend time and effort (and maybe quite some time and effort) on a hackintosh for the initial set-up and the upgrade process later on when there's a new OS X version? If yes, sure go ahead and save a lot of dollars and buy yourself an extra long summer holiday
Ive put a few Hackintoshes together since Snow Leopard and all I can say is, forget it.
I have just put one together using recommended HW on 10.10.3 and for the life of me I cant get the Nvidia card working. Theres a few "fixes " around but not one of them solve my problem. This was a clean install not an update. So my advice is the time you waste playing around with the " hack" the money would be better put towards a real Mac- and you will waste a lot of time fixing problems every time theres an update with a Hackintosh, I guarantee it.
Im not professing that a legit Mac is more stable than a Hack when you finally get it working, I am saying if you value your time buy a real Mac!
BTW I love playing around with Hackintoshes, because I enjoy the challenge - but they are not for your average user. HTH.
I have just put one together using recommended HW on 10.10.3 and for the life of me I cant get the Nvidia card working. Theres a few "fixes " around but not one of them solve my problem. This was a clean install not an update. So my advice is the time you waste playing around with the " hack" the money would be better put towards a real Mac- and you will waste a lot of time fixing problems every time theres an update with a Hackintosh, I guarantee it.
Im not professing that a legit Mac is more stable than a Hack when you finally get it working, I am saying if you value your time buy a real Mac!
BTW I love playing around with Hackintoshes, because I enjoy the challenge - but they are not for your average user. HTH.
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Do you have a Maxwell GPU?
Sometimes it helps, disabling the GPU and using the IGP to install one of the many drivers available, for instance only 346.01.02f02 works for me, not f04, while using 10.10.3.
I simply updated from 10.10.2 to 10.10.3 though.
It boot fine with IGP, when I disable in BIOS and put in a GTX570,I get a black screen a third of the way through boot.. Can only boot with nv_disable=1
Loaded matching Nvidia web drivers, etc nothing works.
Will try the earlier drivers as you suggest and report back. Sorry dont want to hijack this thread, but this sort of highlights what Im saying about Hackintoshes..
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I have
Maybe you have to try different Nvidia web drivers, there are four for me. One of the MacVidCards or Netkas threads has the links to them, as far as I can remember.
Ah, nope, this is where the links are: http://www.macvidcards.com/which-driver-should-i-install-for-my-new-gpu.html
I have the 970 and 4790K by the way on a Gryphon Z97.
Kernel Flags -f nvda_drv=1
GraphicsEnabler No
and I don't think I have the IGP disabled, maybe next time I boot I look it up. Though I often have problems booting up, though for now booting verbose seems to do the trick.GraphicsEnabler No
Maybe you have to try different Nvidia web drivers, there are four for me. One of the MacVidCards or Netkas threads has the links to them, as far as I can remember.
Ah, nope, this is where the links are: http://www.macvidcards.com/which-driver-should-i-install-for-my-new-gpu.html
I have the 970 and 4790K by the way on a Gryphon Z97.
I wonder if we shouldn't have a just general hackintosh thread instead of drifting various other threads into general hackintosh. It'll save the hacks are better, no Macs are better debates and keep everything nice and simple. The hackintosh neighborhoods on the web are all kinda meh with rare exception maybe we could have a pleasant one.