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Quad-core Hackintosh for FCP 6


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For those buying the Q6600 just a bit of info:

 

Try and get a processor with the G0 stepping, this is the new stepping - it uses less power and overclocks better. The older processors have the stepping B3.

 

 

Am I correct in thinking that the price drop will be on the 29th July then?

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Thats not too bad. Its like 90 instead of 100 watts? or..

 

Close. It went from a TDP of 105W to 95W. But this is the 'normal' power the chip will dissipate. The power savings aren't linear so I'm not sure what to expect at the lower loads but ~10W seems like a reasonable guess.

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Scheduled price drop Xeons 29th of july .....

 

One actually is better of with Q6600 than xeon at this point.

 

The FB buffered dimms introduce too much latency and severy affect performance of xeon systems especially dual cpu units ...

 

that is why a fast overclocked dual and now single quad can embarass the mac pro at times

 

 

Intel and apple both recognize this and so next platform for penryn xeons is suppossed to use non buffered ram to exponentially improve performance of memory bandwidth.

45 nm xeon  penryn will also be quite cheap and boast 12meg  instead of 8 meg cache

 

 

So if we can get that platform next yr with 64 bit fcp t,he performance of our existing systems will look slow by comparison

 

 

As a funny aside I am renovating an old  house and came across a 1988 VIC 20 computer inside a wall with tape drive and game cartridges  absolutely perfect!!!

 

Wow that takes me back .... I remember owning one of these and thinking it was really cool!

 

anybody remember ?

 

 

cheers

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Insanelyinsane:

THANKS for a great post!

I agree with you there, its better to wait for the newer xeons, as the price is going down rapidly.

The heat of 2 xeons is also not to play with, but with 45nm it will be better!

 

ITs awesome with 8 cores, but if in the future they will use better ram, (and cheaper) i will wait.

 

I didnt understand that MAC osx is still 32 bit???!!! my god, and ppl complain about windows but its all up and running in64 bit for a while :) hehe yes yes its not nice to say but MAc osx should be 64 bit too soon.

Not even newer leopard will be 64?? hmm iguess they dont think it will be any better with 64 bit?

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As far as I know, Leopard is 64-bit top to bottom which is cool because it's ALL 64-bit and 32-bit apps can exist within it.

Tiger, I belive is, 64-bit capable while it still uses 32-bit data structure..

 

quoting from apple:

 

"Tiger supports the industry standard LP64 programming model supported by other 64-bit UNIX systems. This means developers can easily port 64-bit code to Tiger. LP64 support in Tiger provides for 64-bit pointer, long and long long but preserves 32-bit integer data types."

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I wouldn't be suprised if this place has a large margin for the percentage of people that convert from PC to MAC. I see no reason why Apple would want to stamp the OSX86 project out by taking further security measures for their OS.

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Hey everyone, so I did build my quad-core FCP 6 station:

 

Bad Axe2

2GB RAM (for now)

Q6600

320GB SATA (will RAID soon)

250GB SATA

GeForce7300

 

using uphuck..

 

Working like a charm. I've been editing straight for the last 8 hours, not a single glitch.

 

except .. can't get dual display (help?) tried natit v.02 and v.01

 

haven't even tried audio either as I use a digidesign mbox for sound and that works beautifully through usb at the moment..

 

thanks for all your help with this. I am loving the performance and realtime effects. any idea about the dual display?...

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soo you feel like telling what settings in bios? like AHCI or not.

And whether ALL 8 SATA Ports work?? Please i will be very happy to know :)

 

Oh and how are you planning to RADI?

 

When I tried this on my D975BX2, I found that OSX didn't care whether it was set to AHCI or IDE it just booted either way - and performance was exactly the same...

 

but if you're not running Vista, you need to install drivers to let Windows work in AHCI... and I don't have a floppy drive in my machine so... :blink: back to IDE I go for the sake of dual boot.

 

Regarding RAID... I'd recommend avoiding it like the plague. Recovering data from a crashed Apple_HFS filesystem is not fun a the best of times - trying to recover 1TB from an AHCI/Intel RAID0 HFS volume with bad sectors? :o

 

RAID has a place in the computing world, but 2x500GB SATA drives in RAID0 is not it :)

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Mac tiger has 32 bit kernal and as such will run 32 bit with its attendant 4 gig per application wall will support 64 bit apps but still with basic 32 bit wall. (ie) looks like a 32 bit duck, quacks like a 32bit duck its a 64bit capable 32bit duck.

 

leopard is 64 bit but apps needs to be 64bit apps to take advantage of extra ram  addressing capabililites hence we need a 64 bit version of FCP and all other apps to take f

ll advantage.Developers of software to date have been 

slow to do this .

 

This along with the latency of FBdimms leads me to believe that we are all on the maximum benefit for our buck by going standard co

plient MB's like Bad axe2 and the low latency ram and overclock if desired 

 

Later when 64bit FCP is released and 64bit lepoard is hacked ,our hardware will still be applicable and faster again.

 

Then intel will release penryn platform with its attendant 8 time graphic increase and larger 12 meg cache .Hopefully they will have new server board series that will uses non fb dimms. Apple will be the first to grab for their next gen Mac pro  and then we can follow if we wish a  true 8 core big ram system.

 

cheers

insane

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Hmm interesting all..

 

omfg: are you able to use ALL ports on your Bad AXE 2? all the sata ones i mean :censored2:

 

Could you try to see if a HD can be read from the Marvell, (there are 4 black connectors and 4 next to them) does it read from ALL??

 

I just wonder, as i want to have a lot of harddrives.

 

And IF i would use RAID i would still go for 400-500 gb, but those would be TEMP drives, like video etc. that needs to be written and edited quickly and then out put to final harddrive. Other thing is that you can do this with Softraid within mac i heard, so i think the performance is almost the same as using raid card etc.

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-- I do use Protools but haven't really had time to test performance much yet but I am using the mbox as audio in/out at the moment and works

very well with all of Final Cut Studio and other apps.. itunes, vlc etc.

 

-- SATA: I just plugged my drive into the sata bus and didn't change any settings in BIOS or anything yet (I think it is currently recognizing only 4 SATA, which is fine for me..) as I have a deadline to edit something and am concentrating on that (I think it's doing the 'work as IDE' I think) but anyway I am getting the right performance from it. Editing HD 1080p without any problems or frame drops..

 

At the moment, I don't even think I need a RAID really. This seems to be pretty solid as I am not doing uncompressed. ProRes is the way to go and giving me wonderful

results and render times for now.. When I have some free time, I am going to look into a RAID and will post results here.

 

-- Also I am not dual-booting. Couldn't give a s... for windows. OSX only machine.

 

-- My only, only problem that I care about at the moment is dual-display...

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Hi Hirez, I have three friends who've built their Hackintosh's using the Bad Axe 2 because they've seen what mine can do. Now all of us are in the same boat with the SATA controller. Of course they knew to expect this beforehand. So far, I think only one person has reported credibly that they get all 8 to work and that may be a fluke or there may be different revisions of the board (although all using the same controller) and different bios versions.

 

It is a bit frustrating that with as many people who are using this board, more don't just definitively say, "Yes" or "No" and exactly how or what they've done to make it work. Perhaps it has something to do with the OSX installer version people are using, but I've used JaS 10.4.8 and all of the uphuck versions and it doesn't work for me. But no matter what, this board is far and away the most stable of the 4 that I've tried in this current configuration (core2quad) and it edits using FCS2 and CS3 every bit as fast as my Mac Pro does. Still, I'd like to know if there's some magic out there.

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Thanks for the information, BJ. This thread really dissuaded me from the Gigabyte GA-P965-DS3. One of these days I'd like to get FCS2 working on a Q6600 box.

 

$20 separates the Bad Axe 2 and the P5K-E and the latter has so many bells and whistles...

 

BTW: regarding an earlier post about triple-monitors, most graphics cards only have dual RAMDACs and therefore are only dual-head cards (meaning any combination of DVI-DVI, or DVI-VIVO). I'm wondering if you have a motherboard with multiple x16 PCIe slots, how well multiple 7900s or X1950s would work (at least for driving multiple displays)... It's not that high on my priority, though.

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