This weekend I'll be building my first Hackintosh (HTPC), and if it works ok I'll start putting together a Final Cut Pro Hackintosh to edit High Def HDV 1080i footage I've shot.

I'm pretty much set on everything but the video card:
Gigabyte GA-P35-DS4
Core 2 Quad Q6600
4GB 1066 RAM (2*2 Dual Channel?) (will 8GB help much in Final Cut Studio?)

I'll stick to a video chipset that's in a current Mac, so I'm looking to get either an Nvidia 7600GT, 8600T, 8800GT or ATI HD2600XT.

I know that the 8800 beats the 8600 beats the 7600 beats the 7300, but how much of that processing power does Final Cut actually use?

Will Final Cut be able to take advantage of two GT's running in SLI?

Anyone have any idea how a Q6600 system would stack up against a Mac Pro Quad 3 GHz (two double cores) in Final Cut performance?

I would be grateful for any insights.

I don't think SLI is supported in OSx86. FC doesn't require a lot of graphic card power, any of the nVidia cards you listed will do. You need a hardware (such as blackmagic) compression card to get the best performance for 1080 editing.

I've seen a few bakeoffs with MacPros using the different card configurations, and there was a significant difference in times to complete tasks.

I'm just curios if the difference will be more or less significant when moving from a MacPro to a HackPro.

Im running a hack with the 2600XT (Saphire) and have absolutely NO problems with FC. I don't have a base machine to test against, but it sure seems to fly right along.

I have a cheap 7300gt for the HTPC and am leaning towards an 8800GT for the Final Cut box. It did better in the MacPro Final Cut bake-off than the stock ATi card.

I've been reading about some of the cheap dual quad Hackintoshs and my credit card is getting worried.

Hey Bobdotorg,

I'm going to build a hackintosh next month and was looking at a very similar setup to yours, same mobo, cpu and the 8800gt. I also wanted to use it for Final cut, motion etc.

How did you get on? which GPU did you go for.

cheers

I recommend the ATI Radeon HD 2600 pro. It is the card used in the iMacs as far as i know. Runs FCS2 like a dream.

I have an x1950 pro (QE & CI working) and, I really can't see how the gpu is used in Final Cut. All efects and transitions take a lot of cpu, and in fact many transition can't even run in real time via firewire output in my E6600. So I think, at the moment, GPU acceleration is very underused in FC. FC still being a lot more dependant on cpu than gpu. I think the gpu is just used in colour correction, but almost nothing else, or if it's really used, they didn'nt optimize the code enough.

Yes, you are absolutely right, not only for FCP but also Premiere etc...
The video-card has very little effect on the speed/efficiency of video-editing programs, they are all CPU intensive.

There are some very expensive high-end cards with Quatro archictecture especially for AfterEffects, as well as the usual other devices that mostly deal with data-transport (Decklink, etc)...

so the bottom line is: don't really matter which video-card you stick in your machine, unless your are dealing with high-end post production formats.

Yes, Final Cut Pro doesn't care much about the graphics card. But the Final Cut Suite sure has applications which depend on a powerful graphics card. Color for example is very graphics card hungry and so is Motion. If you also use Shake, you better have a good card. The question is what is best, the HD2600 XT or the 8800 GT ?

8800gt

Since you have a Q6600 you should research a "QuickCluster" using Compressor and Qmaster. Esentially each instance of compressor uses 2 cores max. The quickcluster will create 2 instances and use all 4 cores. You need 1GB ram per core.

Until Apple takes advantage of the Nvidia CUDA GPU acceleration. Which would in turn probable make your GPU th most valuable piece of equipment in you box.

Hurry up Apple!

..Or perhaps they're waiting to utilize the gpu for processing in a different way with snow leopard.

hey mate, this caught my eye, i've had a lot of problems with getting FCP 6 and 5 working with my setup (q6600, 4gb ram, 8800gts 512mb on a gigabyte E35-DS3R) One of the problems i've had is that audio is often out of sync in that, if u press the play button (and i'm using aiffs here) he seek animation will play through the wave graphic but sound doesn't play till about 1-2 second sin, there is also no audio scrubbing, i'm really at a loss as to what to do with it, any insights would be greatly appreciated