letsgetsilly Posted November 10, 2009 Author Share Posted November 10, 2009 I've gone through a bit of a massive search for firewire cards compatible with OSX. After eliminating quite a few cards, I came up with a list. Click here to view my google spreadsheet. I need to have 2 firewire 400 1394a ports, and at least 1 firewire 800 1394b port. I'd like to make sure he has plenty of ports, so here is what I was thinking about doing. The 1394a ports seems like a no brainer. The SYBA PCI to Firewire 1394a 3+1 costs abour $12 shipped from newegg and has 3 ports, all of which appear to be to work with OSX according to a comment in the reviews. The 1394b is a bigger question. There is a product for PCIexpress that would work the best, (it's listed as #4 in the document) but I am not sure whether or not I will be able to have enough room for a PCIx card with my video card taking up two slots. My motherboard will have 3 video card pci express slots, am I able to use any one of those slots, or do I have to use the one closest to the processor, and then I can use the next one, etc? I haven't worked with a board like this before. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
projekt k Posted November 12, 2009 Share Posted November 12, 2009 didnt really read any replies or your pose all the way through. but i wanted to throw in my 2 cents since it's a video editing rig. yea you should go with a core i7 or core 2 quad 512 mb to 1 gb graphics card but most importantly make sure you have raid drives. the raid drives are what is going to speed up your rig the most when it comes to handling tons of large files. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
brokenjack Posted November 20, 2009 Share Posted November 20, 2009 I finished my build, and it was super easy. I'm running Final Cut Studio. I copied hardware components from this post. I followed lifehacker's tutorial and just replaced the extra folder with the one discussed here. I have to say I nearly fell on the floor when everything worked. I haven't hooked up internet yet to the onboard LAN, so I can't confirm I have internet, but it hasn't given me any problems yet (for 2 days now). It really was super easy. You can check out my original post here. I hope to be updating it in the future if I don't get too lazy. I'm running dual displays at 1920x1080 on the ATI 4870 1GB with full QE/CI(had to check dashboard and chess game to confirm, since it won't display in about this mac in snow leopard) without doing any kext installations etc. My speakers were hooked into the UD5 line out port, and I had to change sound in system prefs to "internal speakers" instead of "line out" The responsiveness blows me away. I'm just running the i7 at stock speed right now. Maybe I'll overclock in the future. I haven't come upon a problem yet, and it hasn't crashed (knocking on the wood texture on the side of this page) I'm a complete noob, and after trying DDs method multiple times(and failing), I switched to the lifehacker tut. I sure did learn a lot from all the research and googling though. Thanks goes out to all the pioneers. I'm a professional editor who works in FCP and Avid DS so I'm pretty excited. Can't wait to throw some 4k Red footage at it...which reminds me, if you're serious about color correction, minimum req for 4k color correction in apple color is 512MB vram so you might want to apply the golden rule and double that to 1GB. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
letsgetsilly Posted November 21, 2009 Author Share Posted November 21, 2009 I've started the journey this morning (saturday) and I'm running into lots of confusion and lots of googling. I've borrowed a mac air from a buddy, and I've been attempting to run DD's script method, because that appears to be the most straight forward, but I'm confused on what's going on with the script. I get the sense that the script is meant to be used on a second hard drive in a system that already has mac os running. I'm trying to get either a USB boot stick setup or an external hard drive setup with the correct information so that I can transfer that disk to the desired box. I'm going to try to use the USB method discussed in the lifehacker guide and replace the extra folder with the one listed here. However, that extra folder apparently includes support for an ATI card. I purchased an Nvidia 250 GTS card, and I don't know if that will work with that setup. I feel like I'm in a bit over my head right now. I'll go ahead with the approach the previous poster described and report back. We'll see what happens. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
letsgetsilly Posted November 21, 2009 Author Share Posted November 21, 2009 I'm still attempting to install off of the USB stick but with no luck. When I get to the "select disk" section of the OSX installer, there are no options available to select. It appears as if my western digital hard drive is unrecognizable. I've formatted the drive as an external disk connected to the mac air I have. I used the case-sensitive journaled method. The hard disk is visible to chameleon upon bootup, just not in the osx install screen. My peripherals screen in the bios looks the same as in DD's guide. Not sure what the next step is. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
letsgetsilly Posted November 23, 2009 Author Share Posted November 23, 2009 I was able to get the system to boot using DD's script, but not using the Lifehacker USB image method. The system boots up after entering Chameleon and I have loads of text that appears to be the line-by-line loading of the OS. (I'm new to MacOSX). When the computer boots up everything appears to be working at first glance. However I have experienced a few issues with my video. When the computer goes into standby it will not awake. Also, if I try to change the video resolution on the box the monitor just "blues out". I suspect that because the DD script includes a KEXT for an ATI card that I do not have the appropriate KEXT for my GTS 250 card, but I'm not sure how to verify this. I'm also not sure where to go to get the appropriate KEXT if I wanted to. Any guidance or suggestions along these lines would be appreciated. Thanks! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
brokenjack Posted November 28, 2009 Share Posted November 28, 2009 I was able to get the system to boot using DD's script, but not using the Lifehacker USB image method. The system boots up after entering Chameleon and I have loads of text that appears to be the line-by-line loading of the OS. (I'm new to MacOSX). When the computer boots up everything appears to be working at first glance. However I have experienced a few issues with my video. When the computer goes into standby it will not awake. Also, if I try to change the video resolution on the box the monitor just "blues out". I suspect that because the DD script includes a KEXT for an ATI card that I do not have the appropriate KEXT for my GTS 250 card, but I'm not sure how to verify this. I'm also not sure where to go to get the appropriate KEXT if I wanted to. Any guidance or suggestions along these lines would be appreciated. Thanks! Did you ever get this thing up and running? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
letsgetsilly Posted November 28, 2009 Author Share Posted November 28, 2009 I've updated the results of my build in a new thread. You can find it here. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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