Alacrious Posted December 16, 2011 Share Posted December 16, 2011 So its about time for me to build a hackintosh - used to build PCs back in the day when 64 bit first came out, so obviously things are a bit different... I edit video for a living and this will be for my own business uses at home plus some gaming on off days, and since I have so many legit licenses for Adobe, Pro Tools, Maya, etc etc and I dont want to drop 5k for a decently equipped Mac Pro, this is obviously the route for me to go without spending another 6k on software licenses switching to windows... Hopefully some of you guys can help me out since I dont know where all the new hardware stands and further, what is supported in snow leopard, lion, etc etc... 1. Does Lion support CUDA acceleration within Adobe? Which cards are supported? Im not worried about 3D rendering THAT much so I don't need a quadro card and would be content using a gaming geared card preferably with at least 1, if not 2 HDMI outs (havent seen any that have 2 HDMI outs yet). 2. Capture cards - I use black magic captures cards and have access to a decklink quad to live capture feeds via HD-SDI. I have done this with non-hackintosh fully loaded dual xeon Mac Pros at post houses before, so 10.6.8 acknowledges the card, just wondering if its the same in hackintosh land... 3. Motherboards - Saw a few compatibility lists on the web, but for the most part it seems like you can make almost any modern board work, mainly gigabyte boards? I just need to be able to run 3 PCI express cards at full speed and have been using the MSI Big Bang in PC builds for webcast application in the past few months when I built windows platforms for some friends - obviously not that applicable here but the large count of PCI slots are very nice to have. 4. RAID - What issues am I expecting to run into when installing RAID arrays via the motherboard? Are there any PCI express cards that are documented to support RAID5? I was thinking something along the lines of... 2600K Undecided on board yet 16GB Kingston GTX570 Lots of WD drives - 1 Boot drive, and a RAID array since I will be editing .R3D files at least once a month. Black Magic Capture cards Do you guys have any recommendations? I know this was long winded, but being as this is a business investment on my end, I'd love any feedback you guys have as well as people who might be experienced in setting up capture cards on hackintosh systems... and if there are none... well, Ill be the first for sure. Appreciate it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gringo Vermelho Posted December 16, 2011 Share Posted December 16, 2011 Does Lion support CUDA acceleration within Adobe? Which cards are supported? Read: http://www.insanelym...howtopic=223244 PC motherboard hardware RAID (Intel ICHx, Marvell etc) does not work in OS X - use Appe software RAID. If the capture card is advertised as working on both Intel Macs and PCs then it should work. If they sell separate versions of it for Mac and PC then I don't know. GTX570 Read: http://www.insanelym...howtopic=271109 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alacrious Posted December 16, 2011 Author Share Posted December 16, 2011 (edited) Thank you, the exact information I need. Not asking for a massive explanation from you guys, but obviously it takes a good amount of time to sort through the wealth of knowledge on the site and links are just as good to me as explaining directly. Looks like if I want to support CUDA, I might need to look at another card (Im no stranger to hacking thing to making them work, was a long time slackware user for server purposes and getting it to support SATA back in the day was a treat to say the least... Ill do more research). Upon reading further... it looks like any new GPU that supports CUDA acceleration will be able to be patched to work? Will read more... Apple software raid would imply that I define the array through the OS through the disk utility after I get it to boot? Not a problem in my book, just how it needs to be. Appreciate the response Gringo. The cards are the same for Mac and Windows. Have used the same card (as in, moved it around) on both 10.6.8 on a dual xeon MacPro as well as a homebrewed 2600k/MSI Big Bang windows 7 machine, but I was curious if anyone had first hand knowledge. I will for sure document any difficulties or shortcuts I come across when it comes to installing professional level media capture cards and software when I get around to this in... about 2 weeks? There are drivers for both and I need some computer tinkering in my life again Edited December 16, 2011 by Alacrious Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gringo Vermelho Posted December 16, 2011 Share Posted December 16, 2011 Yes, getting Adobe Mercury Engine to work is basically adding the name of your video card to a text file. There is no reason why the GTX 570 wouldn't work. IIRC there are some PCI-E RAID adapters that will work but I can't seem to find the topics now....some "Promise Fasttrak" card or something? Search and see what you can find. Continue here in this thread when you're ready and I'll check back to see how you're doing. It'll be interesting to hear more about that capture card. Good luck, I think you'll do fine. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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