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My First Post: High End Mac Desktop Recommendations


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Hi There,

This is my first post so please excuse me if I miss any etiquette.

 

I have been happily using my P55 Dual i5 2.81Ghz for a few years now and I have to apologize that since building it I've not really been able to keep track of the Hackintosh community.

 

It's time to update and I want the most powerful pro-desktop that's within reason. The primary use is high end graphics, 3d and games/app development.

 

I really need some advice from the pro community here as I remember it being a bit painful to build the P55, having to swap out new parts here & there and messing around with a lot of kexts - I'm keen to avoid all of this.

 

Question:

What are your recommendations for a powerful CPU/GPU Hackintosh with all modern ports (HDMI etc) - which is really easy to setup without too much pain - for less than $1500

 

Thank you very much!

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For that price range I'd say i7-3770K (or if you want to go down the LGA2011 route and open yourself up to further upgrades, maybe i7-3820). You could also get a newer Haswell processor, AFAIK they're a small but by no means significant step forward from the previous gen as far as performance is concerned. If I were buying right at this point in time I'd probably be weighing that up against the added hassle of being an early adopter. You probably want a suitable Gigabyte or Asus Mobo and a Nvidia GPU. If you're doing games, GTX, if you're mainly doing 3D work, maybe even look into a workstation card. Almost all HDD/SSD's will work, as will almost all ram chips. You won't regret getting a small SSD for your OS. Any other peripherals like wifi just google in advance to find parts known work with hacks.

 

They're are heaps of hardware guides out there too, if you're stuck just start looking through them. Good luck.

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Just a thought. You're at an awkward moment, now, if you want a cutting edge system. Haswell LGA2011 chips running OS X 10.9 are coming soon. If you want a proven system, with a good guide, then it might be reasonable to wait three to six months.

 

If you are impatent, my build, a i7-3770 on a GA-Z77-UD5H, is running just fine on 10.8.4. My build costs me $1400. Top of the line would have cost $200 more, but I didn't intend to overclock or see the need for thunderbolt, yet. A high end graphics card could run $300+ more.

 

I'm not doing anything special with all the power I have. The most I'm doing is to learning to correct photos on Gimp.

 

Good Luck.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Just a thought. You're at an awkward moment, now, if you want a cutting edge system. Haswell LGA2011 chips running OS X 10.9 are coming soon. If you want a proven system, with a good guide, then it might be reasonable to wait three to six months.

 

If you are impatent, my build, a i7-3770 on a GA-Z77-UD5H, is running just fine on 10.8.4. My build costs me $1400. Top of the line would have cost $200 more, but I didn't intend to overclock or see the need for thunderbolt, yet. A high end graphics card could run $300+ more.

Are you sure about LGA2011chips with Haswell cores? The current 49xx chips are still Ivy Bridge-based. Given the time it took Intel to take that step, I would not expect a Haswell LGA2011 CPU anywhere before 2017, if it comes for LGA2011 at all.

 

The good news is that the current ML 10.8.5 supports Haswell, so no need to wait for 10.9.

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