Quad-core Hackintosh for FCP 6

[jojon]

Hi just a little update,

I built Hackintosh system with

Bad axe 2

Intel Core2Quad 4 x 2.66GHz (I overclocked it little bit to match Mac Pro 2.66)

2gb of ram Crucial performance ram 800MHz

8 x 400GB hard drives (Marvel port working don't ask me why I don't know, it didn't work at first but when I initialised drives all working)

EVGA 7900 GS overclocked edition dual monitor support using Natit dual 2

Sound patched with Taruga 1.15 patcher + STAC9274D_83847621.txt

pioneer DVR-112

All in original G5 enclosure from ebay

sleep works, screen saver just like real Mac.

 

Performance is dream come true. FCP 6 is more that stable and it works better than on my G5 quad that will go to ebay soon.

I am using HD footage from Sony Z-1 and this Hackintosh is editing HD footage like it is SD (DV) footage.

No crash since I build it and I can just say that this is more stable than G5 quad that was top not so long ago.

I took my Hackintosh to the friend of mine that is running Mac Pro 2.66GHz with radeon x1900xt so we can see how they perform against each other.

To cut the story short Hackintosh is same if not little bit faster than basic Mac Pro setup even with x1900xt what made me even happier as I was planing to buy Mac Pro.

If you want to edit dv or hdv I am recommending this setup due to high component compatibility and great performance for money invested.

This however is not Mac so if you work professionally and need future operating systems compatibility than the only way is Real Mac.

 

Hope this helps

 

Thanks for starting this great topic

 

Take care

 

Jojon

[asap18]

Just Finished upgrading my hack.

 

Specs now are:

Q6600 at 3 ghz

P5K-Deluxe (All working, sound, both LAN, sata, ide)

2 x 1 GB Ballistix at 1200 MhZ.

 

this machine could kick a mac pro's ass (cept for the octo )

[EvilEuro]

I want to start by saying that I really do appreciate the information in this thread. I'm starting the research process for building a Hackintosh in the future that would be close to the specs posted, possibly even the exact specs in the post above, for a friend that does video editing. So the information here has been invaluable in terms of leading me to specific components to read about, etc.

 

One thing I'd like to know and haven't seen addressed here or elsewhere is whether or not there is an Intel board that accepts dual quad core chips? I'd like to go to an eight core solution if possible. If not, well, then she'll just have to be happy with having four cores.

 

Again, the information in this thread has been great and I will continue to appreciate it as more information becomes available.

 

Now if we could only figure out how JoJon got all eight ports to work??

[asap18]

EvilEuro, yes, the only Dual Socket motherboards are LGA 771 (same used in mac pro) and when u spec out a machine using that motherboard socket and the special 771 chips, the mac pro comes out cheaper so there is no point.

[Hirez]

Sheeplover: hehe great!

I worked with DV so far, and that goes very nice in windows, and even HD from a sony FX1, works smoothly..

of course add a couple of filters, coloradjustments etc. and it will be heavy even on a dualcore.

 

But i cant wait to try in a few weeks!!

 

Yes, this is a great topic (even though i would love to know WHY some ppl get 8 drives working with the bad axe, and some dont hehe.. its probably a simple bios setting)

On the P5k-Deluxe ALL SATA ports are working? even the TWO external ones?

Happy for the info asap18

[Stellair]

If everything on the ASUS P5K Deluxe works than choices would be

 

-INTEL Extreme Series D975XBX2

-ASUS P5K Deluxe

-ASUS P5W DH Deluxe

-or maybe a GIGABYTE board...

[BJMoose]

Hirez, I think I've got some good news for you. When I built my system, from the outset I designed it so the Marvell controllers would all be connected to external drives. So I bought 2 dual sata to esata sleeves, hooked the sata ends to the Marvell controllers and screwed the sleeves into 2 empty expansion slots. I bought a fairly expensive OWC Mercury Elite Pro housing (eSATA, fw400, fw800, usb) for my Mac Pro and installed a SATA drive into the housing. On my Mac I'd already hooked one of these sleeves to the 2 unused SATA connectors on the Motherboard. Hooked everything together and it worked. OSX on the Mac Pro saw, read and wrote to the external drive just fine.

 

Back to the Bad Axe 2 now. I hooked that same external eSATA enclosure up to my external Marvell ports on the Bad Axe 2 and in Windows everything was fine. It will even boot from that drive with the proper bios settings. OSX86 on the other hand, kept telling me it could not read the drive. It acknowledged it was there and Disk Utility would show it (not the partitions) but not mount it. I tried all four of the connections with same results. I even tried different brand of drives in the eSATA housing. Same results.

 

After reading that someone else got all 8 ports read by OSX86, I decided to open up my case, pull all the cables from the Marvell controllers, add a power cable to my PSU (it's modular), and hook some drives up internally directly with SATA cables instead of eSATA cables (I'd asked someone earlier in this thread if they were using 8 internal of 4 and 4 and never got an answer). All the drives worked internally, so it looks like it's either how my OWC housing relates to the eSATA connectors, or OSX86 doesn't like eSATA at all and I have to find housings that are SATA to SATA.

 

I also tried booting from my separate OSX86 hard drive while it was connected to the Marvell controller and it wouldn't boot all the way...stopped at white screen with spinning wheel ad infinitum. I'll have to try again in verbose mode to see what's happening. More than likely it has to do with the fact that the OS was installed with a different controller. I'll report back when I have some spare time to experiment. At least it doesn't seem to have anything to do with drivers etc. I have three buddies who all built identical systems to mine because mine works so well, and none of us thought to do this little experiment.

[Hirez]

BIG grin!!

 

so you mean that you are able to use marvell connectors, as long as the drives are Internal (ie."normal" way without any fancy stuff

And you are still able to run everything in AHCI mode?

 

So are you able to read and write to partitions, just like normal sata ports? yes please report back!

 

Its ok if you are not able to boot from the Marvel (if i understood correctly:) as long as i can use as storage i am happy.

 

And by the way, NONE of your buddies TRIED to put an EMPTY, formatted whatever drive and test the marvell ports??

hehe thats really amazing..

 

Oh btw, can you format HD on the marvel port? or does it already have to be prepared?

hehe sorry for all the questions, just really happy and excited!!

[BJMoose]

BIG grin!!

 

so you mean that you are able to use marvell connectors, as long as the drives are Internal (ie."normal" way without any fancy stuff

And you are still able to run everything in AHCI mode?

 

So are you able to read and write to partitions, just like normal sata ports? yes please report back!

 

Its ok if you are not able to boot from the Marvel (if i understood correctly:) as long as i can use as storage i am happy.

 

And by the way, NONE of your buddies TRIED to put an EMPTY, formatted whatever drive and test the marvell ports??

hehe thats really amazing..

 

Oh btw, can you format HD on the marvel port? or does it already have to be prepared?

hehe sorry for all the questions, just really happy and excited!!

Yes, read and write is possible on the Marvell controller. Yes, everything is AHCI. Yes, it reads all partitions...on both Journaled and NTFS volumes. Since I use NTFS-3G, I format all my drives in Windows so they can be read by and written on both systems. The only drives I use that are Mac Journaled is the one I keep all my dmg's on and my swappable OS disk that's OSX only. I dual boot from another drive most of the time. I probably won't be testing whether I can format a drive from within OSX, but since all other functions seem to work, I can't imagine why that wouldn't. Maybe the next time I upgrade the OS (e.g uphuck 1.4rX) I'll try formatting on Marvell.

 

I have a lot of video rendering to do over the next few weeks so I won't be testing too much until I'm finished. I'm going to order some eSATA to SATA cables to see if that has an effect. If it doesn't, I'll try to find a new SATA (not eSATA) external enclosure and a couple of new SATA (not eSATA) sleeves. There's got to be some way to get these things to work externally.

 

As for my friends, we all work as videographers/producers. I'm the only computer geek among the 4 of us. All they wanted was a way to reliably use FCS2 on a PC. I showed them that the Bad Axe 2 was their best bet. They would never even try to test anything. It wouldn't cross their minds.

 

This now re-opens the possibility that was my original intent when building this system. If I can eventually get OSX to boot from Marvell, and I can find a 4 drive swappable external enclosure that works, that enclosure will become the full time OSX part of my system. I'll set the bios to boot first from that. If it's turned on, the system will just boot to OSX. If I don't have it turned on, it will automatically boot from the other controller which will be Windows.

I'm excited about this once again.

[Hirez]

BJ thanks for the info!

I think these are great news!

I cant wait to test all these things out!!!

[Pokopo]

So all of FCS 2 is working great on my Hackintosh except for Compressor.

I get this error message when I try to submit a batch from compressor:

 

"Please restart your computer or verify your Compressor installation is correct."

 

Anyone else have this problem?

 

Thanks guys..

[BJMoose]

Pokopo, did you have FCS1 installed and upgraded it to 2.0 or did you do a fresh install of 2.0? Did it take the 3.0.1 update? I've read about problems with that update for some Hackintoshes using a 'torrent distributedl' serial number. Don't know if that's the case with you or not. Here's a thread that deals with something like you're describing. http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?sho...amp;mode=linear

[Pokopo]

It was a clean install and it was my retail copy, no torrent..tried pacifist method and all. doesnt work. oh well, I guess I can do without compressorOh and BJMoose, I did check the mic input, you are right, it doesn't work which is OK with me as all my mics are XLR anyway and I do go through mbox for recording always..

[BJMoose]

Pokopo, Compressor is certainly not mandatory, but still a really important part of the package and I'm guessing it's something simple that is causing it not to work on your hack since it works on mine...including with the 3.0.1 update. Like you, mine is a legit retail copy that I got for my Mac Pro so if it works on mine it should be able to work on yours too. AppleSMBIOS.kext has been known to cause some problems with FCS2, CS3 and MS Office 2004 on hacks. I've found that v1.06 works best for me and everything plays well with it. Also, I'm using uphuck's 10.4.9 (currently 1.4iR3 but it worked with all the other versions too) and koolkal's 10.4.10 upgrade. I did have to re-install the AppleSMBIOS again after the update. Have you tried any of these things? On the last two OSX installs (r2 and r3) I checked the IONetworkingFamily.kext option. Prior to those 2 releases, I was changing my ethernet to en0 manually. Just some ideas to play with.

[AaronR]

What does system profile say about sata on badaxe, generic AHCI or Intel ICH7M AHCI? Did you apply bikedude's ICH7 patch? I did the patch and saw ICH7-M AHCI. Recently I bought a 2.5" enclosure with esata interface, connect to one of the sata ports via sata-esata bracket. The speed is terribly slow, like 0.8Mb/s in xbench.

[aliab]

Does some user of Intel BadAxe see PCI cards in system info profiler (as i have got a 29160N Adaptec SCSI and try to make it works)

 

Thank you All

[fx600]

Hi BJ, thanks for the reply on "Official SATA" thread as well as the info here... It's good to hear you managed to get the Marvell 88SE6145 to work! I gather from your sig that your Pioneer DVD drives are connected to the IDE channel on ICH7R and work well in AHCI. Did you get the eSATA to work finally? Please keep us updated - eSATA should theoretically look just like SATA to the host system, no?

 

On a related question, I am about to build a photo editing station, with similar specs to the FCP stations here. I am torn between Bad Axe 2 motherboard and Asus WS64 PRO. The Asus is somewhat more expensive, but offers officially support for new 45nm CPUs (Penryn desktop variant) and 1333Mhz FSB. It uses the same Marvell 88SE6145 secondary SATA controller (so it could work same as yours, BJ, I hope), audio is different (1988B here, Sigmatel on BA2). While there are threads that managed all functions to get working in OSX86 (with more or less work), I have more of a question about the future:

 

Does it make sense to get the Asus board just for the 1333Mhz/45nm Penryn support? I am not sure if the CPU upgrade in the future is so reasonable if I get a Q6660 (soo cheap) now. The Penryn differs in what, 12MB cache total spread between all cores vs 8MB on Q6660? That's not much diff. and SSE4 is unsupported by either Photoshop CS3 or the other GFX apps. If it's like 20-30% faster AT MOST, I suppose that's not worth it...

 

What do you others think?

 

Thanks...F

[aberracus]

osx on intel doesnt see pci cards

[jsmithers]

Hi, and sorry for not answering the above question. I am planning to build myself a FCP hackPro as the original poster, and this thread has been a real saviour in the process of selecting parts. I think I am going for these parts

 

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (because of compressor and other heavy rendering)

Intel D975XBX2 (Bad Axe 2) (out-of-the-box working?)

2x Kingston ValueRAM DDR2-667 2GB (2x1024)

MSI GeForce 7950 GT 512 MB Silent (best supported card? and silent)

3x Samsung SpinPoint T133S 400 GB (silent)

1x Western Digital Raptor 73,4 GB (fast)

 

 

I am thinking about setting up the raptor as OSX bootdisk and 2x 400 in Raid 0. I really want win for some offhours gaming and progtesting, so I am planning to add that as well to the 4th drive.

 

Questions

 

1. How do one best enable file sharing between the osx/win enviroments. I really want to avoid FAT

2. How does my setup look?

3. I would like DX10 enabled gaming, any cards who will work in both systems yet? And this card will support native full HD for my 24" Dell (1900x something?) Ofcourse, dual screen posibilites is needed, alltough not to start with.)

4. I would really like to give the OSX installation priority. Is there a guide for installing 10.4.10 first, and then xp, or is this no point? Which installation procedure is recommended, I sense some difference between upchuck, JaS, kolkal?

5. Can I get Leopard to run on this baby?

 

Thanks again for a great thread, and a great board. Im gonna be saving a lot of money!

 

Thanks

[OOSSXX8866]

Yeah... lol... it should've worked.

 

I've been doing it for months now.

 

F10

[BJMoose]

Well, the final piece of my hardware puzzle has finally arrived this weekend. I've been patiently waiting for them to produce the external SATA enclosure version that matches my internal backplane. I now have 4 500gb swappable drives in the internal backplane that are totally devoted to Windows. The external enclosure has 4 500gb swappable drives totally devoted to OSX86. A push of a button now makes my system either a totally OSX or totally Windows system. Thanks to NTFS+3G and MacDrive7, all drives are swappable between systems if files need to be shared. I may scratch dual booting altogether shortly. That was my intent when I first came up with the idea of designing this system.

 

The external enclosure looks amazingly like my Gigabyte Aurora tower case. Looks like they're produced by the same company, but they're not. Below are the urls for both the external sata enclosure and the tower.

 

eSATA Enclosure: h--p://www.pc-pitstop.com/sata_enclosures/scsat4e.asp

 

Gigabyte Tower: h--p://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/other/display/gig-3d-aurora_2.html#sect0

[jsmithers]

Questions for that rig..

 

1. This means you have all 8 SATA ports on your BA2 working?

2. You have 4 connected internally, and 1 SATA cable running out of your box and to the SATA enclosure (which internally connects the disks to eachother?)

3. How do you choose which to boot from. Can you configure it so that when enclosure is connected, it boots from that on auto, and when not it boots internally? If so,

[BJMoose]

If you check out the enclosure, it has 4 external connectors, each connected to one of the Marvell connectors. The housing has an on/off switch and each individual drive has its own on/off switch. My 4 drives that are connected to the ICH7 controller are housed in a 4 drive backplane (same make as external housing). Each drive has an external on/off switch.

 

The bios is set up to first look for a boot drive on the ICH7 controller, next on the Marvell controller. Whichever is on, is the system that will boot up. All drives can be read/written to by each system thanks to NTFS-3G and MacDrive7. I've been using it this way since the weekend and all seems to be working exactly as I wanted it.

[Findibulator]

Built a fairly similar box - minus the quad, I'm afraid.

 

INTEL BOXD975XBX2KR  

INTEL CORE 2 DUO E6420  

2GB  

ASUS EN7300GT SILENT/HTD 256M GEFORCE 7300GT 256MB PCI-E SLI W/DVI & HDTV OUT

2x SATA 160 drives

D-Link Bluetooth 2 dongle

2 external 500G firewire drives

Antec P-150 Case

 

Jas 10.4.8 updated to 10.4.10

 

Everything works great with the exception of USB when waking from sleep. I have to ubplug/replug any USB devices (KB/mouse included). Anyone else experience this?

 

I'm following another thread on similar issues.

[Vinnie-The-Phoo]

Hi BJMoose

 

We have nearly 100% identical hardware so please forgive my many questions :-)

 

 

Have you managed to get your Mike INPUT to work on the BADAXE2 ?

I cannot speak over Skype and would like to ?

 

Also have you heard of any fix for USB auto detecting of Camcorders ? I use a cannon HDR-SR1 and would like to import my native files into iMovie.

 

BTW , iMovie installed 100% onto my uphuck 10.4.9

 

any ideas will be well appreciated ...

 

thanks

Vince