Inspired by @isaiah 's new Hackintosh, and being a fan of said machines, and having built one before, I decided to take the plunge and retire my trusty old 2010 (modded) mac pro and build an iMac Pro killer. OK, so not the top iMac pro, but I reckon I can match about £8K’s worth for £2K ish…
I’ve decided to go down the AMD GPU route because it’s better supported by Apple OS and things like the Adobe suite now runs faster on Metal than Cuda. Also, Redshift, my render engine of choice, is coming to Metal soon, so its a no brainer really. My 2010 has two Titan X Nvidia cards in it and they don’t really help much so they’re going in the bin (or perhaps ebay).
All the hardware has been ordered and it should be arriving today :-)…
The Designare because it has thunderbolt 3 built in (yay!) and although it comes in at £2484, I can claim back the VAT, so only £1987, so right on budget. I know you get a monitor with an iMac but that doesn’t add much value these days, plus, I have two very nice 4K Dell’s…
I’ll keep you posted on how it goes for those interested.
good luck. stay strong through the frustrating bit in the beginning – before things start booting. once you’re over that hurdle, and you can see things begin to work, everything seems easier…
my only suggestion, an m.2 nvme drive. you can get read speeds that are several times faster. it’s not often when that much performance can be had for so few dollars.
that said, i think you’re in for a treat. i’m still enjoying how fast this processor seems compared to my trusty old mac pro 2010s.
also: please tell me what you think of this video card. i think i’ll be in the market for something this year – but i know so little about these AMD cards that i’m too nervous to pay the price for something nice.
Yeah, I did think about an m.2 drive. In fact I added one to my list but then took it off. I prefer the idea of a removable, easy to transfer ssd. I have a PC with an m2 and to be honest the performance difference is negligible once you’re working and to get one with a big enough capacity for video work would be too expensive. I have a few 4TB drives in the mac pro that I’ll be moving over too and adding an m.2 limits the amount of other SATA drives you can have.
The CPU will be interesting. I went for it because it has fantastic single thread performance which will help day-to-day stuff a lot. My PC has a Threadripper for the intensive stuff :-)
I’ll let you know how the GPU performs once its all up and running.
I still have my hackintosh I built 8 years ago running strongly on High Sierra, in use 8-10 hours per day. Be patient with any bumps, there is a lot of good info out there how to get around issues, just have to wade through it!
I wouldn’t say ‘easy’. It’s a case of following (very carefully) instructions on how to configure EFI Clover bootloader for 10.14.6 on the specific system you have. There are tons of guides out there, you just need to find the right one for your hardware. I went with very compatible hardware (hence Radeon) so it wasn’t difficult.
The Dell XPS 9560’s seem to work as hackintosh’s- http://bit.ly/2Hbqknq Go to Tonymacx86.com and see if anybody has been successful with the model you want
