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So my Macbook Pro is on the fritz. It’s over heating every time I want to edit videos, photos, and just about any processor intensive use. My computer is about 4 years old and has paid for itself so it’s time to upgrade. My first choice was going to be the 27″ Imac. You get a lot of bang for your buck with the newer Imacs. Especially with the quad core i7 processors. The one I want is priced around $2000.00. After looking into this a bit more a friend of mine introduced me into a “hackintosh” or “hack pro” as some call it. A “hackintosh” is basically a PC that you can build specifically for the use of the mac OSX operating system. There are a few pros and cons to doing it this way. A big pro for me is that everything I build I can eventually upgrade. Unlike with normal macs you have to just buy the brand new system. With my hackintosh I can simply upgrade the video card or processor whenever I want. To me that is a huge justification in doing it this way. The computer will last me twice as long because it will never get out dated. One of the biggest cons is that it’s super hard to update your OS through mac’s automatic updates. If you download the wrong one it can crash your mac big time. With that being said here is what I am thinking as far as the build components.

Corsair 800D case – This is one of the more important components to me. The 800D case is MASSIVE. Meaning If I ever want to upgrade to bigger motherboard down the road ( possibly to run a dual core system) I will now have room. There are many other advantages to using this case but the over all size is the most stand out to me. (plus you get a cool window to look into you computer with). Price – $249.99

Corsair 750W power supply – This should be more than enough power for multiple fans and a liquid cooling system etc. Price – $119.99

GIGABYTE Z68X-UD5-B3 Intel Z68 Express Motherboard – This motherboard has everything I need. As well as the ability to overclock the processors (which I plan on doing). Price – $269.99

Intel Core i7-2600K Processor 3.4GHz – Quad core power for this build. Since it is an i7 it has hyperthreading abilities which means the computer views it as 8 virtual cores instead of 4. I’d love to have a 6 core but they are still a bit expensive for me to buy right now. $1000.00 vs $340.00 for 50% more performance is not a good deal to me. I plan to over clock this to the 4.0ghz area. That should put it up there with $3000.00 mac pros performance wise. Price – $342.00

Corsair Vengeance Blu 16 GB PC3-12800 1600mHz – A 16 GB stick of ram should do the job. It’s also 1600mHz vs the 660mHz ram I have in my macbook right now. I should see a huge jump in performance. I can also buy another stick down the road if needed to put me at 32 GB of ram. Price – 114.99

Corsair Cooling Hydro Series H50 – I need to keep those cores chilled down if I plan to do some overclocking to them. This is the best bang for your buck solution that I have found. I’ll admit the idea of having flowing water inside my computer right next to all of the very sensitive “guts” kind of weirds me out. Price – $77.98

OCZ Technology 60 GB Vertex Series SATA II Solid State Drive – A solid state drive is much faster than a spinning drive. It is also a lot safer to use and much more reliable than a spinning drive. I plan to have this as my boot drive and install all of my programs on here to make sure everything is zippy fast. I’m sick of waiting 5 minutes for photoshop to open! Price – $134.99

Hitachi Deskstar 3.5′ 2TB 7200RPM – I plan on buying 2 or 3 of these and striping them. This will help render times because it can access information faster being in a stripe. It also has the safety of being redundant so if one disc fails the information is still backed up onto another drive. This will house all of my work files like videos and photos etc. I may even buy a 3 TB drive just for extra storage and back up of old projects etc. Price – $106.00

EVGA GeForce GTX470 Graphics card – The older cards actually work better with hackintoshes. Plus this card will speed up any work I do in any adobe programs because of its built in CUDA acceleration. Price – $250.00

This puts my build around $1600.00. Give or take. I am getting something with the power of a $4000.00+ mac pro with a bunch of stuff they don’t even offer with the ability to grow and expand. I will have updates on this blog when I start to build. Very excited! Stay tuned.

About the author

Justin
I have been shooting and editing videos for about 10 years now. I also shoot photography professionally as well as being a well rounded graphic designer and web developer. I pride myself in being well versed in the area of multimedia as well as staying current on technology and trends. This way I can offer the best product possible.

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3 Comments for Hackintosh Video Editing Beast Mega Build – Part 1

Plastik7

Thanks Justin!

I’m just about to build my 1st hackintosh and u gave me some really nice ideas.
i got today my intel core i7 990x extreme processor and i must admit i’m not going to overclock it cause it’s fast enough for my needs and i also don’t want to get into liquid cooling and stuff like that, like u said – it’s too weird

anyway, you’ve introduced me to some interesting pieces of hardware here which i will definitely gonna take into consideration.

Cheers and happy hackintoshing!

Reply

Justin

Glad I could help! I will be building my computer this week and I will be sure to upload photos and a walk through. I have changed a lot of what I was going to originally do.

Reply

Nick

Hey,
You’re list looks pretty good. I’m doing my research at the moment and then will build a hackintosh of my own. Did you end of building your machine? How did it turn out, anything problems that you came up against?

Reply