Workstation card for Hackintosh build

[TurnX]

Recently got a nice Hackintosh build going on my Acer 6920g laptop, see my sig for specs, and now that I got a feel for how it works I want to put together a workstation level build for my editing/graphics work.

I've been following some of the threads on here and already have a good idea on the processor and mobo, but was curious what I could use in the workstation GPU department. I really don't care much if it's Nvidia or ATI, just really looking for suggestions on what cards work. Also I believe I recall something about being able to flash 9800 cards to Quadro cards, and was curious if that was an option as well. thanks

 

[Kaido]

The Quadro hack stopped working in 10.5.6, so I wouldn't bother unless you can live with 10.5.5 or earlier. Nvidia is releasing the GTX 285 drivers next month (which have like 200+ cores per card), so I'd wait for that and see. The Nvidia GTS 250 works great right now. Netkas has some drivers for the 4000-series such as the ATI 4870.

What kind of programs do you want to use?

 

[TurnX]

Mostly After Effects, Photoshop, Final Cut Pro and Blender. Basically various types of video production software. I know gaming cards can work fairly well when it comes to this type of software, but if possible id like to find a workstation card.

 

[Kaido]

Originally posted by: TurnX
Mostly After Effects, Photoshop, Final Cut Pro and Blender. Basically various types of video production software. I know gaming cards can work fairly well when it comes to this type of software, but if possible id like to find a workstation card.

What's your budget?

 

[TurnX]

Right now it's pretty much open, but id like to stay under $500, preferably under $300 if possible. I'm mainly using it for school right now so I don't want to pump a ton of money into it since it won't really be making me any money yet.

On a more specific note hows the ATI FireGL V7700 compatability?

 

[Kaido]

Originally posted by: TurnX
Right now it's pretty much open, but id like to stay under $500, preferably under $300 if possible. I'm mainly using it for school right now so I don't want to pump a ton of money into it since it won't really be making me any money yet.

On a more specific note hows the ATI FireGL V7700 compatability?

Haven't heard anything about the FireGL. The fastest card I know of being supported right now is the GTX 285. You can get that disgustingly fast monster of a card for around $410 online:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16814130486

+ 2 gigs of VRAM (512-bit DDR3 @ 2322 MHz)
+ 240 Processor Cores (yes, you read that right - the 9400m has 16 cores, this has 240)
+ 648 MHz Core Clock (1476 MHz Shader Clock)
+ Two Dual-Link DVI ports

What's even cooler is that this card will probably be even better in the future, when Snow Leopard brings in OpenCL and Grand Central (providing that really lives up to the claims, which it has so far with CUDA and Badaboom on Windows!).

 

[TurnX]

That card does sound pretty nice... Any info on how in handles production apps like Blender and After Effects? Basically I am trying to find something to reduce render time but also give me more flexibility when it comes to adding lots of things to scenes.

 

[Kaido]

Originally posted by: TurnX
That card does sound pretty nice... Any info on how in handles production apps like Blender and After Effects? Basically I am trying to find something to reduce render time but also give me more flexibility when it comes to adding lots of things to scenes.

No idea on how it handles in Mac yet, the Mac drivers aren't officially out until next month But, it's pretty much the most powerful card you can throw in a Hackintosh as of today. The 4870/4890 cards from ATI are pretty good too. And I think the GTX 270/275/280 cards are close in performance as well, with varyingly cheaper prices.

Render time is going to be mostly CPU-based. Most apps use the CPU exclusively, and then use the GPU for on-screen render effects while working. Some of them are tweaked to use the GPU for processing now, but there's only a handful of those at the moment (Snow Leopard should change all that with OpenCL & Grand Central).

So, it would be in your best interests to invest in a killer processing setup. If you want to follow an easy guide, the UD3P is pretty good, and you can get a Core 2 Quad for a nice price (none are more than $325 or so, even the 3ghz Q9560 Quad). If you want more power and have a slightly larger budget, then Core i7 is definitely the way to go. If you have a really big budget, then there are some new Asus boards that are X58/ICH10R (i.e. Hack-compatible) that have dual Nehalem processors, and you can buy the chips at 2.26ghz for something like $325 a pop (plus $250 for the motherboard and $150 for 12 gigs of RAM).

So that would DEFINITELY help you process stuff faster. It's all about 1, your budget, and 2, whether or not you're willing to do some testing and tweaking to get your rig up and running. You can build a pretty sick machine on a budget pretty easily