Custom built Hackintosh ? (1 Viewer)

scotjimland

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I've been looking into buying a desktop and like the idea of a custom built machine that can run both Windows and OS X .. this is not to save money but to get the best for my money. A system that is not only built with quality components but also future proof and expandable .. So, has anyone bought one or made one themselves?

An example of what I'm looking at is here
http://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/custo-hack/m.html?item=170924188573&pt=UK_Sound_Vision_Other&hash=item27cbe0239d&rt=nc&_trksid=p2047675.l2562

This guy has some excellent feedback and from my limited knowledge of PC components appears to be making some decent machines...but I would really appreciate some guidance from the knowledgeable Funsters ..

tia

Jim
 
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scotjimland

scotjimland

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Building a PC is not rocket science to be honest. I used to do training courses and could get people building their own after a mornings training.

Doing it yourself may take a day for the first one. After you have built a couple of hundred you can do it in an hour :thumb:
 
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scotjimland

scotjimland

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Building a PC is not rocket science to be honest. I used to do training courses and could get people building their own after a mornings training.

Doing it yourself may take a day for the first one. After you have built a couple of hundred you can do it in an hour :thumb:


yes, the idea does appeal.. not ruled out .. can you recommend a good on line store for buying the components ?
 

Terry

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Overclockers is good Jim :thumb:
To be honest you are wasting money because by there very nature they quickly become obsolete :Doh:My mate is always buying the latest this and that -costs a fortune- but I don't mind because when I want a new computer I simply let him know and within a few weeks I have got the latest 6 mths out od date all singing and dancing thing for around 300 quid that he spent above a thousand for 6 mths earlier ::bigsmile:
Try partisioning the hard drive :thumb: and using one op sys and install the other
terry

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scotjimland

scotjimland

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Overclockers is good Jim :thumb:
To be honest you are wasting money because by there very nature they quickly become obsolete :Doh:My mate is always buying the latest this and that -costs a fortune- but I don't mind because when I want a new computer I simply let him know and within a few weeks I have got the latest 6 mths out od date all singing and dancing thing for around 300 quid that he spent above a thousand for 6 mths earlier ::bigsmile:
Try partisioning the hard drive :thumb: and using one op sys and install the other
terry

It's not just a case of wanting a dual boot machine, I want a quality desktop.. with a decent sized monitor.. no point in a new laptop as I never use mine away from the desk..

The Dell I have is only a year old but it overheats due in part to being on all day .. it's been back to Dell .. but from looking at Dell forums it's a common problem with the N5010 i7 .. so I figured for my needs a desktop makes more sense..

I looked at iMacs and as much as I like they can't justify what they charge .. then I looked at Dell desktops.. and from there thought about a dual boot machine .. hence a Hackintosh..

and now Karl has me thinking on a self build.. and as you know... with anything self built.. you get exactly what you want .. and know how it's put together .. :winky:

will have a look at overlockers.. cheers
 
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yes, the idea does appeal.. not ruled out .. can you recommend a good on line store for buying the components ?

I used a mix of suppliers.

For memory I always get it from Crucial.com. I have had bad experiences with other suppliers before Crucial are the retail outlet for Micron who actually make the chips.

I use dabs.com for motherboards, video cards etc.

I also look on ebay to see if there are any deals on particular parts.

Cases I just do a google and get one I like the look of that serves the purpose.

Of course you have to balance off buying from multiple suppliers with multiple shipping charges.

To keep things simple I would just use dabs.com. Execellent service and the prices is usually within a £1 or 2..
 

Terry

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Hj Jim Paul also uses Micro direct and I can ask him for other surpliers if you want.
He always says that the cheapo's from Aldi have good specs for the money and use quality parts
Even I built one yrs back with Paul looking on :thumb: (yep that's me who cannot even find a spell checker on this thing :winky:)Basically everything only plugs into where it fits ::bigsmile:
Even Paul has stopped chasing the latest this year :winky:
terry
edit He has just got a 22 ins Dell touchscreen for the novelty factor which will be either mine or sold within a few weeks once he has played with it

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Terry

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I need him to get into tablets ::bigsmile: I want another 10ins one :Smile:He has loaned me a 7 ins Lenovo that I can have for 80 quid but it is too small after getting the 10 ins Samsung and giving grandson the free Chinese 10 ins one
terry
 

Terry

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Can't remember ;)
I can recommend viagra :ROFLMAO::ROFLMAO:

How do you know if it's real: BigGrin: beside I don't need it: thumb:::bigsmile:



On your build thing the only thing I found confusing was the jumper bit on the back of hard drives IE one place for master and other for slave -get it wrong and no worky :winky:
terry

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Popeye

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Hi Jim, I had mine built to order by www.pcspecialist.co.uk/ and I've always been impressed with it.

Almost 5 years on I had a problem, I phoned them for assistance and they talked me through it all. I asked for the bill, NO CHARGE within the same owner life of the machine.

Now I'm even more impressed.

My neighbour sold his interest and Directorship in 'Novatech'. The building is only about a mile away if I can get any stuff for you! ... Griff
 
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Snowbird

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== Self build ==
You will pretty much always get the best bang for your buck designing and building your own machine and it's not difficult at all to assemble as long as you do your research and take your time building (dedicate a full day to building it). What you won't get is a telephone number to call when something goes wrong. You're on your own then.

Are you happy with formatting, partitioning and installing an operating system on a machine? Have you ever changed a hard drive or CD-ROM drive or upgraded RAM?

Building a computer is not much harder than this! Worst bit: putting thermal paste on your CPU then fitting the fan. But this isn't too difficult and if you're not up for that use thermal pads.

== Aldi/lidl special ==
They have some decent computers for very reasonable prices (<£300). It's plug'n'play and should last a good few years. When it breaks or gets too slow, buy another one!

== Apple ==
You get what you pay for. You'll be bankrupt but if you drop it, you'll need to replace the floor boards not the iMac.

As for dual booting. I think it's fair to say most people need 2 operating systems like they need 2 holes in the head. Do you commonly find yourself cursing Cygwin for not letting gcc link your C code properly? Are you often frustrated that PuTTY isn't forwarding X11 quite right? Are you having trouble automatically syncing your files to your time capsule? Do you curse Apple for shipping OS X with BSD readline rather than GNU readline?

If not, I'd say pick your favourite OS and stick with it. That is unless you are interested in learning about other OSes.

Posted by Ste on behalf of Snowbird the dinosaur.
 

Snowbird

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Hi Jim, I had mine built to order by www.pcspecialist.co.uk/ and I've always been impressed with it.

Almost 5 years on I had a problem, I phoned them for assistance and they talked me through it all. I asked for the bill, NO CHARGE within the same owner life of the machine.

Now I'm even more impressed.

My neighbour sold his interest and Directorship in 'Novatech'. The building is only about a mile away if I can get any stuff for you! ... Griff

Decent prices. Once ordered a refurb from a place like this (it's now dead after about 5 years hard labour). It came with the graphics card loose and damaged. When I complained they nearly voided the warranty because I'd diagnosed the problem i.e... opened the side of the PC. All sorted in the end though.
 
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Snowbird

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My advice on selecting/building a machine:

CPU: INTEL i5/INTEL i7 (can't go wrong)
MOTHERBOARD: ASUS/GIGABYTE (can go wrong but it's luck of the draw, if you are going to use OS X or Linux check that the onboard sound and wifi have current & working drivers and for confirmation this works on the forums)
HDD/SSD:
for music/movies go for 1TB+ Western Digital HDD
for fast response go for (120/240GB) OCZ Vertex 3 SSD
for both go for both
RAM: CORSAIR/CRUCIAL (can't go wrong)
GRAPHICS: NVIDIA/ATI (careful here if you're going to use OS X or Linux check they have current & working drivers and for confirmation this works on the forums)
CASE: Depends if you like the sound of vacuums or something that looks like a tupperware box. Make sure the cable management is done right unless you like grilled circuit board.
DVD/BLU-RAY+BURNER: Will you use it? LITE-ON/PANASONIC/PIONEER/SONY
POWER SUPPLY: I can not stress this enough: do not skimp on this. Ignore the "wattage" written on the unit. Not all units are equal. I use CORSAIR HX Series. You can find out what wattage you actually need here: http://www.extreme.outervision.com/psucalculator.jsp

Don't trust that whoever is building your machine knows what they are doing. If they did, why would they be building machines?
 
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I have been hemming and ahhing over what to get next. My current laptop is starting to be a bit too slow for some of the things I am doing and I also need a development server. I don't really have space in the van for a full desktop computer and an i7 laptop is pretty pricey with the screen resolution I wanted.

I linked to the google datacenter images a couple of days ago on here. This has given me the idea to make my own 1U sized desktop that I can fit in the space above the fridge or in some overhead locker.

What I am thinking of doing is getting an aluminium sheet and mounting the motherboard to it along with the hard drives and slimline PSU.
for the graphics card I was going to Broken Link Removed so that it can lie flat.
I reckon doing it this way I can keep it under 2" in height. Either that or use the onboard intel graphics. I would only need to use the PCIe extender if I used something like the AMD FX8150 CPU..

I would use a PSU out of a 1U rack server to keep the size down. I am also looking at possible car PC PSU's but I need to know the total wattage of the system before I can do this. If the wattage is low enough I could even run it off batteries. If it uses too much power I would obviously use a standard psu and only use it when on hookup.

I would probably look at liquid cooling as well so I could get rid of the fan noise... I am not sure I could do this if I used the car PSU though...

Nice dream but will have to wait until after christmas as I need a new gearbox first:Doh:

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Snowbird

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Having built a water cooled pc myself I would really want to put others off the idea. It is far more hassle than it's worth. Remember you don't just have to build it, you have to upgrade it and maintain it. This means you have to willing to empty it and fill it up on a regular basis. It takes 4 hours to remove air locks after filling it so you can expect plenty of system down days.

If noise and power are both an issue then look at efficient fan-less (or nearly) designs.

My SILENT core i7 previous generation macbook can out perform an older 24GB ram/2x quad core xeon server in most tasks I do (computer algebra/functional programming/c/FORTRAN) and wipes the floor with it when it comes to response times for file accesses thanks to a silent SSD. The server lives in an airconditioned room and sounds like it's waiting for clearance to take off.

I am lucky in that I have remote access to a supercomputer with 512 cores @ 2GHz and 3.1TB of RAM for heavy lifting. I wouldn't want that in my office with me. It is a Dell though... Link Removed (and yes, it is as flakey as Jim's)
 
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Having built a water cooled pc myself I would really want to put others off the idea. It is far more hassle than it's worth. Remember you don't just have to build it, you have to upgrade it and maintain it. This means you have to willing to empty it and fill it up on a regular basis. It takes 4 hours to remove air locks after filling it so you can expect plenty of system down days.

Have to disagree with you on that one. I built one using a resorator and it was faultless for the 2 years I used it... Top up involved a screw off lid on the top of the tower and pouring in distilled water. Only had to top it up once. Never had airlock problems. Hassle free and silent.

You can find out what wattage you actually need here: http://www.extreme.outervision.com/psucalculator.jsp

Thanks for that link. I have been struggling to find out what size PSU I would need for an i7 using integrated graphics. Brilliant thanks :thumb:
 

Snowbird

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Looks like a nice unit.

With my system I had issues with screw threads being too long leading to a micro leak in my south bridge block, fried my graphics card. Had to remove it and undo the water damage with some ethanol and a q-tip. New barbs and everything is fine there. (1 year in)

The plastic in my pump degraded and it leaked, no damage done, replaced it. (3 years in)

I had some stability issues with my power owing to a poor connection with the motherboard. I suspect I damaged the ATX connector when using a paperclip to short it in order to remove air locks, this killed my graphics card. Corsair replaced the unit no problem with an upgrade which was more than fair considering I told them the whole story. I wasn't expecting that. Excellent service. (3.5 years in)

Now I have a new graphics card waiting to go in but I will have to test it then fit new water blocks to it...

I can say with my set up every stage of this wouldn't have happened or would have been easier without water. But, I did go crazily over the top with the system :). I suppose I deserve it :ROFLMAO:!

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OUCH!!!! You didn't have much luck with it then...

Mine just installed and worked. I also bought the fanless PSU from the same place. Was a great system but too big for the van. As a fulltimer I needed something more compact so dropped down to my now aging Dell M90 17" laptop. It's a 2GHz Core Duo. So whilst fine for general office stuff is not really great for video transcoding or virtualisation.. Hence me looking for an i7 solution.

I will probably run the system headless on linux. I will stick with my laptop as my workstation and run a virtualised linux (OpenVZ) on the i7 box. I can rip dvd's using the laptop and save them to the linux box via the gigabit ethernet and run handbrake on the remote box for transcoding. I did look at using an AMD FX 8150 but that would mean having a gfx card which ups the power usage, cost and space required. As I won't be using it for graphics it seems more sensible to get the cheapest i7. If I want a linux desktop I can use VNC or Xming and run X on one of the virtualised linux instances.

I keep running round in circles on what would be the best setup for me. It's driving me nuts....
 

Snowbird

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Love i7. Both my machines have them. Recommended for you and Jim! You get an incredible bang for the buck on the lowest model and it performs outstandingly for everything I have thrown at it. :thumb:

We were promised so much in the way of parallel processing on graphics cards, especially transcoding.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrJeYFxpUyQ"]NVIDIA 2008[/ame]

I can say that I have been sorely disappointed with ATI's parallel transcoder Avivo. The output quality is poor, it's clunky. I am not a happy bunny. Not tried Nvidia's offerings and I'm not sure if people like Nero have finally caught up with the game or not...

Personally in your situation I would probably go for a new laptop. Well... a macbook. But then I'm a terrible Apple fanboi.
 
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The problem with getting a new laptop is I am looking at over £1,000 for the spec I need. If I build my own system it will be less than £400...

Plus the mobile i7 doesn't quite have the same grunt as the full desktop one.
I would also still need to spend some cash on a small micro itx system to use as a development server.

On the parallel processing side. I have joined kickstarter on this project.
.

I am hoping they get enough for the full 64 core project but it is not looking likely. I would have loved to have gotten involved in migrating handbrake across to it.. Still it looks like a nice toy if not:roflmto:

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Geo

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Ive been following this thread with fervor
Unfortunately I lost :Doh:it somewhere between
Jims "I've been looking" and Your "Looks like a nice toy if not":ROFLMAO::ROFLMAO::ROFLMAO:
Tried google translate it was lost too
 
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Snowbird

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Its an education thing Geo...Us dinosaurs can never be expected to understand :ROFLMAO:
 

Snowbird

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I'm saying sod all ..

better to be thought dumb than to confirm it ... :roflmto:
Most of what my pal Ste says goes completely over my head Jim. I start the day with a clear head, but as the day goes on it becomes very foggy. I often have to remind him I left school at 14, then he explains it so I can understand.
 
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Sorry guys, I got a bit over excited again... I thought from what Snowbird was saying he was up on this tech....

Anyway Jim. Getting back to topic :ROFLMAO::ROFLMAO::ROFLMAO:

I have got my motherboard and CPU sorted.
The motherboard .. I went for it as it was the cheapest Mini ITX one with an H77 chipset, at least 4 USB 3 ports and supports the i7 GPU..
(£84)

I have gone for the non overclockable as it has the VT-d enabled. The K version although over clockable has this disabled. (£240)

Memory I get from crucial 8GB (£30). The SSD I will get from Link Removed (£42). The PSU I will get from my usual rack mount gear supplier who unfortunately doesn't deal with the public (£100).

Just under £500. I will be building it on a sheet of 3mm aluminium and making up the edges with ally angle pop riveted onto the base plate.

I am aiming to make it no more than 12" wide by 2" high. The depth will have to be decided once I get the components as I need to fit a 3.5" 3Tb hard disk in there as well.

There will be other smaller components I need to buy such as heatsinks/fan/mounting bolts etc but I have a good supplier of those..

The entire project should come in at under £600 for a custom high powered computer that can be permanently fitted into the van...:thumb:

An equivelent setup with new laptop and a micro server would come in at £1300 odd.
 
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Snowbird

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Sorry guys, I got a bit over excited again... I thought from what Snowbird was saying he was up on this tech....

Anyway Jim. Getting back to topic :ROFLMAO::ROFLMAO::ROFLMAO:

I have got my motherboard and CPU sorted.
The motherboard .. I went for it as it was the cheapest Mini ITX one with an H77 chipset, at least 4 USB 3 ports and supports the i7 GPU..
(£84)

I have gone for the non overclockable as it has the VT-d enabled. The K version although over clockable has this disabled. (£240)

Memory I get from crucial 8GB (£30). The SSD I will get from Link Removed (£42). The PSU I will get from my usual rack mount gear supplier who unfortunately doesn't deal with the public (£100).

Just under £500. I will be building it on a sheet of 3mm aluminium and making up the edges with ally angle pop riveted onto the base plate.

I am aiming to make it no more than 12" wide by 2" high. The depth will have to be decided once I get the components as I need to fit a 3.5" 3Tb hard disk in there as well.

There will be other smaller components I need to buy such as heatsinks/fan/mounting bolts etc but I have a good supplier of those..

The entire project should come in at under £600 for a custom high powered computer that can be permanently fitted into the van...:thumb:

An equivelent setup with new laptop and a micro server would come in at £1300 odd.

Regarding me being "Up to tech" Please read the bottom of my first post Karl.

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