I will understand if this is something that folks here don't want to discuss or want to pull this thread from the forum. I hear it's sometimes a touchy ethical subject.

But here's the facts: it's tough times out there. I'm looking to expand my business a little into doing some video editing, and everything I've tried on the Windows side has left me cold. I've done some work on a Mac and just think it's far better on the video editing side.

The problem is that despite repeated attempts to justify the Mac Pro to myself, I still cannot justify spending around $2600-3000 on one. I'm not getting an iMac, as I have a perfectly good 30" monitor. I'm not getting a Mini, because I want to do video editing.

So yes, I want to see what it would take to put OSX on something I build myself. I look at the Mac Pro I would want, and at the very least it would come to about $2600. I look at the parts I'd need to upgrade my own PC to something akin to the Mac Pro, and I need to spend around $1200. I know there's an Apple Tax, and I'm not saying that all of that $1400 is tax, but a large portion of it is.

So how difficult is the Hackintosh? What parts of OSX will/won't work? What hardware will/won't work?

I've read a couple guides out there, but they've been a bit unintuitive. The OSx86 site is pretty tough to wade through, IMO. I'd really appreciate any tips.

And the way I look at it, if I really like MacOS, when I'm doing better financially it'll be easier for me to pull the trigger on a real Mac Pro. But right now I need a new computer for my livelihood, and I just can't afford the Apple machine.

Mac Minis have (up to) a 2.26GHz Core 2 Duo. Until mid-2006, no PC in the world was that fast. Yet they still did video editing.

Peter

I have 11 Minis running Final Cut Pro in a production environment. Most of them 1.6Ghz Core Duo's. The one Core 2 I have really flies.

Based on guesswork, I'd be worried about video card support. I imagine that a lot of what makes MacOS fast for video editing is how well the video card driver is integrated. You might end up spending $1200 to get a computer that doesn't work much better than what you have now.

It's not my objective to discourage you from the Hackintosh route, but if I were looking into it, it would be something I would be concerned about.

You both make good points, and I'll consider the Mini. It's still hard to justify, given the amount of machine I can get for the $1050 the top-end Mini would cost. I know you CAN do video on the Mini, but I'd imagine not as quickly as you could on a Core i7.

I think it depends on what you mean by 'do video'. If you were going to be doing loads of compositing, motion tracking or transcoding to and from 2k video then yes you might find you'll be spending most of your time watching a progress bar. However, if you're working in native formats just doing simple overlay graphics etc, then you'd be pleasantly surprised how quickly they do work.

I would worry about what Apple will do with the next release of OS X. Would it be possible for them to make it even more difficult for OS X to run on a Hackintosh?

Snow Leopard is supposed to make great moves towards using the multi core CPU's much more efficiently, and I for one don't mind paying the Apple Tax in order to make sure I don't have any worries when is comes to Snow Leopard.

On the mini, it's worth pointing out the new Mini's come with much improved graphics capability but they still run off 2.5" drives, not sure if they ship with 7200rpm's or not? What were you thinking of editing in?

Cheers

Cris.

How about the iMac you mentioned you didn't want with your 30" connected along-side it? Everyone I've ever seen doing professional editing has always had two displays. And possibly an additional analog NTSC display, though you'd probably want to use a switcher of some kind to output to an HDTV now-a-days.

There should be some discussions about which cards to get to make a workable Hackintosh. You should even be able to find some of the Apple BTO NVIDIA and ATI cards available for sale somewhere. ATI also has a few retail cards available for the Mac.

Using a Windows-centric card used to be problematic due to differing ROMs on the Mac boards (for technical reasons, not to thwart cross-use). I'm not sure what the situation is like right now, but I also know that ATI has released some dual-ROM cards in the past.

You might also want to take a look at what graphics cards are/were being offered by Psystar and that German guy who's currently selling commercial Hackintoshes.

Before dumping even $1000 into this route however, I'd advise you to try and get your Hack-on with whatever hardware you currently have around. Or use whatever Mac you can get your hands on for free right now. Do some testing to make sure you'll be happy with the workflow if not the overall speed. You want to be certain this is the platform you want to use before investing the larger sum.

Then you might want to spend as little as possible to get the bare minimum system up and running to get your feet wet (lower priced Hackintosh). Start making some money and then re-evaluate your options.

Aside re: Apple bare-minimums... A mini at Apple will cost you $599 or $750 with the upgraded processor option. Don't add any other hardware options through Apple as it will be cheaper to add any RAM or HD expansion yourself.

If you're at all serious about editing you shouldn't put your capture or scratch on the same disc as your system. Use an external disc instead, the mini now has FW800 or you could just use USB2 either work pretty well.

Thanks for the input folks. It's something I'm going to have to mull over for a while.

Your suggestions are very good ones, Bruno. I might try partitioning my current machine and experimenting with this idea. It's also true that I could just use the 30" as a secondary monitor, but that still means I'm spending a lot of money on a screen I may or may not want (plus it's glossy), and my desk is so prohibitive to such a setup, that pretty much takes it out of consideration from the start.

On the other hand, you all seem to be pretty confident on the Mini's performance in video editing. I'm not sold, especially since the final price will include an absurd $99 for a friggin' cable to connect my monitor. That hurts.

But I'm considering it...

Wow. That bites. Looks like Apple is the only manufacturer of a DisplayPort to Dual-DVI adapter, too.

Have you considered the EFiX dongle? A friend of a friend built a machine with one and, from what I hear, it actually works. This is despite the guy's poor PC-building skills. He apparently needed to watch youtube videos of how to install a Socket 775 processor during the build.

I'm intrigued by the device, but I think I would still rather spend the money on a real Macintosh. Even if it was a Mini. Personally, I find the Mini more appealing than an iMac because they now have dual monitor outputs and appear much easier to upgrade.

On a related note, I just got done upgrading a cast-away Sawtooth G4 for the sole purpose of video editing. My video work is done in iMovie and iDVD, but it works perfectly fine for those programs. The only time it's really bogged-down is when compiling a DVD. I basically have to set everything up, start the process, then go to bed, go to work, and it might be done when I get home. I got the machine for ~$50, 1GHz G4 upgrade was $170, 2GB of RAM $50, and a hacked PC nVidia 6200 AGP card for $60 or so. Not too shabby, really. A G4 Mac Mini would have cost roughly the same, but I can actually put cards and desktop hard drives in this one...

Its a custom bootloader + patches on a special USB stick apparently. I'd assume that Apple would stop it working with patches every so often.

Considering the dongles are active devices with their own custom firmware that gets flashed to with both NVIDIA and ATI custom code, that's likely to remain the situation for the foreseeable future.

Most anything I would say has been covered for the most part. I do have to agree you are probably overshooting what you need for a first Mac. Back when I made the switch, I bought a used iMac to play with. Sold it off and bought a used G4 Cube. It was only after about 2 years of using OS X that I felt it was necessary to buy a new machine.

As far as the hackintosh side, I personally wouldn't trust any hackintosh for much of anything. I've tinkered with it a bit out of curiosity, seen friends do it, and seen shiny hacks wrapped up into a package like EFiX, and just am not convinced it's stable. Stare at it the wrong way, and some ktext (driver) goes south, or a patch blows it all up. And you will want to patch the machine. 10.5.6 is required for iLife 09 for example. Do you really want to have to wait for some hacker somewhere to release a new patch to unscrew your box and allow an install of newer video editing software? A hackintosh may look like a mac, and act like a mac sometimes, but the experience is very different.

Check eBay, craigslist, or even Apple refurb sales if you want something mostly new but not something with this so called "Apple Tax" on it. And as others have said, don't pay Apple money for RAM or HDD upgrades.

The one thing I've known since the beginning was that I'd never buy RAM or HDD's from Apple. Would you folks suggest Macsales.com for the RAM?

I'd be happy to go the used route, Tom, but that still puts me in a tough spot. I was under the impression that the most recent Mini was the first Mini that could drive a 30" monitor. Is that true or not? If so, that leaves used Mac Pros. I'm looking at my local Craigslist right now, and I'm only seeing the upper $2K's. No real bargain there.

I guess I've been talked out of the hackintosh (though I may experiment with my current system).

You're going to spend hours and hours researching, maintaining, and finagling to get such a system working properly. Unless you're looking for a new hobby, save yourself the hassle and spend the few extra hundred bucks.

So how did that come about, then? How come a converter from Industry Standard #1 to Industry Standard #2 needs per-vendor glue in the middle? Would any of the conversion involved somehow monkey with framerates, sync etc., causing problems for video editing?

And do they actually work with all 30in displays? (Dignan, which display do you have?) The Wikipedia page for Mini Displayport hints darkly that people have had trouble, and there seems to be no shortage of moaning in the reviews on store.apple.com.

Peter

I can probably find out more of course, but at this time I only know (for a fact) that there is "glue" in there. DisplayPort is a packet-based system while DVI is serial, which I suppose has something to do with adapter price. What's going on specifically in the dual-link $99 product however is a bit of a mystery. It may even have something to do with DRM (DHCP vs HDCP).

The adapter is supposed to work with all Dual-Link displays, not just Apple's 30" - however it requires Mac OS 10.5.6 and is specifically designed for Macs. So when other computers come out with mini DisplayPort connectors, this adapter will likely not be suitable.

Incidentally, Apple's adapter prices seem to be the lowest around. Every other adapter out there (for straight up DVI) looks like it was made of random (but suitable) parts and costs at least $3 more.

Whilst not strictly on topic, this might help you make up your mind about the Hackintosh.

Today I took delivery of my new Mac Pro Quad 2.66 (new model). If you like a well thought out, well put together machine then this is for you. Worth every penny of the Apple Tax just because it's a thing of beauty. Not since my first PC (an ex corporate server from 1989 Olivetti M380-XP9 which cost over £10,000 new - Still got it ) have I seen something bolted together so well and with so much thought.

I know this doesn't have too much to do with performance, but for me one of the reasons I moved to Mac is that I just want it to work most of the time, and last. This Mac Pro is going to last! It screams quality.

Bench marks are also pretty good, I am seeing a massive increase in overall performance over my old MacBook of course, but compare to others in the new range I think it holds it's head up for the money. I am glad I spent the extra £92 and got the Mac Pro. (was looking at an iMac)

Cheers

Cris.

I've got a G5 installed that gets cups of coffee dumped on it with some regularity. It runs 24/7, driving 3 Cinema Displays. Aside from video card capacitors going, I haven't had a single problem with it. Every six months to a year when the next batch of capacitors pop, I pull it out and wipe the coffee off the sides.

It's a heavy beast of a machine though.

Matthew

Ah, so you got the 3-year AppleCare Protection Plan, eh?

I did actually, but only because the guy threw it in at the last minute for a quite amazing 80% off, this made it cheaper than buying from eBay as Tom suggested. It also covers the 24" LED screen I may, or may not, have bought at the same time

My advice, if you are buying a new Mac ring up and haggle over the phone. I was already going to buy it really, but decided to be cheeky and I got an even better deal and ended up with an overall 20% off.

I'm now skint, but I do have a big smile on my face!

Cheers

Cris.

Two questions on your MacPro tower:

1) How loud when idle?

2) How much power consumption when on but idle (i.e., disks spun down, monitor in powersave, but computer still on)?

I'm very close to pulling the trigger on one of these.

My Macbook Pro on my desk is louder then my MacPro under my desk when idle.

Not sure about disks spun down and such, but my Mac Pro 2008 (dual quad, all 8 memory slots filled, 4 hard drives, 2 video cards) is using 180 watts. When fully loaded (video and CPU) it goes a bit above 300. Sleep mode, I'm not sure, as I don't have an external utility to monitor it. I'd expect the new towers with a quad and the newer DDR3 RAM to use a bit less power.

Also, Back to my Mac rocks. I pulled this info off my tower back home, after triggering it to wake from sleep with a WoL packet.

As Tom says, it's very quiet. It is much much quieter than my MacBook when the fan is spun up. I have mine on top of my desk at the moment, so it's close to me, can't say it bothers me too much. In fact I remembered I still have a sound level meter around, the ambient level here is 35.5dB and with the Mac Pro powered up and idle it's only 37.9dB. Measured from my listening position about 1m from the tower which is on top of my desk, good enough answer for you?

One thing I have noticed is that the fan speed doesn't seem to ramp up much during load. On my MacBook it would sound like a little turbine when running something like CineBench, but even under full multicore load the Mac Pro seems to stay quiet might have something to do with the massive heatsink on the quad model...





Tom, how did you pull off these figures? I don't have anything external to look at either.

Cheers

Cris

I was hoping one of you guys would have a Kill-a-Watt or something. The on-but-idle number matters to me since one of the tasks I'm looking to do with this thing is to act as a home media server -- generally idle until the AppleTV asks it for something, but still needs to be on and available.

Which picture is also the final answer to the question upthread about upgradability from single-socket to dual: the whole bottom half of the case innards looks different from the dual-socket version on Apple's website.

Peter

Yea, it looks like the main board and the rest of the machine are the same, it's just the daughter board that has the CPU and RAM on that seems different. It's a totally different board, notice how smooth the PCB is on the LHS, there are no holes to mount missing components etc...

I think realistically most customers, including myself, won't be upgrading the CPU. Apple have capitalised on that fact, and reduced their costs by being able to use CPU's that don't support multi CPU motherboards. Pretty cleaver if you ask me.

The heat sink is cooled by 2 large fans, one at the front the other at the rear of the case. It's the biggest heatsink I have ever seen I think

Cheers

Cris.

That's a heck of a lot of power consumption. VERY high.
Are you sure about those figures?

A typical quad-core machine here with a few drives installed idles at under 100W.

??

I used iStat menus. It reads power consumption from the system somehow, though...


No idea. I'm just using software that claims to be querying the monitoring hardware, instead of using an external device to confirm. FBDIMM modules I have heard are pretty power hungry though even when idle. The newer Mac Pros should do better having DDR3 modules in them.

This support page at Apple seems to confirm my numbers appear normal. I can't find similar numbers from Dell on the quad processor XPS boxes we have at the office to compare though.

That reminded me I do have one of these, it was attached to my UPS. Good job I you reminded me as I discovered my UPS cells have failed. When I pulled the plug the whole shebang went off!

I was quite surprised by these results. All on my Quad 2009 2.66 only difference from stock is I have a 1Tb Samsung Spinpoint F1 in bay 2...

Turned off but plugged in - 12w
Idle at desktop - 138w
Single Core at max - 163w
8 HT Cores at max - 252w
Standby (sleep) - 18w

All higher than I guessed. What surprises me most is when I look at my workstation as a whole here. With everything on standby I am running at 103w, and with everything powered on and running at max I am at 502w !!!! Gotta do something about that, this isn't the only computer I have in the house either, I have another 2 one all the time and a PC that's in standby most of the time. I have one of those extension leads that cuts off the other 5 sockets when the computer is in standby, time to dig it out!

Cheers

Cris.

PS - Anyone know where a good place to get replacement cells for a Belkin UPS is?

Core2Quad E6600 - 2.4Ghz, 1x750GB SATA, 4GB DDR2-800,
Nvidia 7200TC, 2 x Marvell SATA add-on boards (no drives).

ASUS Workstation/Server board with tons of PCIe, PCI-X,
and PCI slots, built-in everything (except graphics), etc..

0.925 amps @120VAC = approximately 111W, idle at the KDE3 desktop.

-ml

Thanks for the assistance and the input folks.

Sadly, some things have been going on (indeed, since I posted this thread - sadly some things can happen very quickly) that make it a bit unfeasible to attempt to learn a completely new OS. The financial aspects of going with a Mac don't help the cause either.

I've priced out what it would cost to upgrade my old computer to a nice Core i7 system, and it comes out to about $800.

I recognize that a good amount of the "Apple Tax" goes towards excellent quality, but I just can't afford it right now, when I'm trying to get the best value I can.

I'm currently seeing how good a workflow I can put together using Sony Vegas, and so far I've been quite pleased. It imports the unusual MJPEG video files from my Canon TX1 without a hitch, and the UI is pretty good. If I get confident that I can live with this software, I might go ahead with the upgrade. I've got a fantastic case (Lian-Li PC-75) that's been sitting unused for too long

Oh dear

I can't decide how sad that is (busy at work? lost job? brain tumor?), but I've just gotta know the story behind making it unfeasible to learn something new.

Sorry to hear that.

Of course if money wasn't a problem I would suggest buying the Mac and then just running XP on Parrallels (or something similar) from within OS X

Cheers

Cris.

I just plugged my UPS into my Kill A Watt to join in the fun.

Computers off, Drobo in standby, two 19" LCDs in standby = ~42 Watts

Dell 530S with Core 2 Duo 2200 (2.2GHz) at idle, but Drobo accessing = 200 Watts
Both cores pegged at 100% and Drobo accessing = 237 Watts
Both cores pegged and PowerMac G4 1.0GHz turned on at idle = 304 Watts

Turning the monitors off results in a power consumption drop of 30 Watts each.

Is is possible the G4 with two hard drives powered up only consumes 67 Watts, or is it more likely the Kill A Watt isn't very accurate?

I'm actually pleased with these results since the Dell box and drobo stay on 24/7. 200 Watts is less than I expected.

The G4 systems were pretty power efficient, especially when compared against the chips Intel was shipping back in the same time frame. So 67 Watts at idle doesn't seem too odd.

Yeah, 64W is more like the range I would expect for a moderately efficient desktop machine.

Cheers

Here's a GEM from Steve Ballmer:



This is what key executives at other companies don't get as their margins and market share slide. And even when the hardware's price is too much to bear for some people, they still choose to take cheaper hardware and hack at it to install a different OS.

if Ballmer wanted to compare dollars and cents, he should probably look into the pricing of their OEM and Vista packs.

Let's check back in same time next year Steve.

Yeah, but 90% of the time, Microsoft's getting paid for a license anyway, even if it's never used.

Apple has always (or, at least since the candy-colored iMacs) positioned itself as a premium / fashion choice. The Apple premium has always been there, but it's less and less these days.

The big annoyance is that Apple doesn't have a real "gamer PC". If you want a big desktop with the option for a crazy graphics card, then you're forced to get the Nehalem server-class chipset, with its multi-socket support, ECC memory, and so forth.

Likewise, Apple isn't (yet?) competing in the netbook segment, leading to most of the Hackintosh activity there. The zillion dollar question is whether Pystar or other such companies will succeed at selling "Apple-compatible" clones.

All the duct tape and cardboard in the word isn't going to make a 1995 Ford Taurus into a 2009 BMW.

All true, but the margins on all other PCs have narrowed as well, so relatively there's little difference.

The initial iMacs didn't carry a price premium, and it was actually one of the products that helped push PC prices lower. I worked at Gateway at the time, and it panicked a lot of people when it came out. It had a nice simple design, offered what consumers wanted, and was cheeper then what Gateway, HP, Compaq, and Dell were all selling at the time. The all in one system Gateway had at the time (Profile) was more the premium/fashion statement device, with very expensive for the time components like an LCD. The engineers rushed to clone the iMac in the form of the Astro, as did other companies.

If anything, the iMac was the product that began the transformation at Apple away from the premium priced products it has been churning out in the early to mid 90s.

Nice story about the "Apple Tax". Quick summary: When compared spec for spec, and ignoring the operating system as an advantage or disadvantage, Apple hardware is reasonable in the markets Apple competes in. However, Apple doesn't fill all the markets other PC makers do, leaving people to think there is a tax.

It seems that new MS ad is stirring a lot of this stuff up again. It's at least making a point unlike the Seinfeld ads.

MS is doing the same thing that Hyundai and Toyota do when they compare their cars against BMW.

I'd argue that a Hyundai is closer to a BMW (jn every way, including quality) than a typical Windows system is to any Mac though.

I would say the x301 / air kinda proves the no apple tax point but I think the x301 is better hardware wise at least. (I'm staying out of the osx vs windows holy war)

Late to the party, but Maplin were knocking out mains wattmeters for £8, and I'd always wondered what my always-on media server (VIA Epia PD, 600MHz C3, two 3.5in drives, full-size CDROM) consumed. And the answers are:

Plugged in but switched off: 5W
Peak current, switch-on (spinup both drives): 88W
Steady full load (rip+encode+record DVB): 75W
CPU busy, drives spun-up but idle: 62W
Idle, both drives spun-up: 58W
Idle, both drives spun-down: 45W
Idle, both drives spun-down, CPU@400MHz: still 45W (i.e., on-demand CPU governor makes no detectable difference)

Frankly, that's more than I was expecting; perhaps the (200W?) PSU isn't very efficient at that low load. Maybe I should get one of these.

Peter

That's brilliant. Now I want to build a system around that, just for the sake of doing it.

I have 2 Micro-ATX machines that I used to run them on, I went back to a more traditional fanless PSU solution when I started getting strange problems with the system halting all the time.

I think it was a heat problem of some kind, I also found they really stressed the external 12v PSU bricks I was using at the time. I wouldn't use them again myself, but the machines I am using are pretty much sealed 1U rackmount servers and I think that type of PSU needs a little more venting than I had available.

Cheers

Cris.

This is the EPIA mobo with PicoPSU (yellow and red bits) that runs our rtr.ca cookie-tin server here.

And a close-up crop of just the PicoPSU part.

Is the electrolytic cap just below that Pico PSU board swollen? Perhaps it's just a trick of the light but it looks bad in both photos.

The two photos are actually just a single photo.

But thanks for pointing out the cap.. I'll try and have a looksee later on.

Thanks.

Okay, I had a look into the cookie-tin just now.

Yup, that particular capacitor is bulging quite a bit on top, as are about four similar ones of the same brand elsewhere in there.

I wonder how much longer I can ignore them?

-ml

I guess it depends on what kind of damage will be caused by their failure...

Alternatively, this is kinda cute:

http://www.buffalotech.com/products/network-storage/linkstation/linkstation-pro-ls-xhl/

Bat-out-of-hell fast (60MB/sec+ over gigabit), runs linux, some unspecified DLNA server, 1.2GHz ARM CPU and 256MB of RAM. Plus it takes something like 4W idle and 17W peak.

Truly impressed with a budget network hard drive handily outrunning a USB2.0 one

Hugo

Mmm.. their own spec sheet says 17W consumption with no USB devices connected.

I do have a similar, but lower-performance thing as a backup device (it only does 900K/s over 100Mbit Ethernet, but this is rsync+ssh, and I suspect SSH is CPU-bound, especially as the only ARM cross-compiler I could get working was the old car-player one) -- but the x86 server in question is also a firewall and Freeview DVR, all of which I suppose I could hang off a hacked NAS as USB, but that's a lot of hassle.

Peter

Yeah, though other reviews have shown 4W. I ought to grab my killawatt and check it myself, really. Still, even 17W isn't bad considering its speed....

Hugo

Well, that question was answered this past week, just after I departed for a rock-climbing trip.

The system started crashing with various random errors, and SWMBO did her best to keep rebooting it in attempts to try and maintain internet/email access in my absence.

Now that I'm back, the hard disk has been moved to another machine to restore service -- I've actually just hooked it up via USB to a small notebook computer, along with a USB ethernet adapter to provide the second network port. Works fine!

Meanwhile, I now have to order some new caps from digikey to refurbish the mini-ITX board.

Cheers

Digikey delivered today, and I've now replaced *all* of the electrolytic capacitors with new, high-grade / high-temperature ones.

Seems to be working again, for now.

Still working fine. Another thing we noticed is that the USB2 ports can once again power external notebook drives, something that hadn't been working for a couple of years.

Gee, I wonder why that was..