One of the toughest decisions professionals working in post-production eventually should make is whether or not they want to invest in a Mac or a PC workstation. While Macs are known for their consistent performance coupled with the refined software and hardware, Apple is notorious for putting a high price tag on their machines.
Meanwhile, PC’s offer a much better price to performance ratio although a rather clunky yet widely used operating system. So, is it too much to ask for the software experience of the Mac alongside the hardware capabilities and costs of a PC? Or, is there a way to have the best of both worlds? Well, for some users, a Hackintosh seems to be the way to go.
While these machines have been around for a while, it might be tricky to get them up and running in the first place. Nevertheless, there are many people who have built their own Hackintosh systems and shared their experience with the world along the way. An excellent example in that regard is the Ryzen Hackintosh system built by tech enthusiast Dom Esposito touted as the ultimate Hackintosh based on AMD’s new Ryzen processors.
Interestingly enough, Dom’s machine is built inside of the chassis of an old, black spray-painted Apple Power Mac G5, a nice nod to the fact that the computer is a Hackintosh after all. He’s decked out the internals with an indigo/blue hue of lighting thanks to his UV LED light strips that line the inside of the case.
With the AMD Ryzen 1700 CPU paired with the NVIDIA 1080Ti GPU, the computer seems to seamlessly handle both video editing and even gaming. Looking at Dom’s own tests, Final Cut Pro X does run fairly well on the machine, although it lags behind the 15-inch MacBook Pro in terms of export speed due to the Ryzen based CPU. On the other hand, his Hackintosh seems to outperform the MacBook Pro when it comes to editing in Premiere Pro, which clearly takes more advantage of the AMD processor speeds.
Specs-wise, here is the breakdown of this custom built Ryzen Hackintosh system:
- AMD Ryzen 1700 CPU (B&H, Amazon US)
- Asus – PRIME B350M-A Motherboard (B&H, Amazon US)
- Kingston – HyperX Predator 32GB Memory (Amazon US)
- Corsair Neutron XT 2.5″ 240GB SSD (Amazon US)
- Western Digital – Blue 1TB SSD (B&H, Amazon US)
- NVIDIA 1080Ti GPU (B&H, Amazon US)
- Corsair RM750i Power Supply (B&H, Amazon US)
- TP-Link WiFi Card (B&H, Amazon US)
- ASUS BT400 USB Bluetooth Dongle (Amazon US)
- EK Waterblocks Custom Liquid Cooling
- G5 ATX Front Panel Conversion Cable
- The chassis is made from an old Apple Power Mac G5
Overall, you should keep in mind that putting together a machine like this might be a tedious and time-consuming task. Besides the integration of hardline water cooling pipes and assembling the rest of the hardware, the real issue might be the actual installation of MacOS on the machine itself. There are a lot of third-party applications you’ll have to use, and you need to ensure that the hardware you buy will even run the operating system.
Apparently, Apple doesn’t want their software on non-Apple devices, which is why there is a struggle involved with trying to put MacOS on a PC. Remember you’re also breaking the DMCA with Apple by doing so. Either way, if you’re thinking of building a Hackintosh, do so at your own discretion and make sure to seek advice from online forums and other websites such as tonymacx86.com and hackintosh.com
[source: Dom Esposito]
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The performance gap between the Ryzen setup vs an intel one has nothing to do with the processor. FCPX is optimised for AMD video cards and this setup is using a Nvidia card.
What an useless endeavor. Who on the planet working day to day on an editing system to WORK would use this?
Well I’ve work on hackintosh 5 years right now and with a little bit of work you can put a stable build. It is a bit of hassle to make it solid and for sure you need someones help with that if you want to make it really stable, but hey you can have serious workstation for less money. You can also have a second SSD with windows and if something is wrong quickly switch to windows machine and finish the job. That’s said if you want to have a peace of mind just buy iMac pro. This is not only about money but also comfort of work.
Erm… Me? I have been running video editing hackintoshes since 2007 and haven’t had a single problem with any of them (I think the current one is the fifth one, counting only motherboard changes). I am a professional freelance film and TV editor who likes gaming after the work is done. The only problem with the system in the article is the fact that nVidia cards don’t work to their full potential while paired with a Ryzen cpu. Hopefully a kernel update will solve that and I will go for my sixth hackintosh system – with a 16-core ThreadRipper.
Thank you for comforting me. Both admitting that this a kluge
And I admit that some people are moding their Ford 350 to run on methane made from chicken poop.
You save a lot on gaz…
A Hackintosh clearly isn’t for everybody, but I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily a kluge. I’ve been using FCPX to edit 4K video with a hackintosh I put together with some old parts I had lying around, with no stability issues and surprisingly good performance. My build is with an Intel Xeon E3-1240 and two HD6850s. It’ll do the BruceX 5K export in just over 20 seconds!