EastWest- Hackintosh for Music

[SCVStuart88]

Hello everyone on InsanelyMac!

 

At the moment I'm running a 2008 MBP for composing and recording in Logic 9. When I bought it it was great, just right for what I wanted, but a few years later it's not really cutting it when it comes to big sample libraries, I'm talking EastWest Symphonic Orchestra Platinum.

 

To cut a long story short, My options are- Build a Hackintosh with a nice high spec to run EastWest or stick with what I've got and continue struggling. I've build windows machines in the past, but never a Hackintosh. My question is, what Kind of hardware should I be looking at specifically for making music? I'll need to run 2 monitors (preferably 3 if I can get away with it), my D/A converter is Firewire, so that is a necessity. The computer wont be connected to the internet so wireless etc isn't a problem.

 

Any recommendations when it comes to CPU, Graphics card and Mobo?

 

Hopefully this is the right place to post this!

[Foxic]

Hi, welcome to the forums

 

1. Your best bet is a Gigabyte motherboard, what I did was looked for the most commonly used one on here (at the time).

2. For graphics, look for a card that is used by apple. Lots of Nvidia and ATi/AMD cards are supported out of the box. My 480GTX works beautifully.

3. For your CPU buy the best i5/i7 you can afford.

 

If you choose the right hardware you should have a minimal amount of problems.

 

My hack has been running pretty well for the past year, I've had 2 problems in that time. 1 was when 10.6.7 or 10.6.8 came out and I got stuck for about an hour before finding a fix (on here) for a kext, after installing this 1 patched kext I was back up and running. My second problem was very recent, it started with 10.7.2 and I only fixed it a few days ago. The problem was that after waking the computer from sleep, plugging in a USB device caused a kernel panic. This was fixed by moving the kexts I had in Extra/Extension to System/Library/Extensions.

 

The only time you will ever have real problems is when system updates are released. Simply use carbon copy cloner to clone your OS X partition to another drive/partition before you update and you will always have a working installation with which to fix problems.

Once updated you can do as you wish with the backup partition (I use it as my time machine disk and then format and clone to it when I need to)

 

This forum is a great place and I've learned so much in the last year.

Just be wary that making hackintoshs is very addictive. I built mine, had no problems and got bored with having nothing to fix so I built 2 more and hacked my girlfriends netbook.

 

Have fun and I hope this helps

[SCVStuart88]

Thanks for the quick reply!

 

What would you make of this pair- MOBO and CPU

 

I think your Nvidia 480 GTX might be overdoing it for my needs, I'll have a better look into what Apple are using.

 

Another question, when it comes to external hardware (Soundcards, hard drives etc) how often do problems occur? Is it a case of 'it depends on what your using' like the internal hardware?

 

Thanks again for the speedy reply, cant wait to get on with the project to be honest!