Best parts to use to build a mac clone

I am interested in a mac pro tower for video editing however like most mac products the price is a bit steep. A friend of mine told me you can make a mac clone since the os supports the same processor that windows use. So I am curious if anyone can recommend the best parts to buy to build an affordable mac clone.

 

http://lifehacker.com/5351485/how-t...sh-with-snow-leopard-start-to-finish#hardware

 

Thanks for the link. I have been doing further research and this seems like a great alternative money wise.

 

i7 920 + 5870 and 6GB of Tri-channel DDR3

Thats more or less what you need

 

The days of a Mac being essential for video editing are long gone, just build a regular PC and slap Windows on it. When I need to edit anything on my iMac, it's easier just firing up a virtual machine of Windows 7 and having 20x more software options.

 

Indeed, but then again Final Cut Pro is very good, although it will set him back more than the actual parts.

........unless he pirates it.

 

Exactly, if you are going the dodgy software route, you have more choice with a Windows machine.

 

I am aware of final cut pro's price, but it is the easiest and best software to do the job with(which is why pretty much the whole film industry uses it now).

Other software on windows I have used have been cumber sum and a pain to use. As for this hackintosh, it works fine with final cut pro retail copy.

Btw Shadowlayer thanks for the easiest setup for it. I really wish apple would support letting people build their own instead of forcing you to buy their stuff.

 

This looks semi interesting. Are there hardware issues? If I ever did this I'd try to clone a Mac Mini but getting the smallest box I could find w/ mb, processor, and a card suitable for 2560x1600 all on board.

 

No problemo:thumbsup: anyway, if you were using windows I would rather recommend a PhenomII X6 since video editing tools are multithreaded and really take advantage of multiple cores.

Problem is for the time being OSX doesnt works with AMD processors, which is a shame really since that X6 destroyed the i7 in cinebench.

 

Well the pain of it is you gotta use a special loader that can cause issues if you don't do it right. There is a dongle you can use that puts all the proper drivers in and makes it easy to install osx(but it ain't cheap some old video i watched on youtube i think quoted $200).

Still cheaper then buying an actual mac pro though.But I do know for this you gotta use specific parts since I guess osx is very picky over which parts it will work with.

I will say that the most expensive mac pro tower is quite impressive, two quad processors, my god that must render 3d in no time and process video in seconds.

 

Theres a ECS motherboard that supports dual six core gulftown processors and 4 nvidia cards in SLI, with over 12GB of RAM.

And all that will probably cost the same than an entry-level single processor macPro

 

Not unless the software is written to use those cores. A mate of mine has one and using things like ffmpegX/VisualHub/etc to convert DivX's it's no faster than my dual core iMac.

 

You think apple will ever cave in and let people build their own macs? I mean honestly they are loosing out on a huge market. Everyone knows the ipod didn't become big till it could be used with windows.

 

Is not even apple "computer" anymore, their main market shifted from the Mac to the ipod, iphone and ipad.

If you ask me they just keep making computers as a formality

 

The reason MacOS 'just works' is it is a closed platform with only a small number of hardware variations to support. It also has lower software support.

If you had an open platform like the PC, MacOS would suffer the same issues Windows experiences.

 

http://art-studios.net/goods/86

This is was I'm gonna use when I'm ready to build mine, http://revision3.com/tekzilla/satadock for a video

 

Didn't the EFI-X turn out to be just a rip of the hackintosh communities' work, specifically NetKas's work?

Regardless, $250 for basically a bootable USB flash drive is ridiculous... you sir, have been had.

 

I think they purposely encrypted it to make sure they couldn't be found out, but last I heard, yeah, it was just NetKas' work on a SATA storage device.

 

Anyone that tries this should update this thread w/ their woes. I wouldn't mind building one mainly to bring my DJ software up to the office. As dumb as this sounds, I just don't like travelling w/ my laptop.