@xavieramelio I went with the Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus. It's working great. Took down my CPU temp about 10-20 degrees. It stays around 36-40 now, whereas with the Intel heat sync it was going as high as 50 or 60! System is very quiet. The CoolerMaster requires a plate as well. Luckily the Corsair 500R allows you access to the back of the motherboard. It's a great case (but I have to RMA it unfortunately as the power button doesn't work).

@qwerty123 It went amazingly smooth considering the task at hand, but there were bumps. One very big and unfortunate bump.

First, my reason for purchasing. This is entirely for my business, which is post production. Apple isn't offering anything attractive right now. Mac Minis are too underpowered and I don't want an all-in-one unit that's not upgradeable. And putting a retina macbook pro in an edit suite is just unthinkable, no matter how much people like them. This has cost me around $2000 and I think it's well worth it (that said, I need to run some jobs on the system to prove it's cost-worthiness).

I need something stable (enough) and something that is cost effective. I owned the Kona 2 and RocketRaid card (thus my reason for not buying a blackmagic card - plus, I need SDI in and out). That said, I see this computer as a stop-gap. If, tomorrow, apple came out with a new Mac Pro, I would sell my old systems and finance the darned thing. There is something to be said about ease-of-use. And there is also something to be said about DIY and ownership. The hackintosh isn't easy, but it's also pretty straightforward if you follow the guides.

So far, the system is rock solid. No DSDT with this motherboard. It just works. Installation was a little scary as the first time it didn't stick, but a reboot solved it and OSX loaded fine from the USB stick. I followed these instructions and everything went so smooth: http://hacksbyalfa.com/post/28271035968/gigabytehackintosh

The great news: the Kona 3 works!!! I couldn't believe it. FCPX, Premiere and Avid all play video out perfectly. I haven't captured anything, but I suspect it would work just fine.

The absolutely horrible news: for some odd reason, the RocketRaid 2322 de-initializes any drive that is attached to it when the computer reboots. When the computer boots, it takes you to a BIOS screen for the 2322 card as it's trying to find drives. I think, somehow, it sees the Mac volume and initializes it as MS-DOS. This is absolutely 100% completely and utterly horrible. I tried everything, including updating the firmware on the card. I honestly don't think it has anything to do with the Hackintosh - it's a PC thing.

I've contacted Highpoint support and I truly hope that something gets worked out. But my feeling is that I'm just going to have to get a new card. I've posted questions on Tonymacx86 about this, including asking about any compatible eSATA cards as I need one for the system. I'll probably test out a RocketRaid 2711 card from Amazon or Newegg since it will be returnable. Such a bummer.

Beyond that, everything has been running amazingly smooth (knock on wood). I even installed Windows 8 on a separate drive and it runs fine.

I got a Syba Firewire card. It's just ok. There was a recommendation for this card: StarTech.com 3 Port 2b 1a 1394 PCI Express FireWire Card. I ordered it to test it out and will get it next week.

I downloaded the Resolve 9 Beta today. Will install tomorrow or Monday to see how it goes. Since I don't have a Blackmagic card, I can't fully test it out to my display. But I'll let you all know if it works (I think it will).

For those of you who had never build a computer in your life before, LIKE ME ;) and have very little idea of what it is to do it, from everything I looked up in the net so far, I found this tutorial video to be the best, detail, but not overwhelming,

So, I've pulled the trigger on all the parts to build my Hackintosh. I'm pretty excited as I've been waiting about a year for all the parts I wanted to become available. For my setup, I absolutely needed a system that was both cost effective and upgradeable. Now, I just hope it works and will be stable. :-D

I'm going to start out with the stock CPU cooler. I'll see how the heat and noise fare. But just wondering what you all would recommend for a better cooler? Here are the parts I'm looking at (it's all based on the Customac Pro).

Intel Core i7-3770K Quad-Core Processor 3.5 GHz Gigabyte Intel Z77 Dual Thunderbolt ATX Motherboard with BT4.0/Wi-Fi (GA-Z77X-UP5-TH) Corsair Professional Series 650-Watt SanDisk Extreme SSD 480 GB EVGA GeForce GTX680 Corsair Vengeance 16 GB (2x8GB) Corsair Carbide Series 500R Mid Tower Gaming Case

I'll also be moving my Kona 3 and RocketRaid 2322 cards over from an old Mac Pro tower. Folks over on Tonymac say that those cards should work fine once I get everything installed. In order to get Davinci Resolve working with broadcast monitoring, I'm thinking about a Blackmagic Ultrastudio to replace the Kona 3 - but the cheaper Ultrastudio model keeps getting pushed back. BMD drives me crazy with it's vaporhardware - one reason I've always stuck with AJA.

@dtr

Thanks for your kind help! I will try to play with it.

@dtr Hi, I have a 2600k CPU, Gigabyte Z68X-UD3R-B3 motherboard, 16GB of Corsair CMZ8GX3M2A1600C9 memory, but I am new to overclocking, could you recommend some quick settings for me to play with?

Thanks.

@soundgh2 Can you let us know what (step-by-step) guide you used to build your machine? My main uses for a machine will be running pro tools and premiere (and also resolve). So it'd be nice to build the same machine as someone else who has got this working with no problems. Are you running Snow Leopard or Lion or Mountain Lion?

I'm trying to decide between the hackitosh route or getting a cutom pc built. I'm more at home with macs, but stability, compatibility, etc is a concern with the hackintosh route.

@dtr, thanks for the advise and link. @sondgh2, I hear you and you are wright about what you say, artistic vision is first and the box is just a tool, in any case, a better tool than what I have now wont heart me, I also would like to go through the learning process of doing it.

@xavieramelio I'd say get the fastest CPU and largest RAM you can afford, add an Nvidia graphics card for CUDA acceleration in Premiere, see http://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/3823/graphics-card-for-video-editing/p1 . Get a 'k' Intel CPU with a decent cooler. They're so easy (and intended) to overclock that it's really a shame not to do it. If you can build a hackintosh you can easily do that as well.

@qwerty123 as i understand the sonnet tango 800 card has individual firewire busses for each port, so you wouldn't get that issue. I haven't tested to confirm that.

This is a newbie question, but is there possibilities for adding two separate firewire busses on a hackintosh?

The reason is because I need one fw400 for my mbox pro, and another for external drives. Having everything on one bus slows it to the least common denominator of fw400.

@xavierramelio - Do you already have peripherals like monitor, keyboard, mouse?

You could do a i7 Ivy Bridge, with the Gigabyte UD5 mobi, Nvidia GTX 560ti, 16 gb of RAM and that would get you right around there. I would do a 128gb SSD for boot and apps in OSX and for starters a 1TB internal.

I was looking at the builds of tonymacx86, I did some homework on looking at the stuff I do not know,I am considering the pro build, still there are so many options and possible combinations... Can someone tell me your thoughts on the different options of CPU, mother boards and Graphic cards. Maybe some examples on your own builds like @badhussar post will help me. I am looking at expending $1200 max. Thanks in advance, I also would like to have firewire 800 connectivity for external hardrives, any idea?

@dtr

Thanks a lot.

@xavieramelio - Start reading. Plenty of advice above. Good links as well. Learn your basic computer jargon (RAM, Hard Drive, Solid State Memory, CPU, Motherboard, GPU, etc) and how it will effect your build.