@driftwood Congrats on the new Hackintosh rig, Nick. I'm running a similar setup with the 3770K (also OC'd to 4.2GHz, which seems to be the sweet spot for performance, heat, and stability) except with another Z77 Gigabyte board and an HD5870. Between the i7, SSD, and 32GB RAM, you're getting the best desktop Mac experience there is currently.

Since you're an optimizer, one thing you may want to look at is your system definition aka smbios.plist file in /Extra. Multibeast defines new Hackintoshes as Mac Pro 3,1 by default, but with more modern parts like i7 and many current GPUs you'll get better graphics performance if smbios.plist tells OSX your machine is a late model iMac. Seems counterintuitive but my Cinebench score nearly doubled with my rig recognized as an iMac vs a Mac Pro. Sleep and Speedstep also became better optimized.

You have Nvidia while I have ATI but you may want to try different system definitions and benchmarking them in Cinebench to see which gives you the best GPU performance.

Well my latest updated Hackintosh specs are as follows;-

Gigabyte Z77X-UP5 TH mobo, i7 3770k (unlocked) o/c to a safe 4.2Ghz for now ;-), 2 x 256Gb 840Pro SSDs (one for OSX/other for Windows) couldn't be arsed for the msata as the more expensive price for the same performance shows nothing in it over normal sata port, nvidia 680 gpu, 32Gb of Kingston RAM, plus a ton of regular sata drives and Im happy. Oh, and an additional UltraSharp U2913WM at 2560 x 1080 pixel res. Should do me for another year!

PS This was a breeze spec to 'hackintosh' NO DSDT required. Vanilla build. :-)

Longevity is a factor indeed. My experience is getting top end stuff pays off in the long run. It lasts longer till it's really too outdated to be useful. (Typing this on a 7 year old macbook pro so I know what I'm talking about ;) Of course this argument only holds if you plan to use gear for a long time, not switching every 1 or 2 years.

that's worth considering :D

How does this look:

i7-3770K

Z77-UP5 TH (I don't have any thunderbolt devices, but..)

32 gb 1600MHz ram

Samsung 128GB SSD SATA600 840 Pro Series

(I already have noctua cooler on current processor, Nice case and PSU, GTX260 that will probably be the next to go, and few fast terabytes.)

Is there any reason why this current instalation of ML with all apps would not work copied to a new drive on a new system (with bootloader of course, an correct kexts, minus dsdt)?

I jus upgraded from my 13' late 2011 mbp to early 2013 hackintosh.

mbp: i5 c2d 2.3ghz 4gb ram intel hd 4000 graphics

Hackintosh: i5 3570k 3.4ghz 8gb ram evga gtx 650 ti 1gb

Im def. going to upgrade my ram to 16gb once i get the cash , and possibly get a better gfx card. Ive read that the 560 or 570 is it that does really good almost compared to the quadro4000 series i think. I mostly edit hacked Gh2 footage and Hpx170 footage, and some light gaming. any suggestions for a possibly better card than what i have? not saying im not happy i just want possibly better/faster card with around 2-4gb of memory. Also for monitors I just got a decent acer 22' for $60 of craigslist, works great, only one dead pixel :. I did some research on monitors and I really wanted to get the 27' apple cinema display they got on B&H for like $899. I looked around on newegg and saw some really nice 27' Dell monitors that have more colors and seem reallly nice, I just dont know the tech terms of the monitors,ect.

Thanks

@inqb8tr I was in almost the same boat as you - i7-930 and a Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R. Overclocked, cooled and silenced, it was a beast, but it also pulled a lot of power out of the wall when hammering a render. I replaced it with an i7-3770K and a Gigabyte GA-Z77-DS3H, which is much faster yet draws less than half the AC. I've got it moderately OC'd (3.5GHz) and with 32GB RAM and a Radeon HD5870, it cuts through anything I throw at it.

I put this rig together over a year ago so there are alternatives today I'd probably go with. Quite honestly, if I had to do it over again, I'd go with a, i5-3570K and Gigabyte's Z77 Mini-ITX board. That's the config I'm running as a server and it's ludicrous overkill, plenty beefy and quick for FCPX/AE work. OC the 3570K and you'll rarely notice it's not an i7, and you'll idle along at 30W or so to boot. That is, of course, if you go with the onboard HD4000 GPU, which works in a pinch - for pro video editing, go with a discrete GPU.

Neither of these Ivy Bridge Gigabyte rigs needs a DSDT, and only a handful of kexts are needed for full OSX 10.8.3 support. The tonymacx86 site is your friend here, that's where you'll find the recipes and support.

I've been building Hackintoshes for many years, ever since the first distros were floating around. Back then it was a tightrope act just to get a PC to boot OSX Leopard. Now, as long as you get the right Gigabyte board, you can boot retail Mountain Lion with little fear of breaking the install from OS updates. It really is almost too easy now to build a solid enough Hackintosh for pro work. Between that and a hacked GH2, we live in interesting times.

Good to hear. Seems like a strong contender for the rack mount system I 'd like to build in the near future. Too bad provided wifi/BT doesn't work but I can live with that.

I was thinking to upgrade my hackintosh, currently I have i7 920 and gigabyte ex58-ud5 mobo with 12gigs of ram, running a ML 10.8.2 installed with hackinstaller script.

I like how this "no need for DSDT" sounds like, so can you recommend a motherboard and a cpu that would be the best for this kind of setup.

I want to buy new cpu, mobo, ram and ssd, everything else will stay.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/quo/projectq-run-any-os-the-unique-motherboard

Lots of reports here: http://www.tonymacx86.com/317-os-x-10-8-3-update.html

I've got 3 gigs in the next weeks. Only updating after that...

@jclmedia it's not illegal unless you try and sell the boxes with the Apple software on. With Apples ongoing spat with Intel with them not allowing them to integrate Thunderbolt into their MacPro's, and the current EU standards problems they're having, it might be a long wait for a new MacPro. A hackintosh is essentially a Mac in every way when booted up - except much much cheaper!

Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD5H Intel Z77 Socket 1155 Ivybridge / Intel Core i7 3770K Quad Core IvyBridge Processor / Nanoxia Deep Silence 1 Black Ultimate / Samsung 250GB 840 Series SSD / be quiet! STRAIGHT POWER E9 CM 680W / Corsair H60 2013 Edition Hydro Series Liquid CPU Cooler / Corsair Memory Vengeance 32GB DDR3 1600 MHz CAS 10 XMP / 1x Seagate 3TB Performance SATA 3 comes out at around £899 here in the UK so add your preferred graphics card to taste and edit away. For a Thunderbolt version of above add around £100 for the GA-Z77X-UP5-TH which works a treat.

Join Tonymac or similar site and browse the builds - Stork has a great build that would be relevant for video editing or look at the NoFilmSchool guide to building one for a more video centric build.

Good luck!

The build above is around 20k but not aggresively OCed - CPU running @ 30. Degrees Cinebench might give you more GPU info if there is a score from that