Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Current Project 7/24/12

Currently I've been building a new computer and making sure everything works with it. I'm actually pretty proud with the outcome of it seeing as how I got the project started by convincing a friend that I could build a better mac than they could buy. I know that I could, so I was pretty confident.
Here's the layout of the mac they were going to buy:
                         Mac Pro

  • Intel Xeon 3.2Ghz quad-core
  • 6GB DDR3
  • 1TB 7200-rpm
  • ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB GDDR5
  • other nominal barebones specs (disc drive/mouse/keyboard)
  • PRICE: $2499
I guess my first opinion is that the Radeon GPU is bordering the age of 3 years now. A pretty good quote to use in regards to this is "last year's flagship is this year's mid-range". Currently, Radeon is almost to the 7X generation now, meaning apple is behind by an entire generation of upgrades. The processor is nice I suppose, it's made for servers and doesn't come cheap. It's not even in production anymore. Aged and not up to date again.

So how did I fare against the price from Mac? I did some research and built this:

  • Intel i7 2600k 3.4Ghz quad-core
  • 16GB DDR3
  • 3TB 7200-rpm & 240GB SSD
  • Nvidia GTX 560 Ti 2GB GDDR5
  • Blu Ray drive
  • other nominal barebones specs (motherboard/computer case/power supply/etc)
  • PRICE: $1900
At first I worried about whether I downgraded the processor as i7 is more for home and gaming use, and the intent for this computer is video editing and rendering, but then I remembered that Mac will be using the 3 year old version of the processor and once again, the age of it reduces it's quality. The fun part of making computers is over, and now I have to work the Mac OS in there. Luckily my research delved into a "hackintosh" community where there are Mac enthusiasts who also feel the same as I do about Mac...at least in the hardware department. Installing OSX should be a breeze thanks to them. Anyways, that's the status of my current project! I'll go take and upload pictures in a minute.

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