Sure, he didn't say anything about not being able to build the PC by himself. So the setup is £0.

He did mention though, that he doesn't need a video card. The 9900 comes with an UHD 630 iGPU on board which is fair enough if you don't play games or use render software. So the video card is £0.

Why would you sell someone a video card who obviously doesn't need one, instead of recommending what he really needs?

This PC is a beast, it will stay a beast for 5+ years to come, and it will compete with the top of the food chain for 10+ years, and stay even a solid workhorse after that. And it's within his budget. So why settle with something mediocre and looking for another mediocre new PC in 3-5 years from now, just to stay mediocre again. I'd say this i9900 PC will probably even be faster than whatever most recommendations here will be in 3-5 years, when he wants another new PC to upgrade.

 

Last edited: Jan 14, 2019

kingston ssd rocks.. a lot ppl build them into quality servers...sata has same speed as pci ive read

and audio pc with hdmi port on mobo with modern chipset dont need any gpu...less slots..better performance and static

when i buy new mobo i have hdmi and network on mobo...so i only need 1 slot for rme soundcard
scsi has the second xp remote pc

 

Last edited: Jan 14, 2019

lemmy pls report how youre 1500 ryzen rig is turn out for you...he allready said he is stoked...
-------------------------------------------
one day i buy that old xenon server towers..ppl said this ones are bad cause to many cores what ever...akai s1100 guru from slutz said this machines are super good..

 

I don't know the kingston SSD, there are likely very good SSDs other than the Samsung 970 EVO out there (at comparable price), but the Samsung is just standard. 1. You can't go wrong with it, 2. pretty much everyone uses them, so you can be sure that new software/windows updates will be very well tested to work with it, 3. some SSDs are known to have controller issues with Windows, not because of bugs but because of features (e.g. the crucial MX and other SSDs use hardware encryption which cause issues for Windows, but it's not a "bug" but a "feature" and won't ever get fixed), other SSDs slow massively down when they get full etc. So without checking through a lot of SSDs which are good and which are not and because of the extreme wide usage, I'd highly recommend the Samsung 970 EVO. Can't go wrong with it.

SATA doesn't have the same speed as long as the internal cache is used. But you are right in that you won't notice much of a difference. However, same as you say about the "using less slots", using an M.2 doesn't use up a SATA port and it doesn't waste any space in the PC case. New motherboards have them anyway. So I kind of recommend M.2 for the system disk.

 

Last edited: Jan 14, 2019

I agree on that the cpu is the most important and that Gigabyte Z390 Gaming X was surprisingly cheap and it also had a Thunderbolt header.
So lets try:
Gigabyte Z390 Gaming X $139.99
Intel Core i9-9900K $540
Noctua NH-D15 CPU cooler $90
Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB DDR4 DRAM 3200MHz $140 (on sale)
MSI NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 GAMING X 2G $135
Samsung 860 EVO 500GB $100
GIGABYTE GC-Titan Ridge thunderbolt 3 card $99 (Supported by PCIe x4 slot only)
Corsair RMi Series, RM650i $129.99
Corsair Carbide Series 330R Mid-Tower case $95 (quiet pc is important)

Total: $1469
Not bad

Edit: I added a thunderbolt port to the build

 

Last edited: Jan 14, 2019

another non plus ultra thread

 

thx for heads up !

 

Exactly.

And if you don't need the graphics card, you can get an 8TB HDD or a 1-2TB SSD on top and still be in budget.

And this hardware will blow pretty much everything else out of the water for many years come. No need at all for another new PC in a couple of years. Better spend this money in music. And just get more RAM or SSDs in some years, when they are even cheaper.

 

In light of Apples declining commitment to computers, I have been considering a possible change to PC in the future. Reading all these posts make it clear that the day Apple Macs becomes unusable, I will stop making music entirely.

 

how many kontakt tracks you have in mind? an i7 will probably work best even an i5, 8-16gb ram and ssd's

 

Last edited by a moderator: Jan 14, 2019

explain yourself. Building a Windows pc is much easier than building a Hackintosh. And if you are lazy some companies will build it for you with Windows 10 preinstalled

 

I understand and agree with your point of view and Sinewave's when it comes to attention to the CPU's. It's an investment that you make for years and therefore you should seek the best you can.

"Nowadays new CPUs don't get much faster than the previous generations. Getting a high end CPU right away will serve you very well for a very long time. And getting a very solid motherboard and RAM will make it a rock solid system."

I couldn't agree more. They only get more cores and better memory management (4K)... compare a i7 4790K, 6700K and i9 9900k. Both are very good , High-end 3.6 ... 4.0GHz CPU's. Any of them will make you smile... One has to consider if 5 to (not even) 10% difference in performance is worth the price.

Also, I don't overclock. I prefer not to. When you're editing or rendering video for 2 or more hours, the beast wakes up and heats. The fans come to life. You're going to have to cool it well, so more electric energy is required.

I strongly recommend a dedicated video card, though. A must, even if you don't play (...Hackintosh...). It takes the video work (which is a lot!) from the CPU. If you want to work in Photoshop, record or edit small video clips for your music, watch tutorials while working, that's the way to go...

A Hi-end set has a dedicated video card. No trade on that...

So, what do you say Mr. Djay, are you watching this?

Some feedback would be nice!

"In light of Apples declining commitment to computers, I have been considering a possible change to PC in the future. Reading all these posts make it clear that the day Apple Macs becomes unusable, I will stop making music entirely."

That's very poetic... I would say then you're not free nor a musician...

 

Last edited: Jan 14, 2019

i7 8700k/9900k + 32gb ram 3000mhz
I would like to mention that if you have planned to buy something like uad thunderbolt in the future then I suggest you to DO NOT BUY AMD, because you will need intel processor 8G or higher,
Hope it helps!

 

Hackintosh is the way to go.

An i9900 PC for $1500 wipes the floor with any original Mac hardware at a fraction of the price. And macOS wipes the floor with any Windows PC.

 

Explain myself?

A week ago I wrote about my Hackintosh build. At first I was very enthusiastic about building my own computer. Everything looked good on paper. I did a lot of research on the interwebs and watched a lot of YouTube videos. Everybody was always bragging about performance and the low cost, but nobody was telling the whole story. This is my attempt to do just that.

PRICE
It's correct that on paper the sum of all components do cost less than a comparable Macintosh, but this does not account for the hours you have to invest in building the thing. It's not just skrewing all the hardware components together, it's also the installation of macOS and especially getting all the hardware components to work correctly. The whole build took me at least a full work-week. You do the math. If I would have worked for a client in that time, invested the income in Apple and substracted the rest value of my current iMac, I could have bought a new low-end iMac Pro.

DISPLAY
Another big price component that is never mentioned is a decent screen. There is really no good alternative to a 5K LG dispay at the moment. And a normal hackintosh is not able to run a display with 5K resolution. That has something to do with the Displayport spec and how 2 streams are multiplexed for 5K. It is theoretically possible to build it with a GC Alpine Bridge, a thunderbold PCI card that takes 2 displayport streams and multiplexes them into a thunderbold output stream. But judging from the forums, nobody has ever tried it before and the hardware is not easy to get. That means you are stuck with a 4K display and 4K displays for PCs do not have the 5K LG display's high resolution. I ran with the Dell UP2718Q UltraSharp 27 4K HDR Monitor, which costs around $1500. In terms of colorspace and brightness it's competitive to the LG Ultrafine displays, but it's expensive of course.

GRAPHICS
One of the reasons for building a hackintosh for me was using a beefy graphics card. There are multiple options. You can go with Nvidia and need to install drivers and don't get good OpenCL performance (Final Cut Pro) or you go with AMD. I decided for AMD, because I thought that I don't need to fiddle around with drivers. In reality that's not true. Only a hand full of AMD graphics cards seem to work in High Sierra. The AMD Vega 64 works well, but runs the fans at light speed. In the end, I settled with a AMD RX 580 for now, which is the same graphics card that is running in a new high-end iMac. So that's that. I hope to upgrade to Vega 64 sometime in the future. I wasn't able to get the internal Intel GPU running. This process is really to cumbersome and involves a lot of kernel panics. No time for that.

AUDIO
Depending on what motherboard you use, you need to inject different kext modules. It's amazing that there are people who care enough to make this work. High Sierra however broke the support of a lot of audio drivers. I really couldn't get it to work after 8 hours of trying different drivers, version, etc. I ended up with attaching an M-Audio USB interface to the USB port. Works fine.

USB
Talking about USB. It mostly works for me, but reading through the forums, I get the impression that USB can also be a major source of headache. Cable-bound keyboards and mice do work, audio as well, but at first I wasn't able to mount external hard drives. There was a solution for that however and it took me a while to make it work, but external disks do mount now. However I can't keep them connected to the PC at all time, because at some point the machine just freezes, which is not the case when the external drives are not connected.

BLUETOOTH
Bluetooth also mostly works. I purchased the IOGEAR Bluetooth 4.0 USB Micro Adapter, because I read that this is the best solution. And yes, Magic Keyboard and Magic Mouse do work, also AirPods, however running external hard drives on the same USB bus can cut bandwidth from the bluetooth adapter and the mouse gets a noticable lag. This can go so far as a total shutdown of the bluetooth adapter. Disconnecting and reconnecting it again mostly workarounds that issue.

HARD DRIVES
Disk space is a big upside and I can't really complain about that. I am using a Samsung 960 Pro on the M2 slot and 5 hard drives that are connected over SATA. And I love it. It's really nice to have a lot of disk space and not have a loud RAID on the desk. SATA is also working very reliably so far.

CONCLUSION
In summary, I would never recommend to anybody to build a hackintosh unless he has the time and energy to make it work. I can say, a hackintosh is not about the money, it's about the challange to make it work. If you need a machine for your professional work, get an iMac or an iMac Pro. Personally, I love to have a lot of disk space inside the machine. My hope is that Apple comes out with a new modular and upgradable Mac Pro in 2018 which makes me want to demote the hackintosh to run it Windows only.

 

First of all, it's extremely important to chose the right hardware, if you plan on running a Hackintosh. However, it's not that picky most of the time either. As long as you use Gigabyte or ASUS boards, you should be fine, but checking the usual forums before you buy is nonetheless important.

It took me two days to install my first Hackintosh. You are right, the first time isn't as easy as installing Windows. However, once you know what you are doing it gets pretty easy. The second time around it barely takes much longer than installing Windows anymore.

However, I just installed Windows again a month ago, and was even worse than the Hackintosh. My SSD didn't work with Windows (I mentioned the Crucial MX already, they don't work with Windows! And it's not a bug, it's a feature, says Crucial). You need to reinstall everything again, make a low lever format of the SSD, break the Windows installation and enter some stuff to change the installation itself to make it run. Took me half a day to find this out and I wasted already a day because I had to reinstall everything again.

When Windows 10 runs, it recommends to use some sort of key ID instead of a user login/password. DON'T DO THIS! It will break a hell of a lot of things if you do it. I learned this - again - the hard way. And.... you guessed it... I had to reinstall Windows all over AGAIN!

I never had a 5k display, so I've no idea what I miss, but I'm perfectly fine with my 4k display.

And I can actually use it and read it. I spend hours and hours to find any solution to make Windows actually readable. It's impossible. The fonts are always too small and too thin. I get headaches working with it. Or I need to use my 4k display as a 1920x1080 display. Looks ugly, but at least I can read it.

But for me, I have already 2 4k monitors. I don't want another 5k monitor in an iMac or something. I don't need it. So for me, a PC without a monitor is actually an advantage and not a drawback.

Up until High Sierra Geforce works very good. I don't use Final Cut Pro, but everything I throw at my Hack is very fast. Photoshop, DAZ 3D, Maya, Premiere, Terragen, Modo, Substance... all with hardware support.

With Mojave a RX 580 sadly is the best option. Apple & Nvidia suck for not getting their shit together to support Nvidia in Mojave!

I have USB audio anyway and it works out of the box. Getting onboard Audio to work got a lot easier lately. If I remember correctly it's just one script you need to run, which will figure it out by itself.

Yes, USB can be painful. The best option is to buy the right motherboard. Some are easy, others are hard. Best bet is to read in the forum what others used successful and just follow their steps.

I don't have any issues with USB at all. Actually, my Hackintosh works better than the same PC under Windows, because Windows complains about an USB Hub while my Hackintosh doesn't have any issues with it at all.

Apple completely rewrote the USB code in macOS. My original Mac doesn't work with my USB keyboard anymore. If the keyboard is connected to the Mac, it takes 20 Minutes to boot! And there is no way to fix it. My Hackintosh doesn't have any issues whatsoever with the keyboard, works like a charm.

No idea about Bluetooth. I never used it. My external HDD works flawlessly out of the box as a Time Machine backup.

My Logitech Mouse keeps giving me issues over and over with this shit called Logitech software under WINDOWS. Stops working for ne reason, doesn't recognise to switch functions depending on the software running, forgets settings etc. It works absolutely perfectly on the Hackintosh with SteerMouse driver.

2 x 512 GB SSDs, 2x 8 TB HDDs, 1x BD Burner, 1x external Backup HDD, all work flawlessly out of the box. I can even use the NTFS formatted disk as if it was natively a Mac disk with the Paragon software. Fast and reliable.

And - because I really want my PC SILENT(!), I can switch off the HDDs if I don't need them. I can't do that with Windows. Windows keeps waking up my disks. I spent hours and hours to find out what it is that's waking up my HDDs, I EVEN COMPLETELY DISCONNECTED THE HDDs under devices. It still wakes the HDDs every hour. The noise drives me nuts. And I'm not the only one with this issue, considering what I can find with Google about it. But nobody has a solution that works.

I agree that you DO need to know your way around with computers. And it WILL take some time to get it running the first time. But once you did it, it's extremely rewarding and you know a lot about your system and how to do it again, if you ever have to.

In conclusion, choose your hardware very wise! And plan in some time to get it running when you never did it before.

But for me, having a 4k display where I'm actually able to read the text is not optional, it's a requirement. And Windows is a no go in readability. This alone is worth it. On top of that, even though it's a Hackintosh, everything just works. Even the macOS updates work, can't say the same about Windows 10 updates. On Windows, every day there breaks something else, or you WANT to fix something you don't like. (Like HDDs spinning up every hour)

 

Last edited: Jan 15, 2019

Like I said Hackintosh is a drag, hit and miss. But do you really need a 5k monitor, I mean how big screen do you have? And what about the scaling issues....Talking about monitors I'm planning of buying the Nvidia BFGD monitor 65 inches 4K this year (gonna cost around $4000). I mean if a 65 inch monitor looks great....
Any reason you will not run Windows (I don't wanna start a Mac vs Windows discussion)?

 

Like I said I'm taking part in the conversation because I may at some future stage drop Apple and it's very interesting, correction...challenging, reading your thoughts on what components are best. As a mac user since 1990 I've never had to question will this work with this and will it conflict with that... I have used Windows in business environments when I worked in music publishing and it has never stopped representing a business oriented OS in my mind. My introduction to Macs was as a graphic designer and it was night and day in terms of creativity versus productivity. The fact is if a solid future proof (5years) Hackintosh could run all of my external Thunderbolt SSD's and HDD's plus Apollo and it's Octo Satellite and keep my 14 midi keyboards synced, I'd be in. But I couldn't build it myself. I can't get the bathroom door handle working. Oh, and I'm locked in to Logic Pro. Decades of files.

 

Asus Z170-PREMIUM motherboard
is sold out
cant find it

 

arent fan places kind of fix