If you have to justify it, you really can’t afford it.
Looking through the mega-thread for the Z490 Hackintosh, it seems sleep / wake is a problem for a lot of people, even those with identical hardware were having conflicting results. (And don’t even ask about the AMD side of things - it’s even worse.)
Let me put it this way - my 2012 iMac is fast enough for everything that I use it for. However, more speed when doing video / photo work would not go astray. The fact that it’s not supported under macOS 11 (‘Big Sur’) when it’s released is also a potential problem.
The Nvidia 680M (yes, a laptop GPU in a desktop!) doesn’t cut it when playing Elite:Dangerous and the lumpy frame rate, decreased detail and GPU overheating is beginning to annoy me.
I’ve lived with these issues for a couple of years now, and have been (mostly) ignoring them. So it’s a matter of do I continue to live with things as they are, or do I spaff a large amount of coin to update and (hopefully) future-proof things for another few years?
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Hold out for the ARM Mac if you can.
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I would love to grab an ARM-Mac, except they are more than likely a good 2 years away at the moment. For an iMac model, with reasonable specifications anyway.
Moving into speculation mode, I can’t see Apple bringing out an ARM-iMac soon - not when they’ve just released an X86 refresh of the iMac and the new MacPro is only about a year old. So it makes reasonable sense to go Hackintosh and see what the future brings.
Elite:Dangerous is Xbox/PS4/Windows-only after F-Dev killed the Mac client a couple of years ago. (Don’t get me started on that whole salt mine of shit-fuckery.) So going ARM-Mac will kill the only game I play because there’s no way emulation will allow Windows applications access to the raw hardware.
The system I am putting together is going to be AMD-based again. They will be releasing the new Zen 3 series of CPUs next week, which will be 19% faster “clock for clock”, which means you could swap out the CPU for one with the same number of cores at the same speed and it will be faster. Several of the current motherboards based on the 400 and 500 series will support them with just a BIOS update.
About the time I decided to go ahead with this, Linus Tech Tips released an episode about the Ryzen processors and named the Ryzen 5 3600 with six cores as being the “sweet spot” for value versus price, especially since it comes with a cooler. The stock cooler is not recommended if you’re going to be overclocking, but my intent is to get the system going and look at a performance boost later. If I can do that with a CPU upgrade 1-3 years down the road, prices will have dropped and I can try overclocking with the new Zen 3 CPU and a heftier cooler.
The local store I get hardware from has Asus boards for AMD processors and I had picked the Prime X570-P due to being the one that offers the best forward-compatibility. I didn’t need the gaming version (AM4 TUF Gaming X570-Plus), but if I pick that, it’s got a DisplayPort connector the Prime doesn’t. Both have dual M.2 slots, so theoretically, I might be able to put in two 1TB sticks and use RAID 1 for boot drive reliability. I’m not sure if I can have that separate from any other drives in the computer, or what happens if I add the second 1TB stick later and activate RAID 1 at that time.
I'm still looking through video cards and power supplies, but I did make sure to pick a case that can handle long video cards. One divided it up into long cards at the top and short cards at the bottom. I picked a mid tower case with enough interior space that it doesn't matter where the cards plug in. Gives me expandability to add a second video card and drive a fourth monitor.
This is the first computer where forward compatibility has been one of my component choices. All the other times, I knew that I could add little things to add extra capabilities like another hard drive or re-using a low-end video card to drive an extra monitor. But there was always a limit to how far I could go before it would require a new motherboard and all associated costs that go with it (CPU, cooler and maybe new memory). And if you remember, I ran into the problem where Microsoft deliberately prevented Windows 7 from running on newer motherboards, so I don’t plan on resurrecting the computer where the motherboard failed.
Even if this motherboard fails, it will be new enough that I have several choices to do a board swap and keep most or all of what I have, thanks to the way AMD is handling processor upgrades right now. They won’t go to a new CPU socket and DDR5 until the Zen 4 series is released. The same LTT video pointed out Intel broke compatibility with some motherboards in a recent CPU release.
Should be fun putting this together.
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It used to be that if you had an Intel CPU, you got an Nvidia graphics card since it seemed to work better with the motherboard… If you have an AMD CPU, you got a Radeon card. Is this still an issue?
I know I’m running an AMD Ryzen processor with an NVidia graphics card and seem to have no issues.
Not so much at this point. They have become pretty interchangeable. Bang for the buck is in AMD’s corner, even more so on linux.
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Same here… I definitely remember cursing AMD while trying to get a Radeon card to work with, like, a Pentium 4. But more recently, the hardware and drivers have been much more stable & compatible.
Some interesting news about computers: AMD is buying Xilinx and Nvidia is buying ARM
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I didn’t count on this: a lot of PC cases no longer have external drive bays for mounting a DVD or Blu-ray drive in them. I know you can plug in an external optical drive, but I still need an internal drive in my computer.
A couple of the cases I looked at apparently don’t even have the hardware for holding internal hard drives. I guess you’d just have to use M.2 SSD sticks for your storage but that’s really expensive right now. A 1TB stick is about $100-$180, depending on if you want extra speed for gaming, and 2TB sticks start at double that and can climb to over $300 or $400.
And while checking the Asus website for info on M.2 slots, I moved the mouse over the “Networking” menu item and the picture of the ROG (“Republic of Gaming”) Rapture GT-AX11000 wi-fi gaming router appeared. First thing I thought was “What’s an upside-down Shadow Vessel doing on their website?”
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I think more cases than not are lacking external spaces for optical drives. We have external USB ones for our laptops and I use mine maybe once every few years (usually for work, which disallows USB storage devices) so I feel pretty safe accepting risk on that for my own needs. The lack of space for internal drives is surprising, though. M.2 drives aren’t that cheap, yet.
For the cases I was looking at, I really couldn’t tell if you were supposed to mount the hard drives vertically along the rear frame so the front fans have nothing in between them and the motherboard, or if they just didn’t have any brackets for hard drives at all. The specs were no help, either.
There were some very nice cases that I had to pass by because I didn’t want to have to go searching on a website to confirm if you could or could not mount hard drives in them. The case manufacturers could have put a generic hard drive in to show that the case supported them. Like how when you’re looking at furniture. It might be just for a recliner, but the picture will be staged with other items like a pillow or a coffee table.
The Spy website just published their list of The Best Webcams for Teachers, Students, Business and Streamers. The focus is on 1080p resolution, 30+ fps and typically under $100. I never needed a webcam before. Now it’s a bit more of a necessity.
If it helps, I’m looking at the ‘BeQuiet Pure Base 500’ for my hackintosh. According to the website, it can mount up to 5 (five) 2.5" drives.
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AMD’s new Zen4 / Ryzen 5XXX range of chips looks to be the new bee’s knees…
Benchmark results I have seen show the base model 5600X out-performing the Intel i9-10900… 
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You had me worried for a second. Zen 4 will be the next one. Zen 3 was just released. The way Linus from Linus Tech Tips described it, AMD has a modular way of constructing processors that’s leading some good performance gains. Add in the functions of Zen 3 where the CPU can directly access GPU memory and the CPU cores don’t have a split cache to work around, that helps even more.
Welp, mine’s almost done. Since neither of the local stores I checked had a case designed for an internal optical drive, I ordered a Cooler Master N400. Lots of internal capacity I wanted but it does have a design drawback. The raised area that’s in line with the buttons and USB ports means the eject button isn’t flush with the front surface of the case. It will prevent accidental bumping, however.
Inside, an Asus TUF Gaming X570-Plus without Wi-Fi, fitted with the Ryzen 5 3600 processor. For a few dollars more than the Prime X570, it swaps the two USB 2.0 ports for two additional USB 3.2 ports and adds a DisplayPort jack above the HDMI jack. The first store was out of the video card I wanted but the second had one that was a little better: an Asus Radeon RX570. Two DisplayPorts and two HDMI ports. If I put in the video card from the Windows 7 computer that died earlier this year, I can theoretically connect nine monitors to this computer. I’m thinking about calling it Mr. Universe. Can’t stop the signal, Mal.
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Apologies for sounding like a salesman, but I happened to look at the be quiet! PureBase 600 case, and it has 2 5.25" drive bays (with the corresponding removable panels in the front of the case).
Does this help at all?
A flush front cover like the PureBase 600 gives you unimpeded access to the DVD drive button and would have been better. It didn’t show up in the results when I was searching on Amazon, but my criteria when I picked the other one was:
- In stock at Amazon so I could proceed with building the system in a couple of days.
- Number of hard drives that could be installed (either for a RAID system or just individual drives if I went with an external backup system).
- Product listing included the size of the video cards that can be installed. (Planning ahead for a video card upgrade in the future.)
Neither the Be Cool website nor the Amazon listing have that last one, but with the pictures showing the hard drives are mounted sideways, sliding in through the right side of the case frame, it’s implied that you get an extra 3" of space that way.
One benefit of the N400 case I hadn’t spotted before is they included a plastic bracket to hold an SSD that mounts vertically in the gap on the right side, occupying space that is otherwise wasted. With 8 SATA ports on the motherboard, adding hard drives or SSDs isn’t a problem.
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