Jon Posted April 5, 2011 Share Posted April 5, 2011 My girlfriend is looking at buying a new desktop for video editing as her laptop is on its last legs. She'd really like a mac but can't afford one, so I suggested looking into building a desktop and try and get osx to run on it. However, I have no idea how to do this, or how expensive it is. Has anyone tried doing it before? Does anyone know what sort of specs she should be looking at? I know with video editing you need a lot of ram, processing power and storage space. Cheers in advance! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
doppelkorn Posted April 5, 2011 Share Posted April 5, 2011 Furst thing's furst Jon (ha!): you've STILL got a girlfriend?! But seriously, it can be done but it's by no means trouble free. There's a lot of good resources on the net. I'd look myself but try going through the archives at Lifehacker, MAKE and Hackaday. They're really good for that kind of thing. I'd be really interested to see how this goes if you do it and would be happy to provide consultancy for a reduced fee. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jon Posted April 5, 2011 Author Share Posted April 5, 2011 Furst thing's furst Jon (ha!): you've STILL got a girlfriend?! But seriously, it can be done but it's by no means trouble free. There's a lot of good resources on the net. I'd look myself but try going through the archives at Lifehacker, MAKE and Hackaday. They're really good for that kind of thing. I'd be really interested to see how this goes if you do it and would be happy to provide consultancy for a reduced fee. Haha, yep coming up for six months now! Not the girl some of you met at the dmc finals though, we stopped seeing each other in July last year. I'll check out those sites, thanks for the links! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
johnny 1 move Posted April 5, 2011 Share Posted April 5, 2011 I've just done it... it was a piece of piss Best bet is to use kakewalk: http://www.kakewalk.se/ Basically the guy who packages it has worked out all the drivers (kexts in mac speak) for a specific list of gigabyte boards so all you need is to get a Snow Leopard disk image, drag kakewalk on to it, choose your motherboard, reboot from usb and install. The other thing that makes life easy is picking a graphics card with a chip that apple used in one of their machines. I went for a cheap ASUS nividia 8400 card and didn't even need to do any of the graphics driver tweaks. It all worked with full graphics acceleration straight away. It even survived the upgrade to OSX 10.5.6 without any messing about. The only thing I haven't tried is the onboard audio which often doesn't work but is easy to fix. My firewire MOTU card works a charm, as does everything else and it's rock solid with cubase and loads of other stuff on the go. In fact it's more stable then the windows machine I took all the parts (except mothboard and graphics card) from. Give me a bell if you want any advice Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jon Posted April 5, 2011 Author Share Posted April 5, 2011 I've just done it... it was a piece of piss Best bet is to use kakewalk: http://www.kakewalk.se/ Basically the guy who packages it has worked out all the drivers (kexts in mac speak) for a specific list of gigabyte boards so all you need is to get a Snow Leopard disk image, drag kakewalk on to it, choose your motherboard, reboot from usb and install. The other thing that makes life easy is picking a graphics card with a chip that apple used in one of their machines. I went for a cheap ASUS nividia 8400 card and didn't even need to do any of the graphics driver tweaks. It all worked with full graphics acceleration straight away. It even survived the upgrade to OSX 10.5.6 without any messing about. The only thing I haven't tried is the onboard audio which often doesn't work but is easy to fix. My firewire MOTU card works a charm, as does everything else and it's rock solid with cubase and loads of other stuff on the go. In fact it's more stable then the windows machine I took all the parts (except mothboard and graphics card) from. Give me a bell if you want any advice Wicked, thanks brosef! Will def give you a shout if she decides to do it. Many thanks! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
doppelkorn Posted April 6, 2011 Share Posted April 6, 2011 Performance wise how does it compare Johnny? What's the spec? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vekked Posted April 6, 2011 Share Posted April 6, 2011 My room mate did it/is going to do it to mine soon. Says it works completely fine once you get it going but getting it on can be troublesome for some reason. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
djdiggla Posted April 6, 2011 Share Posted April 6, 2011 Lifehacker has a good one and there is also a comparison chart I saw once for what works if u just I stall osx on different laptops. Nice thing about building a desktop tho is cost, ease and it should work pretty flawless. If I did it I'd have a split OS. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.