In the real world, do its dated specs matter?

Update March 14, 2011: Adding a fast Solid State Drive for the OS and applications is discussed here.

If you are into serious video processing or game play on your computer the answer may be ‘Yes’. If, on the other hand, your goal is fast processing of photographs and vast amounts of cheap storage, there’s no compelling reason to build a newer HackPro.

Since my HackPro came to life thanks to master builder FU Steve, the following component changes have redefined the state of the art in the fastest Macs, albeit still with compromised cooling and poor to non-existent expandability in all but the MacPro:

• The Q9550 Core2Quad Intel CPU is now replaced with the i7 four core
• 800 mHz DDR2 RAM is now 1600 mHz DDR3 RAM – faster

Other than that, there has been little change. LightPeak/Thunderbolt is not yet available on the MacPro and you can bet PCIe cards for the PC and HackPro communities are just around the corner. Graphics Processing improves little on the superb Nvidia 9800GTX+ in the HackPro with the current Nvidia GT260/ATI 5770 models largely reflecting a name change, not real-world speed improvements for photographers. The ATI card is 10-20% faster on some games but for PS/LR3 use there’s no practical difference.

But, if you want to make a HackPro today, several of the components FU Steve used in mine are no longer available. No matter. Ace tech journalist Adah Pash, who inspired my techie colleague FU Steve to create the original HackPro ‘build’, has updated his piece for the latest components, and you can read it by clicking the picture below:

Click for the article.

Cooling? You will not improve on the HackPro. Large case, power supply, HDD and CPU fans, a huge CPU radiator and a separate GPU fan all in a large box keep the Hackster as cool as a cucumber, no matter what you throw at it. It’s so well cooled, in fact, that I have finally shaken my paranoid habit of constantly checking temperatures – a legacy of my Mac days and burned wallet.

The process remains as simple as before and if you can assemble a Lego kit you can make a Hackintosh. If you are serious about photo processing and want seriously reliable hardware, consider it.

OS X Lion, you ask? Will it work? Fear not. You can bet that the hacker community will have that one up and running a few days after Lion is released. Just two warnings. If you use xrite’s EyeOne match colorimeter, then keep an installation of Snow Leopard or earlier running on a separate HDD or HDD partition. It will not run on Lion. And if you use a Hewlett Packard DesignJet 30/90/130 printer like I do, then keep a version of Leopard (not Snow Leopard) or earlier available as the System Maintenance and color profiling tools will not work on Snow Leopard or later. What a mess.

The best upgrade:

The best improvement in speed, if you built the original HackPro, is not from ripping out and replacing CPUs and RAM and motherboards. Rather, it results from replacing the traditional spinning disk HDD with a Solid State Drive (SSD). As my MacBook Air testifies, SSDs boot very fast, even though the CPU in the MBA runs at a modest 1.4gHz – half the speed of the one in the HackPro. Yet apps load in under half the time in one quarter of the RAM! The latest Pash ‘build’ uses an SSD as an OS X and application drive (your option – it is not cheap to do this) and when I get FU Steve to upgrade the original HackPro to include one of these, you can be sure I’ll explain how he did it here.