Shades of Microsoft.

While I very much doubt Steve Jobs knew an operating system from an operating table, his tyrannical, bullying rule of Apple Corp. ensured a high level of attention to detail on the part of his workers. As the guys on the disastrous MobileMe product team, who are now holding up cardboard plaques at the corner of Atherton Avenue and El Camino Real proclaiming “Will Work for Food”, will attest.

Such were my thoughts when installing Mountain Lion on the HP100 nuclear powered Hackintosh chez Pindelski. The download price was right, as in free, as my 2012 MacBook Air had grandfathered the freebie. Getting the freebie was a mess of passwords and poor instructions for which I had to wait 48 hours, the sort of thing Bill Gates revelled in, but I got there. Installation on the MBA was uneventful and after thoroughly wringing OS Mountain Lion out with all my favorite apps (especially LR 4.1 and PS CS 5.1) I concluded it was time to give the big guy a spin.

The Hackintosh thing requires that a major release be downloaded from the AppStore and the installation files transferred to a separate bootable medium. (Minor releases are a simple AppStore download). Tonymac’s Unibeast transfers the downloaded files together with a bootloader to the partition of choice. Restarting from the new partition saw Mountain Lion installed to my boot partition in some 10 minutes (SSDs are fast!) and a restart resulted in …. another Microsoft moment. Most things worked well, but Mail was a spinning beach ball much of the time and Contacts (the Address Book of yore) refused to show. So I did a second install, identical to the first and found myself in the land of sweetness and light. Shades of Windows.

The CPU is at 4.4GHz, but 4.3GHz is as high as OS X can show.

The first Geekbench CPU performance score was a ghastly 5500 – I expected 15,000 or so on the overclocked Core i7 SandyBridge. A moment later I had installed NullCPUPowerManagement.kext using Tonymac’s Multibeast as well as the HDARollback and Realtek sound kexts to restore sound functions. Another restart and the Geekbench report was back over 15,000 and Cinebench came in at almost 30fps. Slower than the 38 I was getting in Lion, but it may be that the Nvidia 9800GTX+ GPU, ancient as it is, is beginning to show incompatibility issues. Still, for my purposes (LR and PS) CPU speed is far more important than GPU throughput, given the CPU-intensive nature of those apps.

Geekbench and Mountain Lion.

Cinebench with Mountain Lion. CPU speed is shown correctly.

So, overall performance is largely unchanged compared to Lion 10.7.3 and some handy features are added. One note – Photoshop required a large Java update when first launched, which took a few minutes. Now it loads faster than ever, under 2 seconds, and Lightroom remains as fast as ever.

Dictation works well (HP100 has a Logitech USB microphone connected), the Notification capability mimics iOS and obsoletes Growl to a large extent, and the showstopper (on the MBA) is the addition of AirPlay, a feature common to iPads and iPhones for a while. This allows you to redirect video and audio from Mountain Lion to any TV with an AppleTV connected BUT the sending machine must have an integrated GPU for this to work. Thus regular Core2Duo or Core2Quad machines cannot do this, whereas those with an HD3000 (Sandy Bridge) or HD4000 (Ivy Bridge) integrated GPU can accomplish the task. I have no need to do this with HP100, despite the presence of its HP3000 integrated GPU, but having this on the MBA, the ‘sofa’ Mac, is heaven-sent, and will create another crack in the bundled pricing hegemony of the cable TV providers. You can get it on your laptop? You can send it to your TV!

The enhancements in Mountain Lion are mostly cosmetic. It’s 64 bit only so you will be SOL if you use 32 bit apps, and now is as good a time as any to start researching the topic. Given the otherwise modest changes, the ML upgrade is a low risk proposition if you can cross the ’64 bit only’ hurdle.

This is no bleeding edge upgrade, as Apple’s $20 upgrade price indicates, and I suggest it’s a low risk update for Lion users. Stated differently, it’s last year’s Ferrari with some chrome trim strips added. With Windows 8 set to emulate Windows Vista (last year’s Trabant), there has never been a better time to abandon the Evil Empire. Let’s just hope that Tim Cook shows some tyrannical traits real soon and kicks some rear on those installation glitches.

Preserving TRIM with SSDs:

To understand TRIM – garbage management for SSDs – just search the term using the box atop this page. A photographer friend who has just built a fabulous Hackintosh using a Z77 Gigabyte motherboard and an Ivy Bridge i5 CPU advises that preserving TRIM with a user DSDT file requires the following settings in Multibeast:

TRIM and Mountain Lion.

I can confirm these work.

Not without a struggle.

Intel’s LightPeak is currently the fastest way of moving data to or from external storage, claiming 10 gigabits/sec, or 1.25Gbytes/s in regular English. This compares with a theoretical limit of 0.06Gbytes/s for USB2, so twenty times as fast on paper. LightPeak was rolled out in several Macs where it continues to enjoy near-zero market share, owing to a dearth of peripherals using the connector and insanely expensive connecting cables.

Meanwhile we have USB3 which claims 0.63Gbytes/s, is backward compatible with USB2 and USB1.1, and is available on most current Macs. The 2012 MacBook Air supports both USB3 and LightPeak (‘Thunderbolt’ in Apple Hypespeak).

For Hackintosh owners there are two ways of adding USB3. For those with older motherboards (LGA775, LGA 1156 typically) a PCIe internal card has to be added at a cost of $20-40. For more recent builds (LGA1155 and LGA1366 sockets) most come with USB3 connectors built into the motherboard. For Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge machines (LGA1155) current Gigabyte boards include USB3, so when ace computer builder FU Steve upgraded HP1 (LGA775 Core2Quad) to LGA1155 (Sandy Bridge i7-2600K) by fitting a Z68 Gigabyte motherboard, it came with two blue USB3 sockets on the back and a 19 pin USB3 connector inside.

And my HP100 has done nothing to use those USB3 sockets since the upgrade, as I have no USB3 peripherals. Until now. As we are getting into hardware, definitely not my forte, I’ll hand it over to ace Hackintosh builder FU Steve for what follows.

Thanks, Thomas.

When I upgraded Thomas’s HP1 to HP100 I intentionally chose the Z68X-UD3H-B3 motherboard from Gigabyte because it’s easily hacked, comes with two USB3 sockets (and many USB2), and has the 19 pin USB3 connector on the board itself. I envisaged upgrading the USB2 internal, front panel USB2 card reader to USB3 and had Thomas plonk down $33 for a Silverstone FP37B 3.5″ internal card reader. This was easily swapped with the older Sony 3.5″ reader, plugging into the 19 pin mobo socket.

And here the story gets complicated. After installing the appropriate USB3 driver (kext file) using TonyMac’s MultiBeast app, the two rear panel blue USB3 sockets were recognized:

Installing the USB3 driver – check the box and restart after running this.
The Gigayte Z68X mobo uses an Etron EJ168 controller. No instability issues noted.

However, no matter how many different drivers I tried the card reader was MIA. Nada. Zilch. Back she goes to Amazon.

Failure. Not recognized by the Hackintosh.

Plan 2. I had Thomas buy an external USB3 card reader, confident it would be recognized once plugged into one of the rear sockets. $35 and nowhere near as elegant a solution, but having the advantage that it could also be used with Thomas’s 2012 MacBook Air, which has no built-in card reader.

US Robotics USB3 card reader.

This comes with a ridiculous 6″ (yes, inch) USB3->micro-USB3 cable, so another $7 saw a 6′ extension cable arrive which is actually usable on the HP100. Having Thomas cuss me out because he cannot get at the card reader is more than life is worth. The stock, short cable is fine for use with the MBA. The reader is USB-powered, so no power brick is required.

Micro-USB3 extension cable.

Don’t bother with that old male-female USB2 extension cable in the brown cardboard box under the stairs. It will fit but you will only get USB2 speed. A USB3 cable has more wires and contacts. There is no free lunch here.

The card reader was immediately recognized, and though System Profiler reports the maximum speed is the 480Mbits/s of USB2, rather than the 5000Mbits/s of USB3, the full USB speed is available. Here’s how it’s seen in System Profiler:

USB3 card reader with a Class 10 SDHC card inserted.

USB3 is reported as ‘USB Super-Speed Bus’, and you can see both sockets are recognized.

Confirmation of the transfer speed was easily done by running the Xbench disk test. Here’s USB2, which takes 10 minutes (!) to run:

Xbench – USB2 (extension cable) with SDHC Class 10 card.

And here’s USB3 which takes a 75 seconds:

Xbench – USB3 cable with UDMA CF 400x card.

Like, whoa!

So USB3 is working properly on the HP100. I ran the same tests with the card reader connected to the 2012 MacBook Air, with identical results, except that the MBA reports the card reader’s speed correctly:

USB3 card reader as reported by the 2012 MacBook Air.

How about some real world tests?

Import and processing of 20 Panny G3 RAW files from the SDHC Class 10 card (not especially speedy as cards go) using USB3 compares with USB2 as follows, using Lightroom 4.1:

• Import 20 files: 20/20 seconds. No difference.
• Generate 20 1:1 previews and apply lens correction profiles: 43/48

Hmmm. Not very impressive. Why is USB3 no faster?

The limiting factor here is the slow SDHC Class 10 card. Here are the speed specs for the various SDHC card classes:

As you can see both USB2 and USB3 are working at maximum efficiency in HP100 – meaning one second per file, with files being around 10Mbytes in size. SDHC simply cannot go any faster, and is not helped by USB3 at all. More recent high-speed CF and SDXC cards however should benefit, as they support data transfer rates of 32Mbytes/s or more and here USB3 should realize the benefits. Thomas’s Panny G3 does support SDXC cards, his earlier G1 does not. He needs a faster card to realize the benefits of USB3 with the Panny G3.

Now repeating the same test using the Lexar 400x CF UDMA card from the Nikon D700:

• Import 20 files: 3/20 seconds. Seven times as fast
• Generate 20 1:1 previews and apply lens correction profiles: 46/48. No material difference.

Thanks, FU. So USB3 in the HP100 will work great with external USB3 drives, and with SD and CF cards. If the card is fast, USB3 is 7x as fast importing files with a 400x UDMA CF cards (and probably similar with recent SDXC cards), and all at a fraction of the cost of LightPeak/Thunderbolt. Processing time remains unchanged as that’s a function of the CPU and GPU, having nothing to do with the card. For users of the latest DSLRs like the Nikon D800 which generate 75Mb files USB3 is a cheap – and highly recommended – fix for fast import – the time will fall from 6 seconds a file to under 1 second.

And, of course, any USB3 external disk drives will be much faster, especially if SATA3 drives are used in preference to the older SATA2 designs.

As for the processing speed when importing to LR, that’s hardly a limitation. Once the files are imported, you can let LR grind through processing while you simultaneously start developing your picture. Processing occurs in background mode and only a faster CPU and GPU can speed that up.

So if you want the best transfer speed per dollar, USB3 is the way to go at very modest increased cost – $35 for the card reader plus $7 for an extension cable.

Update January 27, 2013:

I managed to bend two of the pins in the US Robotics USB3 card reader when inserting a CF card from my Nikon D3x. The pictures on the card were corrupted, but were easily recovered with the wonderful DiskDrill application. Mercifully, I have retained the original internal USB2 Sony card reader in my Hackintosh, so download could proceed. I dismantled the US Robotics device (you have to pull off the four rubber feet hiding the screws) and managed to straighten the bent pins and all is well again.

Moral: Be very careful to insert the card straight into this device. The guide channel is short – misalign your card and the suspect engineering design of the CF card which requires perfect alignment will trip you up, much as it did me. SD/SDHC/SDXC cards are a far more robust design, using broad contacts on the card, addressed by wipers – not pins – in the reader. Yes, you hear of CF cameras with bent pins too, but Nikons are fairly well made in this regard as they use a very long channel to ensure proper alignment of the card in the slot.

The optimum setting.

Computer builder FU Steve writes about overclocking, heat management and power supply selection:

Having had a few days to experiment with the Core i7-2600 Intel CPU in the HP100, replacing the excellent i5, I set about varying overclock settings to see where the sweet point lies for Thomas’s HP100 Hackintosh.

The willingness of these CPUs to be overclocked falls, like most populations, on a Bell curve. Most will go to some decent OC, some will not, some will be superstars.

From much of what I have read the stock 3.4GHz speed is easily increased to 4.4GHz (+29%) simply by changing one setting in BIOS, the frequency multiplier. Thereafter things get tricky.

Here are my findings with settings for a stable running CPU; Geekbench results are shown also:

Intel Core i7-2600K overclocking table.

As is clear, the law of diminishing returns kicks in rapidly beyond 4.4GHz with Thomas’s sample of the i7. Go from 4.4 to 4.5GHz, a barely noticeable 3% Geekbench increase, and the idle temperature rises 8F. Go to 4.6GHz, a further 3% Geekbench improvement, and the temperature jumps another 11F, or 19F warmer than at 4.4GHz. After that the temperature rise:speed trade-off worsens quickly. You have to start juicing the core voltages significantly, Bclck is maxed out at 1005, and heat skyrockets. This is not consonant with a long, hard-working life for the CPU which, at $280, is the costliest part in the computer case.

Vcore will be set by the BIOS to 1.36 volts if you leave that setting (in “Advanced Frequency Settings”) at ‘Auto’. However, for maximum stability, override the Auto setting and set it to 1.385 volts. The maximum permitted by Intel is 1.50 volts, so it’s not like you are over-stressing anything.

Optimal setting? 4.4gHz, Vcore 1.385 volts, all other variables at default, failsafe BIOS settings, aftermarket CPU cooler.

In high stress scenarios, such as ripping and compressing a movie file, you can add 70F to the core temperature, so at 4.4GHz the temperature rises to 169F. Intel publishes exhaustive technical data on its CPUs, and you can find the following table in its 2nd Gen Intel® Core™ Processor, LGA1155 Socket: Thermal Guide which makes for fascinating reading:

Thermal table for the 2nd generation Intel i5 and i7 Sandy Bridge CPUs.

The maximum power consumption of the desktop Core i7 is 95W, at which point Intel specifies a case temperature of 72.6C (162.7F). Case temperature (the outside of the CPU) is 22F lower than CPU core temperature (the inside), which is where the temperature sensors used by apps like Bresink’s Temperature Monitor (free download) reside. So Intel’s maximum of 162.7F becomes 184.7F as a safe limit temperature as reported by Temperature Monitor.

In the following 24 hour chart I show temperature for all the cores. The small spikes half way across are for Carbon Copy Cloner running overnight SSD and HDD back-up jobs at 2am and 3am. The peak here is 129F – no biggie. The massive spike at the end is where I used HandBrake to rip a 4gB DVD movie and compress the result to H264 format for playing on an AppleTV2. The process took all of 11 minutes, by the way, and as you can see from the data, all eight cores of the i7 were working hard. There were several LR4 and PS CS5 sessions in the 24 hour period illustrated, but they barely register any heat increase. This is a mighty testimony to the suitability of the HP100 for still picture processing.

24 hrs, concluding with a movie rip/compress.

Ambient temperature was 75F when ripping the movie. The Core temperature rises to 169F, 15.7F below the Intel recommended core maximum of 184.7F. That’s slim headroom, but very safe, owing to the variable speed fan fitted to the large Coolermaster 212 CPU cooler – all of $28 and the best money you can spend on your Hack. Ripping movies with the ineffectual stock Intel cooler is a bad idea. For that matter, ripping movies on any iMac or, worse, MacBook Pro or MacMini, where cooling is severely compromised in the interest of sexy looks on the sales floor, is a positively rotten idea. Hey, it’s your money but be warned. Other than the MacPro, Apple’s hardware is simply unsuited to prolonged movie processing.

Here then is how my Hackintosh HP100 is set with regard to CPU speed and cooling. I use an Antec Sonata III case with the stock 500 watt power supply and two 120mm case fans – these can be manually switched to H/M/L.

• Rear case exhaust fan – L.
• HDD case fan – M.
• CPU 120mm fan – variable – attached to Coolermaster 212 CPU radiator. This fan spools up instantly when the CPU heats up.
• Intel Core i7-2600K CPU – overclocked to 4.4GHz.
• BIOS CPU warning set at 176F – this will flash the temperature display from Temperature Monitor in the menu bar.

If overclocking you should experiment with frequency multipliers. Assuming you are using an efficient aftermarket CPU cooler, start by taking the stock frequency multiplier setting of 34x to 38x for the i7, the maximum supported by Intel’s warranty. Then take it up in steps of 2x, doing a Geekbench and Cinebench GPU run each time. The former will report CPU speed, the latter measures GPU speed and is also a good stability test. Once you get a Kernel Panic (grey screen with warnings) in OS X you know you have reached the simple adjustment limit and need to revert to the last stable setting, and you are done.

A note on ambient temperature. My measurements disclose that a 2F rise in room temperature results in a 1F rise in idle CPU core temperature. The above movie rip/compress was at an ambient temperature of 75F. At 95F ambient (we get that a few days a year in the Bay Area, and have no air conditioning) that means the CPU will be 10F warmer, meaning a peak temperature of 179F when ripping/compressing a movie, still within the 184.7F safe limit.

Preliminary measurements on the new MacBook Pro with Retina Display disclose that this is an exceptionally hot running machine, probably owing to the over-spec’d display, something no one needs in a small 15″ screen. And it doesn’t even have a DVD drive. I dread to think what its temperature runs once you connect an external DVD burner for ripping movies.

Determining power supply needs:

It’s easy to overlook the need to correctly specify the power supply when building a high performance Hackintosh. There’s an excellent free calculator at Outervision Extreme where you simply input your components to determine the wattage needed. Not all watts are the same. A cheap PSU with light windings and chintzy transformer iron cores will overheat and compound heat management and stability issues. Good brands include Antec and Thermaltake. I have used both extensively with no issues and many builders to whom I have recommended these remain happy. Here’s my output after using that calculator:

The result suggests that HP100 is bumping up against its limits with its 500 watt PSU, and that a beefier power supply may be called for in the interests of cool running and stability. Mercifully, the upgrade involves a few screws and a couple of connectors, and less than $100. There is no beating stock PC parts for price and reliability.

Thank you, FU, for that timely update, coming on the heels of your sterling work (FU is English, after all!) on the recent HP100 CPU upgrade.

A little tweak ….

The other day the Hackintosh HP100 got a nice performance boost when the boot+applications SSD was upgraded from SATA2 to SATA3. Fast disk I/O is essential for best Lightroom and Photoshop performance. Now it’s the CPU’s turn.

Geekbench is a test of CPU speed. It’s a simple and quick comparator of great use to photographers as apps like Photoshop and Lightroom are far more dependent on CPU speed than on the latest in GPUs. Little is to be gained, data suggest, from using a high-end gaming GPU.

Cinebench framing rates are a measure of GPU speed. My Hackintosh HP100 (Sandy Bridge Core i5, 16gB RAM) uses a three year old, low power draw, Nvidia 9800GTX+ GPU, yet returns a very high Cinebench framing rate.

One of the beauties of the Sandy Bridge and later Ivy Bridge CPUs is that overclocking is trivially simple, unless you go crazy. Clock speed is a near-linear indicator of effective speed for like CPUs. Double the clock speed and you should see an almost identical change in the Geebench score. In summary, the Sandy Bridge i5-2500K overclocks from 3.3gHz stock to 4.4gHz with one key entry in the BIOS. The i7-2600K goes from 3.4gHz to 4.5gHz for the same effort. As long as you dispense with the inept stock Intel fan and fit a Coolermaster 212 ($27) or similar, you will be thermally protected. Further, the BIOS has many failsafes to turn things off if heat rises too much.

I have been running my Sandy Bridge i5 at 4.0gHz since inception, or 21% over the 3.3gHz stock, but the new Geekbench Ivy Bridge data for the just released MacBook Pros spurred me to action. Here are those data:

Meanwhile, HP100, perking along at 4.0gHz, records the following in Geekbench 64:

Actual speed with several apps running. 4.0gHz is correct, GB states it incorrectly.

Hmmm. Not good enough, even if my environment measures ‘real world’ results with Mail, Finder, Safari, Firefox, etc. running. You can also bet that the above MacPro data are in an ideal setting with no other apps running. That’s how Apple does data.

So I hopped into the BIOS on the Gigabyte motherboard, changed the ‘Frequency Multiplier’ from 40x to 44x, meaning the clock speed is now 4.4gHz, and restarted. Two minutes later I had the following result:

Core i5 Sandy Bridge at 4.4gHz. 42% faster than stock.

That’s more like it. A 10% clock frequency increase realizes a 9.4% CPU speed gain, and equalling the fastest, latest and greatest from Apple, at no incremental cost to me.

Heat, that bugbear of all computers, remains unchanged.

Temperature graph at 4.4gHz.

The above graph reports the temperature of the four CPU cores from restart. The usual start-up spike quickly disappears to settle at 109F, indistinguishable from the reading at 4.0gHz. The CPU cooler is set in BIOS as a variable speed device, meaning it cranks up only when needed. It sounds just a little louder than at 4.0, meaning it’s working harder but just as effectively. On the other hand, when I was running this test, ambient temperature was a high 85F (we have no air conditioning as it rarely gets that warm in the SF Bay Area) so there’s little to worry about. Things can only get cooler on regular days. The spike toward the right results from starting Lightroom 4. Starting Photoshop CS5 does not make any discernible difference. I have had no stability issues so far.

The Cinebench tests for GPU speed are outstanding. Brown (#5) is for HP100 at 4.0gHz, Orange (#4) is at 4.4gHz (not 4.0 as shown) – 13.3% faster. The highest reading here (#1) is for a Xeon equipped machine with a high end gaming GPU – meaning $1,400 more for the CPU and $1,300 more for the GPU – for a 25% speed increase. Goodness, the all in cost of HP100 is less than one of those components! And PS and LR do a very poor job of multi-threading so a 12 thread CPU is money wasted. Those economics do not solve for me nor does any photographer need to spend that sort of money. #3 is for HP100 running at stock GPU speed but with all other apps closed – hardly realistic, but impressive if you are a marketer. Marketing, after all, is lying for a living.

GPU results from Cinebench.

And when Apple gets faster, you can bet on one thing. With a tweak or two, HP100 will be right there at very little or zero cost.

Looking forward:

If you accept that CPU speed increases are leveling off, and that the focus will increasingly be on lowering power consumption, then simply dropping an i7 in place of the i5 will yield a 25-30% speed increase, for a net upgrade cost of maybe $150 after reselling your i5. I doubt Intel will be able to increase its CPUs’ speeds by more than 5% annually henceforth.

GPUs are already so far ahead of anything photographers need that spending lavishly here makes little sense. Any conceivable pixel density is already supported.

In the case of both, Adobe’s software is a long way behind what the hardware can do. Poor use of multi-core, multi-threading technologies means that far greater gains are to be had from software design than from hardware upgrades. Lightroom, in particular, is showing massive code bloat, with no improvement in operating speed. LR4 is some ten times the size of LR3.

The next frontier is peripheral I/O, where Intel’s LightPeak (we keep hearing that Apple’s Thunderbolt is the latest invention from Cupertino, when in reality it is simply LightPeak on which Apple’s 1 year wasted exclusive has now expired). LightPeak promises disk read/writes ten time faster than USB2, maybe three times faster than USB3. Whether it succeeds like USB2 did, or fails like Firewire has, remains to be seen. Very slow adoption is not encouraging, and I suspect it’s simply not a mass-market selling point. External drives are hardly the norm in the average home. If it does succeed, you can bet cheap PCIe cards will become available and that photographers’ Hackintoshes will be adding these for a few dollars.

Update:

As I’m not about to be beaten by Apple’s poor hardware, I set about adding a little more fire to the pot by tweaking the i5’s frequency multiplier from 44x to 45x, for a CPU frequency of 4.5gHz, and increased the VCore voltage to 1.385volts for stability. Nothing else was changed. System ambient temperature remains at 113F (45C) and is stable. At stock VCore it kernel panics. Intel specifies the maximum safe VCore at 1.52 volts so it’s not like I’m really puashing it here. This is the result – faster than the Core i7 in the fastest MacBook Pro:

Intel Core i5 – 2500K at 4.5gHz CPU speed.
1.4% faster than the fastest MacBook Pro, with more to come.

Cinebench GPU data remain unchanged.

I have shutdown failsafes in the BIOS set at a CPU temperature of 176F (190F is the danger point for the i5 2500K) so everything remains conservatively specified.
These data suggest that a modestly overclocked i7 – 2600K Sandy Bridge should be good for 16,000 or more. But you do need proper cooling to do this sort of thing, not Intel’s stock cooler.

The Z68 chipset on the motherboard does not work happily with OS 10.7.4, and while there are workarounds, it’s not worth the effort. (It slows to a crawl). H67 and P67 chipsets have no issues with 10.7.4. So on the HP100 I’m sticking with 10.7.3 for now. Only P and Z motherboards support overclocking.

Another 25% in speed?

Sure. Get a Core i7-2600k. Look here.

A modest improvement.

Readers will recall that my desktop Hackintosh was upgraded from a Core2Quad CPU to a Sandy Bridge i5 2500K, with CPU performance gains of the order of 25% and doubled RAM speed, late last year. This required a new motherboard and memory in addition to the CPU, but was a painless experience, substantially ‘future-proofing’ the machine as rates of change in CPUs and RAM have pretty much stalled.

Intel released a modest upgrade to the Sandy Bridge CPU, named Ivy Bridge, last month, and reading the performance data at Anandtech here is my advice to readers contemplating the construction of a new Hackintosh or an ugrade to an older machine.

Just a reminder that the goals of this bulky, desktop machine are simple. 90% of the highest performance available (the MacPro) at 30% of the price, with easy upgrades possible using inexpensive parts from the local computer store. In the 8 months since my Hackintosh was upgraded by FU Steve to Sandy Bridge it has been on 7/24 and has not locked up once. It has been restarted a couple of times when OS X Lion upgrades required that. Otherwise it runs all the time and is used hard all day. Thermal properties are outstanding. Except when compressing a large movie file when the CPU temperature rises to 135F, the prevailing temperature, regardless of load, is 108-115F compared with a safe operating limit of 170F. My i5 CPU is overclocked 25% to 4.0 gHz.

Should you build an Ivy Bridge machine?

The answer depends on what you are using now and what your needs are. If you use Photoshop with many files open and simultaneously run Lightroom and maybe a few other applications, a fast machine with a lot of RAM makes sense. Whether it makes sense for you is largely a function of the value of your time. If you like to smell the daisies and plonk along, it probably makes little sense. If, on the other hand, you regard all processing time as time wasted, then it’s worth considering an upgrade.

Cost: The i5 ‘K’ version is the best bet unless you do a lot of video processing, in which case the extra $100 for the i7 is money well spent. ‘K’ designates that the CPU can be overclocked with a few key strokes. Free speed. The i5 is easily and safely overclocked to equal the stills processing capability of the i7. Ivy Bridge 3570K – $240. Sandy Bridge 2500K – $215. No brainer. Use Ivy Bridge. The overall cost of a similarly spec’d Ivy Bridge Hackintosh will be similar to that of one using Sandy Bridge. FU Steve strongly recommends Gigabyte mobos as these are the easiest to hack with no issues. The many variations largely address the number of expansion sockets and rear panel connectors available.

Fit: These use identical LGA1155 sockets, but Sandy Bridge motherboards will need a BIOS update, so make sure you can do that if you are using a Sandy Bridge motherboard. If you are migrating from an LGA775 motherboard (Core2Duo and Core2Quad) simply buy a current Ivy Bridge motherboard.

GPU and RAM: For the first time it’s safe to say that even demanding users can go with the integrated GPU included with the Ivy Bridge CPU. The HD4000 GPU is now a very capable graphics processor, and Anand Tech’s specs confirm it will easily handle the needs of PS and LR. You save $60-200 on a separate GPU card, and can use a smaller motherboard and box. The HD4000 integrated GPU will need some RAM to do video processing, so make sure to max out RAM, which is very inexpensive in 1600MHz spec. Also, use a proper aftermarket cooler – FU Steve recommends the Coolermaster 212 at $26 – as heat kills, and Intel’s stock fan sucks. The 212 needs a big box to accommodate it.

However, if you are using more than one monitor and prefer those with very high pixel counts, then a separate GPU is recommended. For example, users of 27″ monitors with 2560 x 1440 pixel counts would be better off with a separate GPU. Spending more than $120 on a discrete GPU only makes sense if you are a gamer. FU Steve is a big fan of EVGA Nvidia GPU cards as no additional hacking is required for most of these.

Power needs: Irrelevant for a desktop. The most significant advantage of Ivy Bridge over Sandy Bridge is lower power consumption, of primary interest to laptop users. Ivy Bridge uses less power. Even if your box includes 2 SSDs, 2HDDs, 16gB or RAM and a separate GPU card, as does mine, a decent quality 500 watt power supply will easily cope. FU Steve likes Thermaltake power supplies because they are conservatively specified and reliable.

WiFi: The 802-11n protocol will be replaced by 802-11ac over the next few quarters, offering higher speed and better resistance to interference. It is not available on any aftermarket PCIe card or, for that matter, on any Mac, so it’s a question of ‘wait and see’ for now. The right way to enable 802-11n wi-fi in a Hackintosh with full AirDrop capability is described here. This provides full support for the 5gHz and 2.4gHz spectra. FU Steve built all of my three Hacks with these and they work perfectly, being recognized as native Airport cards by OS Lion.

Everything else: Check the Hackintosh article linked at the beginning of this piece. Everything else works unchanged. 16gB of RAM costs little more than 8gB, 1600Mhz RAM is barely costlier than 1333Mhz for a 20% speed boost, and just about every Ivy Bridge motherboard now supports USB3 and SATA3. SATA3, used with the latest HDDs and SSDs, doubles the rate at which data is read from or saved to disk, and will be especially noticeable for those photographers who splashed out on a Nikon D800/E only to find that they now have to process 75mB files!

Hacking tools: I’m no hacker, but my builder FU Steve (Going rate? One six-pack of imported beer per Hackintosh) says that Tonymac’s tools are fully up to date for both Ivy Bridge and HD4000 use with OS Lion.

iMac?: On paper the specs of the iMac look price competitive. If you want a machine with minimal ability to upgrade, sporting a display which cannot be properly calibrated for photographic use, a long turnaround time for repairs, impossible to dismantle for all but experts with special tools and one guaranteed to overheat in heavy, professional use, the iMac is the machine for you. And it looks nice too, as you contemplate your reflection in its high gloss screen. The Hackintosh is a Mack Truck, the iMac is a daily commuter with Cadillac glitz. For like specs, the iMac will cost you twice as much as the Hackintosh and there’s no alternative to the truly ghastly glossy display.

The proper comparison for the Hackintosh is the MacPro which gives you 10% more performance for three times the price and dictates the use of costly OEM upgrade and repair parts. But even the latest (6/2012) MacPro will not run 1600mHz Ram has no USB3 and will not support SATA3 6gb/s disk drives. Very disappointing for the money asked.

Build sheet: You have to add the wifi card/adapter ($40) and your display(s) of choice to this list which makes a 2 SSD, 2 HDD, 16gB Ivy Bridge machine for $1,300, with state of the art performance for any photographer, using the integrated GPU in the i5 CPU – all disk drives are fast 6gb/s SATA 3:

Ivy Bridge Hackintosh components.

Add a couple of Logitech speakers for $25 if you need sound.

A 1tB HDD will store 13,000 75mB Nikon D800/E files or 80,000 D700 files (you really need a D800?). A 2tB HDD costs $30 more, doubling capacity. SSDs are used for Mac OS and application files; picture files go on the HDDs. Disks are paired for full redundancy. The costliest part, the CPU, is also the most reliable.

FU Steve recommends Dell Ultrasharp monitors. Their 21.5″ 1920×1200 runs some $260 and comes with a matte surface and a three year warranty. It is easily profiled using a colorimeter like the EyeOne and has excellent build quality.

Updating a Sandy Bridge motherboard:

If you use a Sandy Bridge motherboard from Gigabyte, the maker provides a free BIOS update which will enable that board to use the later Ivy Bridge CPU. That’s for the Z68 (F12). H67 (F7) and P67 (F7) boards can also be updated, but no update has been released for the Q67; search for the appropriate page on the Gigabyte site. You may need a PC un-shrink the downloaded BIOS update, extracting the installable file. Read on.

• Download the BIOS update; it downloads as a DOS .exe file so you will need to use Windows to run the file which uncompresses it. Alternatively, if you refuse to use Windows as I do, download FileJuicer and it will extract what you need from the .exe file.
• Place the BIOS file on a flash drive (MS-DOS formatted in Apple’s Disk Utility).
• Enter BIOS at startup.
• First save your old BIOS to the flash drive, just in case, using the BIOS F8 (‘Q-flash’) function.
• Make a picture of all the old BIOS screens as you will have to reinput the changes after the BIOS update.
• Set your motherboard to ‘Optimized Defaults’.
• Using F8 again, load the new BIOS from the flash drive (it’s some 4mB in size) while still running your Sandy Bridge CPU.
• Now reload your preferred settings (Turbo, etc.) once done, using the pictures you took earlier.
• Turn the Hack off, restart, test with Sandy Bridge.
• Swap the Sandy Bridge for an Ivy Bridge – they use identical LGA1155 sockets – and restart.

The difference between an upgraded Z68 or similar Gigabyte Sandy Bridge Board and the later Z77 Ivy Bridge version is that the Z77 will support PCIe3, whereas the updated Z68 will go to PCIe2 only. New cards coming to market, probably Thunderbolt and others, may well be PCIe3 only. But the BIOS update on a Z68 board will allow use of an Ivy Bridge in every other respect.

I updated the BIOS in my Z68 UD3H from F9 (as shipped) to F12, and I continue to run a Sandy Bridge i5 CPU on it with no performance changes.