Speed, speed, speed!

You can’t be too rich, too thin or too fast. And while adding a Solid State Drive to your work computer doesn’t demand great riches, it is thin and, my goodness, is it fast.

My first hard disk drive was bought in 1982, It was the size of a shoe box, made loud clicking sounds when accessed, stored 10 megabytes and cost $1,200. Today our home has no less than 12 terabytes of storage, or more than one million times what that shoebox stored, the whole thing is the size of that same shoebox and the replacement cost is …. $1,200. The spinning disk drives making up that storage may represent a technology in the last quarter of its life, but that technology is a triumph of function over form, and represents the peak of American engineering and materials science genius.

Sharp eyed readers will have noticed that Western Digital, a large HDD maker, just bought Hitachi’s HDD business last week. Well, there’s an old saying in investment banking of which WD is blissfully ignorant: “If you tie two rocks together, they still sink”. It’s a bit like getting into LP manufacture based on some nut’s claim that “the sound is so much better”. Uh huh.

Within a generation all that spinning disc storage will have been replaced by flash memory, which is already the only storage found in every iPad ever made and in most iPods. It’s no surprise to learn that Apple purchases 60% of the world’s flash memory chips. Laptops increasingly use it and if you want to give your G3/4/5 PPC Mac a last lease of life, flash storage in the guise of an SSD is the single best thing you can do for it.

Out with the old, in with the new.

What clued me in to the idea of adding an SSD to the HackPro, my daily workhorse, was the outstanding operating speed of my MacBook Air, which despite using a very small SSD and a poky 1.4gHz, dated, Intel CPU mated with a modest 2gB of RAM, spanks the HackPro for overall speed, despite the latter’s 4 core Intel CPU which runs at 2.83gHz with 8gB of RAM.

And because I’m constantly in and out of Lightroom, Photoshop, iWork Numbers, Safari, Firefox, iCal, Mail, NetNewsWire, Excel and Word, as well as several stock market systems for my day job, the difference in operating speed of the HackPro compared with the MBA was beginning to irritate me.

So when the HackPro’s builder, the pseudonymous FU Steve, was in the vicinity the other day, he offered to pop my newly acquired Intel SSD into the Hackster. FU did the work, I snapped the pictures and screen shots.

SSDs are still expensive. I bought a 120gB Intel SATA model from Amazon to place the OS and applications on it. I opted for Intel as it has the lowest failure rates and the most capital supporting it. It has a three year warranty and cost $230. By contrast, a 500gB spinning disc notebook drive can be had for well under $100. Is the SSD worth it? Read on.

In time, SSDs will become as cheap as traditional drives are today, a related appeal being the SSD’s lower power consumption. A typical notebook drive uses 1-2 watts compared with 0.15 watts claimed by Intel for its latest 35nm technology second generation (G2) SSD with no moving parts. If you are interested how Mac OS X handles TRIM for an SSD (garbage management), click here. I am unaware of the absence of TRIM yet being a problem in Macs.

Here’s the size of the relevant directories on my HDD which will have to be moved to an SSD for the OS and applications to work:

FU Steve says you can chuck the CD which comes with the Intel SSD if you use a Mac. It seems that those afflicted with Windows need it – an OS at the same point in its life cycle as the spinning HDD. Before installing the SSD, FU formatted it in my Aluratek USB cradle which ordinarily plays host to my TimeMachine HDD, using Disk Utility (Mac OS, GUID, journaled). That took all of 30 seconds.

Using the external cradle allowed FU to test everything. He copied the above directories to the SSD, adding in Users but excluding my user data files (pictures, movies, music, etc.) and 95 minutes later we had this, using Carbon Copy Cloner.

By purging old, unused applications,
I now have almost 60gB of free space.

There’s still a lot of space left on the SSD for new apps and OS upgrades. If you want to add that nifty SSD drive icon which FU used, surf the web looking for ‘Mac ICNS files’, download the icon of choice, then do a ‘right-click, Get Info’ on the SSD and drag and drop the ICNS file on the small top left picture, above.

One of the best ways to see what is taking up space on your disk, and hence determine what can be erased, is to use a product like OmniDiskSweeper, which will show space use by directory and size. Of the 60gB or so used on my 120gB SSD, no less than 10gB is for WinXP + VirtualBox. I would dearly love to get rid of XP but it’s still essential for the occasional business application where no OS X version exists. If you erase apps, use something like AppCleaner which will erase not just the app but also any related files which may be lurking in other directories.

Before going further FU Steve made sure to install the boot loader from the HDD to the SSD to make the drive self booting. It does not get copied over otherwise and your SSD will not be bootable. If you don’t know what he’s doing here, click on ‘Hackintosh’ in the right hand column and read the build articles. The boot loader is a small piece of code which fools the OS into thinking it’s looking at a regular Mac. FU booted from the cradle-mounted SSD and all was well.

Next came installation. Here’s what’s needed from the box, plus the Antec case mounting plate from the Hackpro:

Adapter plate top left, Antec Sonata HDD plate top right, data and power cables, Intel SSD

There’s no need to buy an adapter plate to fit the notebook-sized SSD in the regular HDD drive bay. Intel thoughtfully provides it. The SSD is screwed to the adapter plate using the small screws provided. If you use the excellent Antec Sonata III case which FU used in the HackPro, the other set of screws is too short to mount the SSD on the silicone shock resistant bumpers which Antec provides for its hard drive mounting plate. Use the long collar screws provided by Antec.

Here’s the SSD mounted with the (locking) cables in place:

Installation in the HackPro was trivial for FU – he simply connected the power and data cables and slid in the assembly, connecting the data cable to an open SATA II socket on the motherboard. The Antec case has so many redundant power supply cables that finding a free one for the SATA power connector was not an issue. The whole mechanical part of the installation took FU Steve maybe 30 minutes, much of it spent undoing his neat tie wraps of all the unused cables so as to fish out an additional power cable for the SSD. His snipping off of the old tie wraps had me looking away, I confess. As usual, FU made sure all the loose cables in the HackPro were anchored with new tie wraps before replacing the cover.

Intel SSD in the HackPro. Two 1 tB Samsung HDDs to the right.

Finally, a quick change in the BIOS (hit ‘Delete’ at boot) to make the new SSD the boot drive:

Heat:

Temperature Monitor reports that the Intel SSD runs at room temperature. There is no temperature rise. The two Samsung 1tB HDDs show no rise either and all three drives have a large fan almost in contact with them to draw away any heat. You will not get this sort of heat management in your Mac, where looks trump function.

CPU:

My HackPro uses an Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 CPU; I have read that the later i5/i7 CPUs, like those found in the latest Macs, require a firmware update for the Intel SSD to work. That means you have to download the firmware from the Intel site while running on your existing HDD, load it to the SSD then proceed. You should do your research first if you are using an i5/i7 Mac. The Intel link is here.

Other applications:

Some precautions/changes are called for when you first boot from the SSD.

Photo processing

You have to tell Lightroom, Photoshop, Aperture and iPhoto where to look for data files. Likewise most other apps which use databases are clueless until pointed appropriately. Be sure your Carbon Copy Cloner settings for overnight backups are correct.

To redirect iTunes, which is now booting from the SSD, hold down the Option key while starting iTunes then point it to the library on your HDD data drive.

Make sure Lightroom Preferences use the SSD for the Cache – cache files are created by LR when you roundtrip RAW files to Photoshop:

Lightroom3 directory created on SSD Boot->Users->Tigger (me!)

Next, make sure Photoshop is using the SSD as the scratch disk for temporary processing files – PS can get pretty disk intensive with complex photo processing:

Photoshop Preferences for the scratch disk.

Finally, if you use TimeMachine, check that it’s backing up from the right data drive to the TimeMachine drive. I left the OS on the HDD I previously used to boot from, in case the SSD blows, so there’s no need to backup the SSD.

1Password:

If you use the excellent 1Password app to keep your passwords and software licenses securely sync’d on all devices using Dropbox, delete the 1Password.agilekeychain in your cloud Dropbox folder, and send the new file from the SSD to your cloud Dropbox folder, using 1Password->Preferences->General->Data File->Move to Dropbox.

The data file shown is on the SSD, NOT on your old HDD.

If you fail to do this your local changes on the SSD’s 1Password will disappear at the next automatic sync and will leave you scratching your head!

Speed?

Time is money. Any statement to the effect that SSDs are too costly in $ per gigabyte is trying to solve an equation with a missing, key variable – the value of time.

Boot and related times for common apps are 2-4 times faster. Here are some examples (current application versions unless indicated otherwise):

Lightroom: 3-4 seconds
Lightroom – create TIFF file from RAW and open it in PS CS4: 5 seconds if PS is open, 8 seconds if PS needs to be loaded
Lightroom – Create a 240dpi print file from a RAW original and open it in Preview for soft profiling: 8 seconds
Photoshop CS4: 3 seconds
Aperture 2.5 : 3 seconds (I gave up on Aperture after this version)
iPhoto (8.1.2): <3 seconds iCal: <1 second Apple Mail: <1 second NetNewsWire (RSS reader, 50 feeds): 2 seconds MS Word (2008): 3-4 seconds MS Excel (2008): 3 seconds iWork Numbers: <1 second (startlingly fast) iWork Pages: <1 second (even faster than Numbers) iTunes: 2 seconds Bento (database): 4 seconds Win XP SP3 (under VirtualBox): 25 seconds (no comment!) Cold boot: Not measured. My HackPro runs 7 by 24 and is never switched off, so cold boot time is irrelevant to me. That said, it's probably twice as fast - MacSales has some videos which make all sorts of comparisons. MacBook Air, 11" 1.4gHz Intel i5 CPU: This speedy machine takes one-and-a-half to twice as long to load all of the applications listed above, except for Aperture and Win XP, which I have not tested. I will not be testing those, having better thing to do with my time. Here are the xBench HD scores. Higher is faster. These data bear out the '2-4 times faster' claim I made above. First the 7,200 rpm 1tB Samsung HDD:

Then the Intel SSD:

Once you have an SSD, there’s no going back.

Current drive topology:

Here are the drives in and around the HackPro:

Drives in and around the HackPro, with thanks to FU Steve.

Here’s the thinking:

• If the SSD blows I can boot from either internal HDD as each has a full bootable OS on it.
• If the SSD and one of the internal HDDs blow, I can boot from the other internal HDD.
• If the HackPro gets incinerated, I can restore from the external TimeMachine back-up.
• If the HackPro and the full TimeMachine back-up get incinerated, I can at least restore my Pictures from the notebook HDD in my car, though the OS and apps are lost..
• If the Big One hits locally I’m SOL.
• No back-up in the ‘cloud’. Just don’t trust it or its custodians.
• And I would rather lose the lot than entrust anything to some schmuck bankster’s safe.

There are four additional remote drive enclosures, each containing two 1 terabyte mirrored Samsung drives, for movies. Those are not shown here, and will soon be obsoleted by the growing ‘cloud’ storage of movies.

Doing this on a real Mac:

You can buy SSD options in new MacBook Pros, iMacs and MacPros. Cost premia are little more than buying your own. If you want to install an SSD later, it’s plug-and-play in MacBook Pros and MacPros, and a real pain in iMacs (where the glass cover has to be removed with suction cups) and MacMini’s (which are hard to dismantle). In MBPs your warranty is not invalidated; I don’t know about the others. For the MBP user, there’s an attractive option to remove the DVD drive and install an SSD in its place, if you do not play DVDs. This allows you to retain the HDD which came with the machine. MacSales and other vendors have the kits.

Use the drive in an external enclosure or cradle:

If internal installation is too hard, you can always have your Mac boot from an external SSD. (System Preferences->Startup Disc or hold the Option key when starting your Mac). When FU Steve was setting mine up using the external cradle, he tried booting from it and overall speed was comparable to when he eventually installed it inside the HackPro. That’s surprising as it compares a relatively slow USB connection (cradle) with a SATA II one (internal). A viable solution when you cannot open the computer’s box or do not want to and ideal for older G4 and earlier iMacs which are hell to open up.

What’s next?

Unless you are doing heavy video editing, the ever increasing clock speeds and number of cores in CPUs and GPUs are of little practical use. Few applications take advantage of multiple CPU cores and your rig is only as fast as its slowest part. As an example, my HackPro is little faster with 8gB of RAM than with 4gB and overclocking the CPU adds stress to the hardware with little effective speed gain.

A speedier graphics card with more video memory is an excellent investment if you process pictures or video (or play games), if your motherboard will support it. It will do more for your productivity than faster CPUs and RAM. The HackPro uses an EVGA Nvidia 9800GTX+ with 512mB of RAM; there are faster cards but for photo processing the 9800 is probably more than you need already.

In practice, for users accessing the web or the ‘cloud’, that slowest part, by far, is their broadband connection. The US is cursed with very poor broadband speeds compared with Europe and Asia, so until those improve, loading up with faster CPUs and RAM accomplishes little. Optical fiber, like Verizon’s FIOS, is slowly being rolled out and promises speeds far higher than the modest 5-10 megabits/second common with regular broadband. But it’s costly to install, so don’t hold your breath.

Then, when you finally get through to your web site of choice, you are beholden to the speed of its servers, which can be frustratingly slow, especially at peak use times.

So while an SSD would not be the first item on my list when in search of overall operating speed, it was the next logical step, as I already had a very competent CPU and GPU and cannot do anything about AT&T’s poor broadband speed. (I use Uverse which, unlike FIOS, still uses copper wires for the ‘last mile’ to the home and when they tried to ramp me up from 10 to 15 mb/s my speeds actually dropped!)

* * * * *

Thank you, FU Steve, for once more moving the HackPro to the front of the line.

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.

Two new features of note. And one great loss.

Like many, I use Macs not for the hardware – which my many years of use have shown to be generally poorly designed and unreliable – but for the operating system which is robust and largely trouble free. Indeed, my home brew Hackpro has shown that not only are PC hardware components dead reliable, they are also far cheaper and more easily replaced than anything in a Mac. The last major upgrade to OS X was Snow Leopard (June, 2009) and while it introduced no exciting new features the reliability improved on its already excellent predecessors Leopard and Tiger. Snow Leopard is so solid that the only time I reboot any Mac running it is when a software upgrade dictates that process.

Now that the next release of the Mac OS X operating system is out in beta test, details are beginning to leak. Snow Leopard will soon be replaced by Lion and here are a couple of substantive features that have caught my eye:

Recovery partition support: Lion will place a separate partition on your start-up drive with a complete installable copy of the Mac OS in it. This means that if the regular boot partition gets corrupted in some way, you will simply be able to restart your Mac while holding down the Option key and will be presented with a choice of boot drive. You elect the Recovery partition and are up and running in no time. Of course, if your whole drive is hosed, that will not help, but the increasing incidence of Solid State Drives (SSDs), as used in the MacBook Air and some MacBook Pros, makes this much more useful as the chances of ‘mechanical’ failure in an SSD are low. I suppose a massive blow would do it but the SSD would be the least of your worries in that case.

I hope that the version of the OS in the Recovery Partition is updated at the time the user updates the OS in the boot partition down the road. I can’t determine if that is the case

TRIM support for SSDs: Because an SSD can sustain fewer read/write cycles to any one internal location the OS has to move data around to maximize life. It’s not that big a deal as it’s likely your Mac will be obsolete before you exceed the number of permitted cycles, but it’s still a fact of life which may affect a very small percentage of users. Further, one dirty little secret of SSDs is that they do a poor job of managing garbage like deleted files (hitting ‘Delete’ does not delete the file, just the file name which appears in Finder, removing the total file size from the ‘space remaining’ statistic only), so they tend to lose storage capacity over time in the absence of TRIM technology.

Here’s a System Profiler snap from my 11″, 2010 MBA running Snow Leopard:

As you can see, it does not support TRIM, which is a technology which cleverly manages garbage to keep storage capacity at a maximum.

OS Lion, SSD + Recovery Partition + TRIM: Put those together and you get three benefits:

• Fast SSD read and write speeds
• Ability to restart even with a blown boot drive OS
• Efficient management of dead space on a costly SSD

This leads to a couple of thoughts. If I can get Lion to run on the local workhorse here, my HackPro, then the next logical step is to add a small SSD to become the start-up drive with OS Lion on it and to store the Applications and Library directories on that SSD. Data files will continue to reside on traditional spinning disk drives until SSDs become larger and much cheaper. MacPro users could do this also given the machine’s ability to contain multiple disk drives. MacBook Pro users whose disk drive is of the spinning traditional type can get a kit to replace the increasingly useless optical disk drive with an SSD – Mac Sales has them – thus running two drives inside their laptop. I’m not sure about iMacs; there’s an option to buy these with an HDD plus an SSD but whether it’s possible to retrofit machines with an additional SSD which came without one is not something I have researched. Nor will I, given the poor heat design of the iMac which saw two die prematurely here, and the ghastly glossy screen.

I added up the size of those directories and here is what I got:

So that little lot totals less than half the capacity of a 120gB SSD. Here’s the current pricing of SSDs at MacSales – these come in a 2.5″ drive size so add $20 for the cradle to adapt the SSD to a full size machine which takes 3.5″ drives:

So the 120gB is in the gB/$ sweet spot and just the right size for my purposes.

MacSales’s web site makes the point that applications like Photoshop still do a lot of disk swapping when processing, so doing this using an SSD is going to result in far faster performance when doing complex processing. And my experience with the SSD in my MacBook Air tells me that PS and LR3 work super fast, especially when it comes to start-up times. Typically these applications start in half the time on the MBA compared with the HackPro with its 8gB of RAM and 1tB Samsung 7200rpm traditional HDD boot drive.

Today even the MacBook Pro laptop computer reports faster benchmark results than the HackPro despite the latter’s four core CPU, fast Nvidia 9800+ GPU and 8gB of RAM. But, then again, I can get faster to the grocery store on my push bike than you can in your Ferrari. Raw speed tests are not everything. Constraining factors like a slow internet connection can make all that speed of little use in many real world uses. The SSD addresses one of those bottlenecks, the slow read/write times of conventional hard disk drives, so for a modest investment of $270 + OS Lion I expect that the HackPro will once again jump to the forefront of effective speed in practical use which, for me, means less time spent processing photographs. That’s always a good thing as I much prefer pressing the button to messing about with a mouse.

Thunderbolt: Never missing an opportunity for hype, Apple has just added Intel’s Light Peak technology to the newest MacBook Pros fancifully naming it Thunderbolt. Please. This has nothing to do with OS Lion but is a wire or optical connector which permits far higher data transfer rates than USB2 or the nascent USB3, as well as supporting many peripherals like external drives, displays, etc. on one connector. The MBP version does not use optical fibers but you can bet those will be coming soon. There has been some confusing press stating that Thunderbolt will be exclusive to Macs for a year but I think that cannot be correct. It makes no sense for Intel to destroy its market for this exciting technology by limiting sales to a vendor who commands 5-10% of the non-tablet computer market. Accordingly, I expect that we will see aftermarket PCIe plug-in Light Peak cards for PCs and MacPros soon. It will be interesting to see how this works out but hopefully all those sockets on computers will disappear in favor on one, two or three Light Peak connectors. Light Peak supports serial connections (simply string your peripherals together end-to-end) and offers mainframe communication speeds to the PC market and I wouldn’t be making any investment in USB3 peripherals if I were you. USB3 is DOA.

No more Rosetta: Now here’s the bad news. Lion will not include Rosetta so PowerPC apps, like my Photoshop CS2, will no longer run. That’s a shame and I fail to see why Apple would delete this feature. Still, for the first time in ages, Apple has made Adobe happy given how many people will have to upgrade to the outrageously overpriced CS5.

The more troubling implication is for EyeOne Match which is the application used with the Eye One colorimeter to profile displays. Even though PPC hardware has been discontinued for years, x-rite has yet to update EyeOne Match to work on Intel machines; it needs Rosetta to work.

I have written to xrite and will publish their reply if I get one. Here’s what I wrote:

Gentlemen – I use your EyeOne colorimeter with your EyeOne Match software on my Macs for photo processing. I use v. 3.6.3 which is the current version of EyeOne Match, I believe. This application requires Rosetta to run in OS Snow Leopard as it is a PowerPC app and appears not to have been updated to run natively on Intel Macs. As you know PPC Macs have not been made for many years. EyeOne Match runs fine on my Macs using Rosetta.

However, the next version of Mac OS X, Lion, which will be introduced shortly, will no longer support Rosetta/PPC apps. So my question is:

“When can we expect an Intel version of Eye One Match which will work on the latest Macs running Lion?”

Not upgrading the Mac OS is not an option as all new Macs will come with Lion only; unless you upgrade your EyeOne Match software your device will cease to function on new Macs and your sales to Mac users will cease.

Thank you.

Until I get a positive response with a committed date from xrite I no longer recommend the Eye One for photographers and have updated my review to that effect. Indeed, the Mac user contemplating purchase of any xrite colorimeter should first address this issue and, if the software runs in Rosetta/PPC emulation mode only, buy something else.

xrite follow up: Correspondence with fellow photographer Roy Hammans has disclosed that others are onto this issue. It seems that Monaco Optix has the same problem and I wouldn’t be surprised if ColorMunki has it also – all three colorimeters are sold by xrite.

Meanwhile, assuming xrite is lazy/slow/dumb (which history suggests) it occurs to me that there is a workaround. The Mac user would keep a working installation of Snow Leopard in a separate partition on his boot drive and start from that, perform a profile update then simply copy the profiles created over to the Lion partition. Then reboot from Lion. Even easier, create a bootable version of Snow Leopard (with Rosetta) on an SDHC card or an inexpensive USB thumb drive, and install the EyeOne Rosetta software there. An 8gB drive should be ample as OS X uses under 5gB.

Your display profiles reside here on your Mac:

If it comes to this, as I suspect it will, then I will post a piece here explaining how to accomplish the workaround, allowing users to update to Lion and still retain the ability to use the EyeOne to profile their displays.

TurboTax: While not germane to photography, US users of TurboTax should also think before moving to Lion. Through and including tax year 2005, TurboTax for Macs was a PPC application and needs Rosetta to run. So if you need to access tax returns prepared using TurboTax for tax years 2005 or earlier on your Mac, make sure to keep a Mac running nothing later than Snow Leopard handy for that purpose.

A follow up.

HackPro builder FU Steve set forth how to build a high performance desktop computer running Snow Leopard for less than one third of the cost of a comparable MacPro here. His intent was to craft a cool running machine for reliable photo processing. That’s cool as in temperature not cool as in Apple Hype. The two are diametrically opposed concepts. In the event, his HackPro turned out to be exceptionally speedy – see his benchmarks at the end of this piece. I asked him for his thoughts on obsolescence with specific attention to the HackPro. Here they are.

* * * * *

It may seem premature to address the HackPro’s obsolescence, but I always like to think ahead.

In terms of life expectancy, the video card is one of the best there is – it’s now rebranded as the GT150 but that’s the same as the nVidia 9800GTX+. You can get versions with 1024mB but I don’t know how that would make any difference for Lightroom and Photoshop users. GPU development has hit a wall and the one I used should last quite a while.

The RAM is DDR2 800mHz. The mobo will support up to DDR2 1333mHz, so lots of room for upgrades if it makes sense and when the price falls. Meanwhile, 800mHz/DDR2 offers the optimal price/performance mix.

The CPU is the 2.83gHz Intel Core2 Quad Q9550 at $220. You can upgrade to the 3.0gHz for $340 – lots more for little more. Alternatively, you can crank up what you have to 3.4gHz (or more) and simply add a bigger cooler for $30 – there’s lots of room in the box for one and there’s a large community of users doing this reliably. I have not bothered with any overclocking tests as what I have is fast enough. Current CPU designs are peaking as the 45nM component separation is getting close to the wavelength of the electromagnetic spectrum, which limits further size reduction. Heat management will improve with the newer Nehalem CPU but it’s not an issue in the HackPro, only in laptops.

The motherboard uses the Intel 775 socket, meaning you cannot fit the latest Nehalem Intel CPU (i7 socket). The Nehalem’s advantage is better multi-threading but while Lightroom can run in 64-bit mode it does a poor job of using all four cores; until that’s fixed by Adobe the Core2 Quad will be far better than the software I’m asking it to run. If I get the craving for an i7 for some reason, the motherboard will have to be changed. $140 + CPU cost. Easy to do but makes no sense today for the applications I use. Even Apple’s Final Cut Pro for professional video editing and Photoshop CS4 are still only 32-bit applications, so software has a lot of catching up to do before today’s quad core CPU designs are over the hill.

The display is independent and you can use/spend what you want. The Dell 2209 I use may hold value well as it has no competition at its price and attracts users with specific needs – meaning photographers who cannot tolerate color shifts as the viewing angle changes. Its IPS panel is the best display technology there is and there are no signs of new revolutionary designs on the horizon.

The Snow Leopard OS seems very robust and as it’s an enhancement to Leopard and not a new design, you would expect that. That very fact tells you that the rate of improvement in Apple’s operating systems has slowed dramatically. There’s not a whole lot that needs improving. Subsequent releases seem to be minor bug fixes and when 10.6.2 comes out (imminent) you will be able to run the new Apple Magic Mouse with its touch sensitive surface if that’s your thing. There is no Magic Mouse driver in 10.6.1 though the newly introduced iMacs have it installed.

Blu-Ray will fail, in my opinion and my HackPro has none. Too costly, needs new, expensive gear to exploit fully (big screens, etc.) and introduced right into the teeth of a shot economy. Sales remain flat despite the failure of its only competitor HD DVD. Plus Blu-Ray’s huge file sizes with the US’s slow broadband invalidate the format for transmission. Still, I expect Apple to add it shortly (Yuppie and Joe Sixpack demand) and once the drivers become available you can simply install a Blu-Ray drive in the HackPro in one of the 5 1/2″ front bays (3 remain available). The cost is closing in on $100.

The HDDs are traditional 3.5″ SATA 7200 rpm with a 32mB cache, a technology that shows signs of peaking. There are 10,000 and 15,000 rpm designs available but they are smaller in capacity and run hot. I question their life expectancy. On the other hand, flash drives will come to the fore over the next few years and I expect we will all be using 1tB flash HDDs in a decade, costing under $100 and the size of a postage stamp. They will run cooler, though HDD heat is not of concern in the capacious Antec case. Meanwhile, their prime use is as a boot drive in 32mB or 64mB sizes at under $200, where they are affordable, but it’s hard to see the need for a fast boot if you never switch your machine off. I leave mine on all the time, arguing that thermal cycling from switching on and off is far more destructive to life expectancy than a permanently ‘on’ state. Think light bulbs.

Wireless 802/11n can be added for $50-125 but I see no pressing need for it in a desk top computer unless you cannot easily run a broadband cable to the case. I have no wiring issues so I did not bother with wireless. Not really an obsolescence issue.

Windows 7 has, as even members of obscure Amazonian pygmy tribes know, just been announced and is opening to favorable reviews from every magazine which derives advertising revenue from Microsoft. Time will tell if it is fast and robust (there’s zero basis for trusting MSFT on anything given the company’s record) but in the spirit of keeping an open mind, let’s assume it offers things you cannot live without. Well, it’s a moment’s work to partition the HDDs into two partitions, one with Snow Leopard, the other with Windows 7. You can then choose whether to boot from one or the other. Alternatively, you can use Apple’s Boot Camp to accomplish the same (one advantage of using Boot Camp may be the ability to see data across the partitions – Windows files from the Mac side and vice versa, but I have no idea if this works) or, smarter, use Parallels or VMWare ($50 or so + Windows 7 + applications) in your existing partition to load Windows in its own window without the need to reboot, if the performance drag is acceptable. I used Parallels on my dying iMac with Windows XP for a while and it works fine if not very quickly. Maybe, in the interest of keeping Windows as remote as possible from your safe OS X environment, it’s best to load it on a separate drive and boot from that.

Finally, resale value. The picture is very bright here. My cost, excluding peripherals, is $815, which gets me the case ($100), CPU ($220), GPU ($120), RAM ($100), motherboard ($130), DVD burner ($30), Card Reader ($15) and HDD ($100). A like configuration from Apple, Dell or HP runs $3-5,000 using the exact same parts. I can sell the machine as either an OS X or Windows box, or both, focusing on its top-of-the-line components. I should get a good price even three years hence, and have no need to sell my monitor and peripherals. Or if I upgrade piecemeal, I can simply sell the components for even better prices.

What about the greatest threat of all? Say Apple decides to make future Snow Leopard revisions run only on Macs? Well, they have a lamentable history of failure in this regard. Take the iPhone. Try as they might, the hacker community breaks each attempt within days of introduction. It’s a red rag to a set of very smart and dedicated bulls. And let’s say they succeed. Heck, I would be happy running the HackPro on Tiger, let alone Leopard or Snow Leopard. These upgrades really do very little for a working still photographer. Arguably the only value added by Leopard compared with its Tiger predecessor was the Time Machine backup utility which makes for seamless file backup. Other than that it’s a lot of fluff. Lightroom can run in 64-bit mode fine in Leopard and does not need Snow Leopard to do so.

But I don’t think Apple will do something so foolish. First, desktops are a falling part of their profit picture as Apple is rapidly becoming a cell phone company. It’s where the money is and in the iPhone they have a superb product with no real competition. Second, the Hackintosh adds value to Apple rather than taking it away. Most Hackintosh builders either could never afford a Mac or are simply making something not available from Apple – a reliable desktop with low entry and repair costs. Many Hackintosh builders are future Apple customers, so it’s foolish to write them off, and most – like me – still buy the OS where otherwise there would be no sale. And, in the grand scheme of things, sales lost to the Hackintosh are a rounding error to Apple. How many people can be bothered to a make the modest effort involved in building the best desktop for photographers on the planet, especially when uninformed comments on chat boards policed by Apple zealots consistently proclaim that the Hackintosh is junk? Still, I do love those fools as they just help my Apple stock position along!

Before I show you the comparative performance data from Geekbench, it’s worth adding a few words about the extraordinary degree of failsafe redundancy built into my HackPro. The following functions are duplicated so if one fails, I simply switch to the other and all have been tested:

• Dual BIOS on the motherboard
• BIOS level and application level CPU high temperature warning buzzers
• Dual video card outlet sockets
• Dual video card motherboard sockets
• Matched memory pairs allow the system to run with 4gB almost as well as with 8gB should some memory fail
• Dual case fans – if one fails the system temperature rises just 10F
• Dual boot drives – my 1tB internal drive has a matched one in the case which is fully bootable and is backed up daily. Further I run Time Machine on an external drive which is kept in a remote location.
• Finally – dual monitors – I bought two of the Dells!

I don’t recall seeing the word ‘redundancy’ in any Mac specs. Maybe you have.

Here are the data comparisons:

MacPro with 2.66gHz Core2 Quad Nehalem
and 4 gB RAM rated by Geekbench in 32-bit mode

FU Steve’s HackPro with 2.83gHz Core2 Quad Yorkfield
and 4gB RAM rated by Geekbench in 32-bit mode

By the way, the just introduced 27″ iMac (C2D) scores 4650 on Geekbench, making the HackPro 25% faster than Apple’s latest offering.

Finally, a few words on opportunity cost. Many comments on chat boards addressing the economics of constructing a Hackintosh wrongly attribute high opportunity cost to the process, arguing that time spent in research, procurement, construction and testing makes the whole thing uneconomical. This is not a correct understanding of opportunity cost. Time spent only has economic opportunity cost if it displaces time which could have been spent on activities providing a positive income stream. In the event, the Hackintosh builder is using time which would likely have been spent in such unproductive activities as watching sports or playing computer games or whatever. In that sense, the time invested in the Hackintosh is free and the true economic cost is purely that of the components used.

* * * * *

Thank you, FU Steve.

Only a fool would make long life claims for a computer but I think FU has constructed something with a decent life expectancy at very modest cost and with exceptionally low repair costs. Using the MacPro (an excellent machine) as a reference, the rate of change in its components has been positively glacial in the past couple of years, suggesting most of the technologies used are very much at the point of diminishing returns. The retail technology business is focusing much more on smartphones, handheld devices and small laptops. FU’s HackPro should last a while. The HackPro is the Elitist’s choice. The Macpro is for the snob.

Successful completion.

This concludes the piece on the HackPro built by a friend of the blog, the pseudonymous FU Steve. Part I appears here.

TP: FU, when we last spoke you were just embarking on assembly of your HackPro, whose goal is to perform like a MacPro with none of the reliability and repair issues common to poorly cooled iMacs, while offering substantial upgrade capabilities at modest cost. How did the assembly go?

FU: Please, ‘build’ not ‘assembly’. If you are into hacking, that’s the teenage vernacular, you know! It was just as I expected – easier than a Lego kit. The only tricky part was plugging in the four small front panel connectors to the mobo (that’s hacker talk for ‘motherboard’ if you must know). The space on the mobo for these is crowded out by the graphics card, so it’s easier to connect them before installing the graphics card. These connectors are for on/off, reset, and the power and HDD activity LEDs. They are the only connectors which are not keyed, meaning they can be inserted over the wrong mobo pins, meaning your computer will not work, so it’s an area repaying attention to detail. And those pins are delicate – the heavy handed have no place here.

TP: Any other hardware issues?

FU: One big snag – the first mobo shipped by Amazon was faulty – the CPU temperature sensor would report 99C when cold and would shut the machine down. I noticed one of the CPU fan pins was bent on receipt and suspect Amazon may have sent me a used board. The board is made by Foxconn in Taiwan and there’s no way they would allow bent pins to ship. (Foxconn, surprise, makes most of Apple’s boards). Anyway, I can’t grumble as Amazon had the replacement in my hands before the original was even shipped back.

It is striking to see how beautifully made all the components are. Toyota not GM, with none of the cost cutting, design compromise and overcrowding you get in the iMac. The Antec case is superb. Properly finished, and I have not one cut on my hands. I expected assembly to take 2 hours but had to add 30 minutes for the insanely poor instructions Intel provides for the correct installation of its CPU fan. Amazing, really. The only part made in the US – figures. I finally found Intel’s own video on YouTube and it can be seen here, and does what the miserable instruction book fails to do, which is to show how to properly clip the cooler to the CPU. Surely, proper CPU cooling is one of the most important aspects of any computer design?

The only tools I used were a Philips screwdriver and a pair of cutters to remove excess length from cable ties used to keep the wires away from fans inside the case.

I originally expected to defer installation of the DVD burner (I installed Snow Leopard from a small USB drive) and a Sony card reader (CF, SD, SDHC, you name it) until later, but Antec does such a fine job to make this simple that I installed both in the first pass. You screw small rails to the reader (which occupies one of the 3.5″ drive slots in the front behind the door) and the DVD burner, connect power and data cables then slide both in until they click. The internal HDDs are mounted similarly except that they are screwed to a plate using soft silicone bumpers for isolation of vibration. The Antec Sonata III case can accommodate up to four 3.5″ SATA drives. As I will be running two 1 tB Samsung drives, I spent an additional $15 on a second Antec TriCool case fan – the case comes with one installed – to cool the HDDs. After my iMac started to fry, just like yours, it seemed like a modest additional cost.

Interior of the HackPro

TP: You are running no fewer than five large fans? Is it noisy?

FU: Five, yes. CPU, GPU, power supply and two case monsters – 120mm in diameter (4.7″). Those things can move some air. I have the two case fans on the middle setting and, with the case closed and underneath my desk, the box is silent. Much quieter than the iMac with the fans turned up.

Now while my experience with computer gamers is that most couldn’t give a gnat much competition in the intelligence stakes, the one thing I have learned from that community is its focus on cooling. Many gamers over-clock their CPUs to make games run better and apply exotic cooling solutions.

For example, there is a large aftermarket in enhanced CPU coolers to fit the Intel 775 socket used by the Core2 Quad, and many are a drop-in replacement for the stock Intel cooler/fan, offering 10-20C more cooling for $20-50. I’m not over-clocking but it’s nice to know that should I ever get the urge, enhanced cooling is a simple upgrade.

It’s common to read of gamers running the 2.83gHz CPU (Intel model Q9550) I am using at 4.0 gHz without damage, owing to enhanced cooling solutions. That is a significant speed increase which may make sense for video processing, and it’s much cheaper than buying a natively faster CPU.

TP: How warm does it run?

FU: Once warmed up the CPU never exceeds 120F (49C) no matter what I am doing. For reference, the service limit of the Core2 Quad CPU is 160.5F (71.4C) so you have lots of headroom. I noted with alarm that my iMac’s CPU reported 163F when I was using Migration Utility to move all my applications and data over – I could smell the difference ….. Mercifully, it survived long enough to move everything over. As for the HDDs, they run close to room temperature, in no small part thanks to the huge adjacent fan drawing air over them. Best $15 I have ever spent – I would rather lose the CPU than my data!

TP: How was the software install?

FU: Piece of cake. Rather than using an SDHC card as all the web sites suggest, I loaded Snow Leopard and the requisite boot loader (SL is not tampered with in any way) on a self-powered USB drive. Much faster – SDHC is a very slow medium compared to a small hard disk. The boot loader takes the place of code on a chip in Macs and bypasses the traditional BIOS used by Windows when loading. On your first boot you still need to enter the BIOS to set it up and dictate the boot order of the various devices, all of which is explained on hacking sites via Google. On this first trip to the BIOS (by holding the ‘Delete-to-the-right’ key depressed during start-up until you see ‘Prepare to enter Setup…’ at the base of the display) you are telling the computer to boot from your external drive on which the OS resides.

I found that the easiest solution was to delete all boot drives in the BIOS (‘Advanced BIOS Features’ screen) and simply tell the system to boot from an attached USB drive first (my OS and boot loader source), and then from the internal drive.

Thereafter you never need to look at the BIOS screens again which is just as well, given how ugly they are.

TP: How did you get your applicatons and data over to the HackPro?

FU: Once I had SL running I migrated all the apps and data from my failing iMac using Apple’s Migration Utility. You can do this by connecting your Mac to the HackPro using an ethernet cable or by simply connecting your bootable back-up drive to the HackPro using Firewire – USB will not work. Migration Utility will ‘see’ another Mac in both instances and you just need to tell it to move all your user settings, applications and data over. There’s no need to reload applications or to reinput serial numbers using this approach. In a couple of days I’ll remove the HDD from my iMac and install it in the Antec case where it will become a back-up drive.

If all you have is USB use Time Machine to create a backup then restore from it.

TP: OK, so this is where the rubber meets the road. Tell us about comparative performance.

FU: Easy. The best approach is with objective measurements. I always suspect the subjective approach in these things – when I read it ‘…. feels faster ….’ I ask myself what part of himself the fool writing this was feeling and turn the page. Remember, buyers tend to defend what they bought. It’s human nature.

I ran two sets of tests to get objective data. Geekbench, which focuses on the CPU and Xbench which looks at GPU-intensive tasks. These metrics give you a rough idea of relative speed between computers. Of course neither addresses broadband speed which is increasingly the slowest part.

For purposes of comparison, my iMac has a 2.16gHz C2D CPU, the nVidia 7600 GPU with 256mB of RAM, and 3gB of 667 mHz DDR RAM and is running Leopard 10.5.7.

The HackPro has a 2.83gHz Core2 Quad CPU, the nVidia 9800GTX+ GPU with 512mB of RAM, and 4 or 8gB of 800 mHz DDR2 RAM and is running Snow Leopard 10.6.1. (I ran the tests with first 4gB then 8gB of RAM in the HackPro to see if the added RAM made any difference). These are all in 32-bit mode as I do not have 64-bit versions of the applications plus 32-bit under Snow Leopard is a fair comparison to 32-bit with the iMac’s Leopard OS. Expect 64-bit to be even better on the HackPro.

Geekbench (CPU):

HackPro – 4gB RAM: 6119 (215% of iMac)
HackPro – 8gB RAM: 6250 (219%)
iMac – 3gB max. usable RAM: 2848

Xbench – Quartz graphics:

HackPro – 4gB RAM: 254 (172%)
HackPro – 8gB RAM: 261 (176%)
iMac – 3gB max. usable RAM: 148

These readings were made with the motherboard RAM voltage set to the default of 1.8v. Adjusting it to 2.1v, the manufacturer’s recommended setting, with 8gB returns Geekbench of 6211 and xBench of 259 – both worse – so it makes sense to stay with the lower, conservative, default setting.

If you want to see the readings from Geekbench for the current most comparable MacPro, the four core 2.66gHz, they can be found here. As you can see, the HackPro is some 12% faster!

Finally, for the jerk who wrote you (Jerk’s comment not published. Ed.) that this machine is seriously dated, here are video processing scores generated using Cinebench. These compare an 8-core 2008 MacPro with the 4-core HackPro, and test how long it takes to render a graphic image in various circumstances:

Single CPU core:

MacPro: 3233
HackPro: 3229 (3281 with 10.6.4)

Multi CPU core:

MacPro: 18811
HackPro: 10568 (10728 with 10.6.4)

Open GL rendering:

MacPro: 5995
HackPro: 6184 (6428 with 10.6.4)

Seriously dated, my rear. But like you said when you called me with that comment, Thomas, for every person who gets off his duff and does something, there are a hundred jerks more than happy to sit on their ample behinds. We call them losers, where I come from.

(To see the full reports which FU Steve made available to me, click the links above. Ed.)

The data speak louder than words while also suggesting that much over 4gB of RAM does’t improve theoretical performance. (In practice, more RAM does allow more applications to be open simultaneously without slowing down performance). The real world feel (ooops!) is that of a snappier machine – not dramatically faster but noticeably so. As for legacy G3/4/5 PPC applications like Photoshop CS2, they run fine so long as you remember to click the ‘Customize’ button when installing and checking the ‘Rosetta’ box – why Apple left this unchecked by default beats me. It will be the cause of endless frustration for many users unaware of it.

TP: How about performance with Lightroom, an issue of particular interest to my readers?

FU: I’m using LR 2.5 and the default installation is 32-bit. There didn’t appear to be that much difference, frankly. Even though I generate 1:1 previews when importing the RAW files form my Pentax DSLRs I would still get the “Generating larger preview” message for a second or two on many images (it’s not consistent) when going from thumbnail to loupe mode. Then I closed LR, highlighted it in Finder, hit Command-I (the letter after H, not the number 1), clicked on ‘Get Info’ and unchecked the ‘Open in 32-bit mode’ box.

Restarting LR I could briefly see the words ’64-bit’ on the splash screen at start-up and the difference was night-and-day compared to 32-bit. No matter how fast I page through my images in full screen loupe mode I never get any delay message. That’s the awesome nVidia 9800GTX+ video card doing its magic, compared to the dated (and overheated) nVidia 7600 card in my iMac. Right there I knew I had made the right decision in building the HackPro. The difference is far more striking than suggested by the statistics, above.

For the more technical among your readers, the HackPro fully implements Apple’s Quartz Extreme hardware acceleration technology to render images faster. To confirm you are running an application in 64-bit mode just fire up Utilities->Application Monitor and you can find out.

TP: How about sound?

FU: As configured the HackPro has none, but the motherboard has all the outlets you need. I bought a pair of Logitech LS-11 powered speakers for all of $20 and they have excellent sound, far superior to the dorky downward facing ones in the iMac. You connect the power and plug in the speaker cord to the green receptacle on the mobo. If you listen to music in iTunes, you can tailor the speakers’ response using Window->Equalizer in iTunes and get a nice smooth response with these. Just don’t expect massive bass with small speakers. And do avoid USB-powered speakers – USB cannot provide much current so your sound output will be limited.

TP: So what’s the real price comparison?

FU: It’s pretty shocking really. Here’s the current 4-core MacPro:

It’s a very close feature comparison to the HackPro. Both have two 1tB drives, the MacPro has a slower clock speed but superior performance quad core CPU for no net difference, and the ghastly 24″ Mac glossy screen. As the base nVidia GT120 (a rebranded 9500 to catch the suckers) is significantly inferior to the 9800GTX+ in the HackPro, I have priced the MacPro with the comparable ATI Radeon 4870. Further, the MacPro needs the AppleCare rip-off warranty to get insurance coverage, whereas all the HackPro’s parts, have warranties of 3-5 years or more at no extra cost. Apple charges you another $249 for that – greedy, greedy, greedy.

The comparable price for the HackPro with the marginally smaller – but matte – Dell 2209WA 22″ IPS display – is $1,368. That’s $3,129, or 70%, less. Buy AAPL stock with that sort of margin, not their compromised hardware.

TP: Any final thoughts?

FU: I recommend this to anyone with a bit of patience looking to create a state-of-the-art Lightroom (or Aperture) machine – anything more exotic is a waste of money for still photographers, though it may make sense for video processing. The result is easily upgraded as technologies improve (meaning as software gets ever more bloated), will run as cool as you want and divorces the monitor from the computer’s circuitry, meaning less heat in the box and a far cheaper repair or upgrade cycle – no need to throw out the display like you do with a fried iMac. Heat and life are inversely proportional to one another which, Thomas, I know will be hard for you to accept given your English upbringing.

About FU’s HackPro

Most importantly, you are removed from the tyranny of the ‘closed box’ philosophy adopted by Apple, a cleverly contrived approach intended to keep you buying overpriced, mediocre performing hardware every two years or so. Even if your iMac survives heat issues, it cannot be upgraded absent the most complex and extraordinary efforts. For all of Apple’s spin about how ‘green’ it is, the iMac is an environmental abomination – when it goes wrong, you have to throw out the whole thing. When your PC or HackPro blows, you replace a faulty card.

Best of all, when something does fail, the most expensive part in the box costs $220 (the CPU) with nothing else over $125 or so, and a replacement can be had at your doorstep in a day or two rather than having your Mac moldering at the local Apple store. And if you read of all the botched repairs of iMacs which have fried, well, life’s just too short to have to put up with Apple’s poor hardware and service. DIY is so fast and simple, there’s no rational alternative.

And it bears repeating that assembly of your own computer is substantially easier than making a Lego toy** or connecting the parts in a piece of home exercise gear, not to mention a lot more fun. Plus, unlike in either of those two fields of endeavor, you are left with $2,000 or more burning a hole in your pocket – had you elected a similarly capable MacPro.

TP: Reality check time, FU. You know, you could have bought a 2.93 gHz iMac with a 24″ screen for $1,600 – just a little more than you paid.

FU: True. And I would be replacing it two years hence when it was dead.

The iMac Just Fries. The HackPro Just Flies.

“Thou shalt not run Apple’s OS on non-Apple branded hardware”. Easily fixed.

** Postscript: “…. easier than a Lego toy”? FU Steve has kindly provided me with a slide show for readers showing the whole process and you can view it by clicking here. Thank you, FU Steve.

Cooling update – November, 2009:

FU Steve sent along some details of an update he made to CPU cooling in his HackPro. Dissatisfied with the cooling from the stock Intel cooler which simply clips into the motherboard from above, offering a mediocre contact force between cooler and CPU case, he removed the motherboard (!) and fitted a Coolermaster 212 Plus bolt-through design. This allows for proper clamping force between the cooler and case and the whole thing comes with a 120mm fan (a 4 pin variable speed like the Intel one, so that fan speed varies with CPU case temperature) for the princely sum of $30, including thermal paste.

Coolermaster 212 Plus in place, fan not yet fitted. Note the huge cooling area. The top of the fins just clears the Antec Sonata III case used.

FU told me the fan is sheer hell to install and can only be installed once the cooling fin tower is in place, as the clamping screws are not accessible with the fan in place.

Coolermaster 120mm variable speed fan in place. The red circle denotes the proper installation point for the fan clips.

Talk is cheap. Data tell the story. Take a look at the large and instantaneous drop in CPU temperatures once the fan is up an running:

Before and after. A 27-30F temperature drop for the CPU internals.

The case temperature is 25F lower than the internal temperatures shown in the graph, meaning that the warmest core – #1 – is actually running at a case temperature of 90F (32C), compared with the 160.5F (71.4C) maximum case temperature specified by Intel. Now that’s headroom!

Thanks, FU. That is very cool! Nice to see how flexible the HackPro is when it comes to enhancements.