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.

With thanks to FU Steve.

Having earlier explained how he hacked an MSI Wind netbook for portable computing (“The netbook Apple will not make”), the pseudonymous FU Steve touched base with me last week to mention that his iMac 24″ – a late-2006 white model, like mine – was beginning to show screen artifacts which indicate imminent failure of the graphics card. I mentioned that Apple wanted $900 to repair mine, a ridiculous sum, and that put FU over the top. He decided to build a Hackintosh. More specifically a machine to equal the performance of the ridiculously overpriced MacPro, naming his ‘build’ the HackPro.

Here are extracts of the interview I held with him.

TP: I understand you are getting all the parts for your HackPro. Could you share the details with my readers?

FU: Glad to. By the way the machine will run Snow Leopard and because all the components can be shipped overnight and come with a three year warranty, if something goes wrong I can simply replace a faulty part in 24 hours, rather than losing my machine to Apple for weeks. The single costliest component is the CPU at $220.

My component list excludes a monitor but includes a keyboard, mouse and hard drive, but if you have these already, the cost obviously drops. I’m including the long form descriptions below so that there is absolutely no question about the parts used.

• EVGA GeForce 9800 GTX+ Video Card – 512MB GDDR3, PCI Express 2.0, SLI Ready, (Dual Link) Dual DVI, HDTV
• Antec Sonata III 500 Quiet Super Mini Tower ATX Case (Black)
• Antec TriCool 120 3-speed fan for HDD cooling
• Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 Quad-Core Processor, 2.83 GHz, 12M L2 Cache, 1333MHz FSB, LGA775
• Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P LGA 775 Intel P45 ATX Intel Motherboard
• Sony AD-7240S-0B Optiarc DVDRW Drive – DVD+R 24X, DVD-R 24X, DVD+RW 8X, DVD-RW 6X, DVD-RAM 12X, SATA
• Sony Multi-Card Reader/Writer MRW620-U1
• 8gB (4 x 2gB) Patriot Extreme Performance Viper Series 4 GB PC2-6400 DDR2-800 Dual Channel Desktop Memory Kit nVidia EPP Certified – PVS28G6400ELK
• IOGear USB 2.0 Bluetooth Micro Adapter GBU421
• 1.0TB Samsung Spinpoint F3 7200RPM 32MB Cache SATA II HD
• Apple keyboard and mouse – both wireless
• Arctic Silver thermal paste

All told that lot ran me $930 without a monitor. The only tools you need are a Philips screwdriver and a modicum of grey matter. Between the Antec case and the motherboard you have all the connecting cables you need. You could do without the Sony Card Reader if you already have a card reader, but installing it in the box cuts clutter and the cost is only $18. Likewise, you don’t need 8gB of RAM (though Snow Leopard can use all of it) as the speed increase in Lightroom is some 8-12% compared to using 4gB, but RAM is now getting so inexpensive, especially if you watch out for rebate deals, that it’s not a lot more if you use 8gB. There is faster (and costlier) DDR3 memory available, but you trade speed for stability. Not good. It never does to be at the bleeding edge of technology if you are paying for hardware with your own money.

If you prefer to use a wired keyboard and mouse you can delete the IOGear Bluetooth adapter ($18), but may need to add USB A-to-A extension cables if your monitor does not have any USB sockets, as the Antec case will likely make its home below your work desk. That can be a bit of a stretch. Either way, you will need to borrow an USB wired keyboard and mouse for the setup. Your system will be unable to recognize bluetooth wireless devices until …. you have accessed the system, and you cannot access the system without a keyboard! It’s a Catch22.

If you feel spendy, you can upgrade the CPU to a 3.0gHz (Q9650) Intel Core2 Quad for $50 more, but that seems a lot to pay for so modest a speed increase – 23% more for a 6% speed bump doesn’t solve, in my book.

TP: Do you have preferred vendors?

FU: (Laughing). Yes. Anyone who is cheap and charges me no sales tax! I used Amazon and Tigerdirect.com. Both are easy to deal with in the event a faulty component needs to be replaced. Those residing outside CA may prefer Newegg.com which charges sales tax to CA residents.

TP: But the MacPro uses the Intel Xeon ‘Nehalem’ CPU (i7 socket) with 8 cores whereas you are using the older 4 core ‘Yorkfield’ (LGA775 socket)?

FU: Yes. The key advantage of the 8 core in the MacPro is faster video processing. My primary use is with Lightroom and Photoshop – I am a still photographer – so the added cost of the 8 core makes no sense as these applications do not take advantage of it.

TP: Don’t you have to be an engineer to build this thing?

FU: (Laughing). You have to be kidding me! A 12 year old could put this together – it’s easier than Lego. All the connectors are keyed so you cannot get it wrong. You install the motherboard in the case which already has a power supply installed by the manufacturer, plug the memory and graphics card into the motherboard, connect the power supply, graphics card, HDD and dvd burner cables to the motherboard and plug in the fans. There are no fewer than four fans, by the way – GPU, CPU, power supply and case. And the case one is no less than 4.5″ in diameter – quite a change from the toy ones in the iMac. You can add a fifth to cool the HDD for all of $15 if you use several hard drives – the case will accommodate four HDDs. And the whole thing is dead quiet. And did I mention the removable, washable air filter?

TP: Ok, so the assembly is easy. How about the software part?

FU: Just Google for the fix. It’s super easy and the installation allows fully automated system updates. I bought my Snow Leopard update disk from Apple for $29 and that’s what I used.

TP: Legality?

FU: Look, Apple has stolen from me for years. Every single piece of Apple hardware I have owned has broken after two or three years and proved impossible or uneconomical to fix. How on earth can Apple’s false advertising (“It Just works”) be any more legal than what I am doing? That should read “It Just Breaks”. And now my iPhone consistently drops calls – in San Francisco of all places – because Apple’s and AT&T’s greed has resulted in so many sales that AT&T’s systems are simply overloaded.

Apple maintains that its OS can only be run on Apple branded hardware but that has yet to be tested in the courts. Further, the fact that Apple has not gone after the hacker community suggests they have concerns that they might not legally prevail. And I paid them for their software, many times over, if you look at all the hardware failures I have suffered over the years.

No, given that the little guy like me has no possible redress against Apple’s consumer fraud, it’s more than a little ‘holier than thou’ to argue the legality case here.

TP: So what’s the performance like?

FU: No idea as I haven’t assembled everything yet. But I can give you some meaningful predictions. Geekbench on my iMac (2.16gHz, ATI7300, 3gB RAM) reports a reading of 2850 and I expect that the HackPro will come in at 6000 or so, so roughly twice as fast on CPU intensive tasks like converting RAW files. On video I would expect a similar performance increase as the nVidia 9800 GTX+ card I’m using is a rebadged GT150. The current HackPro uses the GT120 which is a rebadged, and more modest, 9500GT. More Apple and nVidia spin. So the HackPro will be better as regards graphics capability. The card has dual DVI outputs, by the way, meaning it can drive two regular 24″ or smaller monitors or one 30″ dual-DVI display at full 2560 x 1600 definition.

I could overclock the CPU and GPU and get even more performance, but I’m conservative by nature and prefer to trade speed for reliability.

TP: And the case?

FU: Can you say elegant? No boy racer looks or neon lights here:

Antec Sonata III case

Antec has been making high quality cases for years and this one is as good as they get. HDDs slide in on rails and there are several externally accessible bays behind the top door for things like DVD burners, card readers, etc.

TP: Thanks, FU. When can we expect results?

FU: Give me a couple of weeks or so. One final thought. For Windows users, this machine will run Windows with no hacking, and will run it faster than all but the costliest gaming machines.

The results can be seen in Part II here.