When you have ableton set to 128 sample buffer size to ensure that vocals and midi come in with low latency, it really can eat at the cpu. Now the mac mini is fast, but not fast enough for my music set up.
I used to use a receptor live (for people who know don't know, it's like a music pc in a rack but it's big and expensive for what it is) So I decided to use my mac mini for the same purpose instead and never looked back. This thing has saved my life for live music performances I need to because it's just so damn small and reliable. Just before summer I bought a 2GHz i7 quad-core mac mini and put 16 gigs of ram into it, with 2 big internal hard drives inside.
Hey hadgi I'm just curious as to what music software you primarily use? I have been debating on building a hackintosh purely for speed issues. If not, I may require the help of computer guru's on here lol So hopefully next week when the parts arrive, I shall be ok. Then it's on to programming it all to work right. But the sites I got the info from all have tutorials and such, so I think I'll manage to get it all connected together without a problem.
Now lord knows I still have no idea how to put this all together.
Oh yeah I got some computer tools and grounding straps and whatnot too! Heard that's good practice. Mini PCI-E to PCI-E Wireless Card w/ 3 Antennas () - $4.81Īpple Airport Extreme Card BCM94322MC () - $43.99 (for airport extreme) LG WH12LS30 12X SATA BLU-RAY BURNER () - $81.95Ĭorsair Carbide Series 400R Mid Tower Gaming Computer Case () - $89.99Īntec CP-850 850 Watt CPX SLI CrossFire 80 () - $88.06 SAPPHIRE AMD Radeon HD 6870 1GB GDDR5 () - $169.99
Western Digital Caviar Black 1 TB SATA III 7200 RPM 64 MB Cache () - $119.17Ĭorsair Vengeance Blue 16 GB DDR3 SDRAM Dual Channel Memory Kit () - $96.99 OCZ 120GB Vertex 3 SATA 6Gb/s 2.5-Inch Performance Solid State Drive (SSD) () - $109.99 Gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD Intel Z68 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard () - $134.99 Total cost came to around $1300-ish for the setup below, through Amazon (order 1-2 parts used, like power supply and case):
The idea was for me to build a machine that was more than capable of handling video rendering and effect processing along with music production, because although a lesser computer would have been able to handle Ableton and plugs fine enough, I am getting really into video production alongside music so I wanted a machine that would last me some years with good power.Īlready own 2 monitors, keyboard, mouse, printer, bluetooth dongle, 2 TB external hard drive, so I didn't need to account for those. Looked into a couple sites, mainly tonymacx86 () and nofilmschool (), and sorted out the parts I was going to get and what to keep in mind. So, after much deliberation, and impatience in waiting for more funds to waste on a stupid apple logo, I decided to go ahead and purchase all the parts necessary for a machine I could hack OS X onto. Got some good info from ezelkow, mostapha, and others for places to look, so thanks to you guys.
Was going to post this in the other hackintosh thread I started, but I thought it'd be good to start a new thread in case anyone else thinking about a hackintosh wanted a good look at a possible build/paths/tips/shortcomings.