In addition to the Intel chips that Apple uses, companies like AMD make clone processors that can also work. There are a lot of motherboards to choose from, and they come in different sizes, with different numbers of ports and options.
There’s the motherboard, which holds the CPU, RAM, video card, interfaces, and all the other circuitry that is required to make the thing go. Here’s what I did.Ī computer is made up of a few key components. While finding the right combination of parts can take some time, and getting the OS configured might be tricky, the result can be a machine that is far less expensive than an equivalent Apple offering, and that includes many configuration options that Apple doesn’t provide. However, you can hack the OS to install new drivers, and fashion an OS that will work on a fairly vast array of stock parts. Consequently, OS X includes a very small set of drivers, meaning you can’t just stick an OS X disk in any Windows machine and get it to work.
However, there are many different variations of all of these components, and the Mac OS is designed to work with very specific ones. This means that you can take the same motherboards, drives, videocards and other interfaces, assemble them into a computer, and run the Mac OS on it. With the switch from PowerPC processors to Intel processors, Macs now run on the same hardware that Windows machines do. The result? A machine with Mac-Pro like performance that crushes all the other Macs in my house, and cost only about $1000. As his machine came together, and he sent me some benchmarks, I decided that this was the upgrade path that I would choose. A friend mentioned that he was going to build a Hackintosh. After a few recent jobs, including a computationally-intensive video gig, I started to wonder if it wasn’t time to think about upgrading to a faster machine.
Since the tower is connected to a large monitor, it’s what I use as my primary image editing workstation. I have a few Macs that I use for my various jobs, but the main machines that I use are a MacBook Pro, and a Dual 2.7 GHz G5 tower.