Do you want budget Hackintosh for 4K video editing?
Built from brand new components and ready for massive future upgrades?
Then this video is the right for you.
Hi, I’m Teresa from morgonaut.cloud and I help people to save money on their Hackintosh
builds, I help them simply to build a perfect Hackintosh.
If you are new here, then please click that subscribe button and hit the bell next to
it, so you won’t miss any of my future videos.
The people who are in touch with me already for some time knows, I build hackintoshes
of all categories, from ultra cheap based on old components up to monster brand new
top specs builds, like now my last build as this Intel Core i9-9900k Hackintosh monster.
But I’m getting lot of comments about how to build really affordable Hackintosh for
4K video editing, which users can easily upgrade in the future even to the mentioned i9-9900k.
So I decided to build such a cheap Hackintosh based on brand new components just for purpose
of this video, but than I felt in love with it and now I use this Hackintosh primarily
for all my video recordings.
So now let’s jump straight into the specs and what components I chose and recommend.
I chose the Asus Prime Z370-A motherboard, because it is by my opinion one of the most
compatible mainboards for any Hackintosh build.
And it even supports Thunderbolt 3.
You can expand RAM up to 64 GB and CPU support goes up to Intel Core i9-9900k.
So you are absolutely not limited by this board in any aspect and the same board you
can reuse for your next upgrade to a monster Hackintosh sometime in future.
For CPU I chose the Intel Core i3-8350k, which is the cheapest easy overclockable CPU with
4 cores and high frequency and Intel HD 630 integrated GPU which will help with encoding
acceleration using Intel QuickSync technology.
Now I can hear you - Core i3 CPU for video editing?
Are you kidding?
So wait till I show you it’s real life performance later in this video.
What surprised me, was a fact, this Core i3 CPU has about 60% of performance of my Intel
Core i7-8700k, but for just about one third of the price.
So I started to use this machine also for all my video encodings.
Yes, again you can hear right, i3 CPU for video encoding.
Am I a looser?
So those are the most important parts.
For RAM I chose just two 4GB sticks of some cheap 2800MHz memory so in total 8 GB of RAM,
and yes I can hear you again - whaaaat??
Only 8 gigs of RAM for 4k Video editing?
As I said - wait :) Yes, you’re right, it is really recommended to have at least 16
GB of RAM for video editing, in my main production machine I have 64 GB of RAM, but we are talking
now about BUDGET 4K video editing Hackintosh and this little baby can handle it even with
only the 8 GB with ease.
And finally for storage I chose very affordable Samsung 970 Evo 250 GB NVMe M.2 drive.
And I forgot to mention GPU - I chose again very affordable Sapphire AMD RX 580 8GB Nitro+ version
which is 100% compatible with macOS and is running great in the latest macOS Mojave.
BTW if you want to build also similar system, just look at this video description, there
you can see links to all components I used.
And because I always try to make Hackintosh easily available to all people, even absolute
beginners without any knowledge how to build a Hackintosh, in this video description you
can also find link to already prepared and tweaked EFI Clover folder, so all you need to do
is to just follow my tutorial (link is again under this video), install macOS
on your disk and then just copy my whole prepared EFI folder into it’s EFI partition.
That’s all.
You can have your own perfect Hackintosh up and running in just an hour.
First I will show you some synthetic benchmarks and then I will show you the point of this video
how it performs in 4K video editing and some conclusion.
So, synthetics benchmarks.
First let’s have a look at About This Mac.
Latest macOS Mojave, 4 GHz Intel Core i3, 8 GB of RAM and RX 580 GPU.
Onboard audio is fully working, as well the Intel Ethernet, RX 580 Metal supported
Samsung 970 EVO NVMe M.2 disk drive, all USB ports correctly mapped and working on advertised speeds.
So let’s run now the Geekbench benchmark.
5461 single core performance and 17090 multi-core performance.
Let’s check now the GPU compute benchmark in OpenCL.
143080 points OpenCL score.
Let’s check the Metal performance now.
142252 Metal score.
Now let’s go to Cinebench benchmark CPU and GPU.
668 points is not so impressive,
but the strength of this CPU is somewhere else then 3D rendering, you’ll see that
later in this video.
Let’s check now the OpenGL benchmark.
Quite 125 fps, that’s very good.
So I enabled back all my monitoring utilities, which I disabled to not influence the benchmarks.
Intel Speedstep working, so power management is working OK, also sleep and wake is OK.
All sensors and monitoring tools completely working.
Also the same for GPU power management.
So let’s open the DaVinci Resolve.
I prepared some 4K test project based on RED files, which are converted from their 6-8k
resolution to 4k.
So when you look here, all files are exact 4K footage and they are in 4K timeline.
All clips have some colour correction applied and added a LUT and some of them have few
more nodes with additional corrections.
So, scrubbing in timeline is absolutely fluid with not a single slowdown.
You can look at the GPU usage and also check the CPU usage at the same time.
Absolutely no dropped frames.
Realtime playback exactly at 24 fps, that means realtime.
CPU usage around 44%.
So let’s render it out.
Most of you will publish to YouTube, so I choose YouTube and H.264.
And now, that’s interesting.
As you can see the CPU usage and the GPU usage are at it’s maximum, that means we are fully
utilising both at the same time, so there is no bottleneck in the system.
Rendering is twice as fast as real time playback.
So this build is what I would called a perfectly balanced system.
So let’s try export it into ProRes 422 HQ
and again, same scenario, absolutely maxed
out every portion of this build.
CPU temperature stays in high fifties even with the cheap air cooler.
I absolutely love this build.
Nice performance for cheap, and also the low power consumption is a very nice benefit.
Now back to what I mean by the “perfectly balanced system”.
Absolutely does not matter if you have top spec high end CPU, high end GPU, but poor disk.
The same in reverse, it’s pointless to have the best GPU but the rest not on par.
The key is BALANCE.
The whole system must be balanced so any of it’s components is not a bottleneck.
So as you could see, none of the components in this build was a bottleneck.
Better GPU with this CPU would not help in any way and also better CPU with this GPU
would not help too.
This is what I call perfectly balanced budget 4K video editing Hackintosh.
So again, just a reminder, links to all components used in this Hackintosh and also already prepared
and tweaked EFI Clover folder configuration you can find now in this video description.
So as you could see you absolutely don’t need to spent thousands of Dollars on a Hackintosh,
to be able to edit and render 4K videos, even with a low budget, you can go and buy brand
new components and build of it a perfect Hackintosh for 4K video editing.
And you can easily upgrade it in future.
So I hope you’ve found in my todays video some new inspiration, if so please click on
the Like button below, share my videos anywhere you can, so more people can benefit from it.
Subscribe to my channel and hit the bell next to it, so you won’t miss any of my future videos.
And don’t forget I don’t have only one, single video, I’ve done lot of useful videos
and tutorials already, so watch them too before asking.
You can also join my Hackintosh and Macintosh groups on Facebook, Reddit or my website,
links are again now in this video description.
So that’s all for today, thank you for watching and see you next time my Hackintosh friends.