cheapest solution mac to do resolve

i realize i can edit on a 5 year mac book but i can't use resolve at all. what the cheapest solution i could upgrade to and use resolve lite 10? 11 seems not work on anything. but 10 is temperamental. should i buy a macbook, imac, etc.. mac mini even! which would you choose.

There is no cheap solution when it comes to mac. You should get a fast hard drive (ssd) and good storage for your media (not usb 2, not 5400rpm drives). The power of resolve comes from GFX cards. Apple are generally behind in putting very powerful GFX cards in their machines and only the most expensive have a discreet graphics card, the rest have the built in intel Iris stuff which will not help you out much at all.

If it has to be cheap build a desktop PC, you will pay way way less than a mac laptop but you will get a real video card and you can make it a good one (get two, have one for the GUI and one for resolve).

I have the latest and best retina laptop (with NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M, which is outdated but the best you can get from apple in a laptop), it does an OK job of 1080i footage in resolve, but it is disappointing compared to a desktop PC that costs half the price.

Save up some more money, and get computer with a very good graphics card (>2gb memory)

Build a hackintosh?
http://www.adamroberts.net/blog/davinci ... sh-part-1/

Also rotation speed of drives is not that important for video work. It's important for fast access to lots of file (seeking across the drive). The data rate is pretty much the same be it 4200/5400/7200/etc. Building a RAID array will increase the data rate.

Hackintosh seems to be the best solution, any stability issues with that? And is there a place to got buy custom machines?

And when I meant cheapest solution I meant is there Mac out if the box ready on their site? I'm assuming no. Price isn't a huge issue I just don't want to sink a lot of money into so ething and it not work, if you get what I mean.

Well the Mac Pro with the Dual D700 GPUs is more than capable of running Resolve.

The iMac 5K will run Resolve but the huge screen is using up most of the GPU power leaving very little for Resolve so processing will be slower.

The non 5K iMac with the upgraded NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M with 4GB of GDDR5 memory would probably be a better option.

I built my Hackintosh, linked to above, because the Mac Pro was still no where to be seen and the iMacs were not a very viable option. It's been stable and earned its keep. I can grade 4K RAM footage for the BMPC4K with relative ease.

Today there are better GPU options and as described in my blog you could also save money if you got a lower lever motherboard. I wanted Thunderbolt so that added around £130 to the build.

thanks adam for your help! i was looking at the lenovo's what if i made this set up and added IOS to it? http://imgur.com/o4veizD

adamroberts Thanks for posting that. What a great resource.


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I will second Adam Roberts' recommendation for a hackintosh. I followed his tut when building mine a year ago, works great. I recommend building your own based on online guides, rather than buying a pre-built one. It's important to understand the hardware in this kind of stuff.

As an alternative, you could always buy an old Mac Pro and put some nice video cards in it. I run an early 2009 mac pro (which I think is as old as you can go because earlier macs don't support nicer video cards), with 2 GTX 690's in the first 2 slots. The whole rig would probably cost around $1200 from ebay and it's a real Mac.

Though I will say that my next rig will most likely be a hackintosh.