My Workflow 2023 - Hackintosh updated

Hello dear forum members,

I want to share my current workflow with you to give back something to the community since I often find answers to my problems here.

So just to explain a bit what I'm doing and what my needs in terms of hardware are. I work a lot as a camera man and do editing and color grading in Resolve. A lot of my work is documentary or at least involves many hours of footage that are being produced and have to be copied, stored and backed up. So I decided to film with a Sony A7S 3 and use H.264 422 codecs for the whole process. For example this year I filmed 3 month in Manila and the total amount of data produced was 1,5 TB. In ProRes HQ it would be more like 15TB and that would have been a pain to backup and also quite expensive. Working in H.264 does require a decent editing computer though. I own a MacBook M2 MAX with 32GB RAM which works quite well specially for editing since it has H.264 acceleration. When it comes to grading it still doesn't have as much power as a machine with a decent GPU so I decided to upgrade my Hackintosh I still had running a i9 9900K and a Radeon IIV and was hoping to have a better machine then the M2 MAX at home.

Here is the current setup I'm using:

Computer:

CPU: 13900KF
GPU: Radeon RX 6900XT
RAM: 64 GB 5600MHZ DDR5
SSD: for OS 2TB for cache 1TB both M.2
RAID: internal RAID 5 with highpoint controller 24TB
IO card: Blackmagic Intensity Pro 4k

peripherals :

control panel: Blackmagic micro panel
Monitor GUI: LG 32UN880-B ( Cheap and hardware calibration )
monitor scopes: Arzopa 15inch portable monitor ( I use it when I travel as second screen and at home for scopes)
Monitor Viewer: LG C2 42 INCH - Calibrated with a Display1 probe and Calman for LG ( absolutely amazing image quality and a Delta average of 0,5% )

With this setup I'm very happy and it work flawless for me. The Hackintosh upgrade was very much worth it and in terms of RAW performance it outperforms even a Mac Studio ultra M2. I can't compare it because I don't have one but it's much faster than my M2 MAX and feels much more snappy in every task.

Here are some numbers in tests I did:

CPU and GPU:
13900KF and 6900XT

Screenshot 2023-10-07 at 14.42.57.png (821.86 KiB) Viewed 8378 times

Cinebench.jpg (317.36 KiB) Viewed 8378 times

Disk Speeds:

OS SSD Samsung 990 Pro
Cache SSD Sabrent Rocket 1TB:
RAID 24TB Highpoint

Disk.jpg (262.96 KiB) Viewed 8378 times

That's the basic setup I'm using. I f you have any suggestion or like to share your setup I'm happy.

Best
Ben

If you want to compare with a maxed out Mac Studio M2 Ultra I can share my DR benchmark with you.
Drop me a PM, I'd be curious too.

If you want to compare with a maxed out Mac Studio M2 Ultra I can share my DR benchmark with you.
Drop me a PM, I'd be curious too.

Hoes does PM work on this forum?
Never used it. Maybe you write me?

Hi Ben,

Curious to hear what OS are you running. I have been successfully running 13.5.2, Resolve 18.6, and Desktop Video 12.7, until a week ago, when I made the mistake to update to Ventura 13.6. Now I cannot get my Decklink 12G 4K Extreme card to be recognized, despite following steps here
https://softron.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/115001568114-TROUBLESHOOTING-Video-card-not-seen-kext-not-loaded
and here

and here
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=164279&p=931647&hilit=hackintosh#p931647

I called Blackmagic Design today and they stated that Desktop Video 12.1 seems to consistently work with Hackintoshes, yet when I roll back, remove preferences, etc I cannot get it to be seen.

Hi Ben,

Curious to hear what OS are you running. I have been successfully running 13.5.2, Resolve 18.6, and Desktop Video 12.7, until a week ago, when I made the mistake to update to Ventura 13.6. Now I cannot get my Decklink 12G 4K Extreme card to be recognized, despite following steps here
https://softron.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/115001568114-TROUBLESHOOTING-Video-card-not-seen-kext-not-loaded
and here

and here
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=164279&p=931647&hilit=hackintosh#p931647

I called Blackmagic Design today and they stated that Desktop Video 12.1 seems to consistently work with Hackintoshes, yet when I roll back, remove preferences, etc I cannot get it to be seen.

I'm running the latest version of Ventura. Just downgrade to Desktop Video 12.1 and it should work. It's the last version that works but fully funktional.

If you want to compare with a maxed out Mac Studio M2 Ultra I can share my DR benchmark with you.
Drop me a PM, I'd be curious too.

Why don't you make your Benchmarks public? I think it's be interesting for many of us to compare. I for one have a very similar workstation.

I can make the benchmark public any time.

The one for Fusion is easy, since you can download the file from BM, about one third into the product page for Fusion. It's the Spaceship project.
A maxed out Mac Studio Ultra needed 18 minutes and 48 seconds. The images don't look like much, but the project is pretty complex. A MacBook Pro M1 with 32 GB RAM needed 58 minutes.

The benchmark project for DR with a 2:30 timeline is a bit more difficult to reproduce. I can make the .drp files public any time, but you'll need the source files. Most of these are manufacturer's demo files, some of which are accessible only after registration (like Red, Arri or Sony). For convenience, I collected them for testers in my Google Drive, but I don't dare to make that a public link. That's why I'm asking you to contact me by PM. If anybody wants to try, I'll leave the files in the cloud for about 10 days more.

The result in 8K, including three files of 6K upscaled by Superscale Enhanced, needed 35 minutes and 18 seconds. I used very demanding functions, and most PCs except those with 24 GB VRAM crashed when trying (the Mac Studio used around 100 GB RAM).
The same sources, but without Superscale, rendered to UHD in 7:42. For comparison: a MacBook Pro M2 with 38 GPU cores needed 16 minutes for UHD.
An older PC laptop with only 6 GB VRAM crashed when trying.

The best result from a PC I got until today was from a Ryzen 9 3950X, 128GB RAM, RTX 4090 24GB VRAM. It rendered into UHD in 6:11, beating the Mac Studio, but not by a big margin.

Oh ok, misunderstood. I thought for some reason you didn't want to state what your benchmark results were publicly. But yeah, I'd like to get my hands on the Benchmark files you use so that we can compare. I'll PM you.

Hey,

are you using the IO card: Blackmagic Intensity Pro 4k, for a clean output for your monitor?