Hackintosh Upgrade 2013 – Part 1 Research

I haven’t written to the blog lately – I’ve been more of a consumer of knowledge and really haven’t contributed anything much. I’m hoping to change this stance as lately I’ve found myself referring back to my blog entries as my own personal documentation. So I figure, why not spend a few minutes to document my stuff and create a blog post while I’m at it?

I’ve been getting into two different services that really have help me out in organizing my entertainment – Calibre and Plex. Calibre is an ebook management system and Plex manages all my audio and video items. I’ve centralized everything onto my Ubuntu server in my home office. Unfortunately, the server hardware was damage due to a loose cpu heatsink. The server would reboot every 5-10 minutes when the system was under load. This is a major issue when I got the entire family gathered around to watch a movie. It was time for some replacement parts.

It’s been a long while since I got any computer hardware for the house that wasn’t from Apple.  After a ton of research, I decided on getting the following:

• Intel Core i5-3570K Ivy Bridge 3.4GHz (3.8GHz Turbo) LGA 1155 77W Quad-Core Desktop Processor Intel HD Graphics 4000
• GIGABYTE GA-Z77-DS3H LGA 1155 Intel Z77 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard

A colleague of mine at work builds PCs on the side and he had a couple of extra parts around to sell me rather inexpensively:

• Western Digital WD Green WD30EZRX 3TB IntelliPower 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5″ Internal Hard Drive
• G.SKILL Ripjaws Z Series 32GB (4 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) – actually only got two of the sticks from this pack from him.

I would reuse my server case and the two 500GB drives that are already installed.  Based on the research I did, the above system would allow me to do at least 4-5 1080p movie streams at the same time!

However, I also started reading about how easy the new motherboard could be turned into a Hackintosh.  This got me to thinking – could I kill two birds with one stone?  Instead of replacing the server hardware with the new equipment, maybe I should replace my Hackintosh.  Then I would use my old Hackintosh hardware in the server.

After running a few tests, it appeared that my old Hackintosh hardware would give me at least twice if not three times the capabilities of the old server hardware.  So I figured – why not.

In short, for just over $500, I got not one, but two machines upgraded!  That made me very happy.  Of course, that happiness disappeared over the next few days with the new parts – it was almost a nightmare getting everything to work correctly.  I’ll go into a little more detail in the new couple of blog posts.