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GA-Z87X-UD5 TH - Success... Sort of.

Joseph Mastantuono

Joseph Mastantuono

Hey there fellow colorists.

So I shelled out some cash to get a bad ass PC once the new Gigabyte thunderbolt board came out, and I've got it working! (so far). I'm going to be trying to put this system through it's paces on an indie job this week, (I hope).

Here are the specs if anyone is curious.

GA-Z87X-UD5 TH
4770K
16 GB of ram (to start I'll likely upgrade this)
256GB SSD
GTX 780
850 Watt PSU
all in a monstrous case.

I'll be installing some older drives and Raiding them 0 (with a back-up of course) as my media drives for this testing phase.

I haven't gotten the Thunderbolt ports to work, but that might be because I'm on Mavericks... Otherwise if anyone out there knows what they're doing with hackintoshes, I'd love to chat! Please send me an email, as it feels pretty lonely out here...

I'll be dropping a deckling 3d and a older GTX 285 as a GUI card for this process, as well... Wish me luck!
 
Hi Joseph,

I got two hackintoshes and one of them has the GA-Z77X-UD5-TH mobo. I don't remember doing anything special to get the Thunderbolt working. Almost everything was working immediately (less sound).

Would love to help you out... Question are welcome!

Good luck
Pepo
 
Hi Joseph,

How have you configured your pci-e slots? The thee pci-e-16x slots are now running as 8/4/4 right? The Deckling is happy with four, but did you give the Cuda card or the GUI card the benefit of 8 lanes? Also i get the impression that thunderbolt has to share its bandwidth with those three pci-e slots, doesn't it? Would be interesting to know how this board distributes it's bandwidth exactly.

Good luck!
 
Looks like a good board, however I think the X79 (despite no TB) has potentially better bus bandwidth than a Z77 chipset based board, and X79 supports faster CPUs.
 
Joseph Mastantuono said:
Hey there fellow colorists.

So I shelled out some cash to get a bad ass PC once the new Gigabyte thunderbolt board came out, and I've got it working! (so far). I'm going to be trying to put this system through it's paces on an indie job this week, (I hope).

Here are the specs if anyone is curious.

GA-Z87X-UD5 TH
4770K
16 GB of ram (to start I'll likely upgrade this)
256GB SSD
GTX 780
850 Watt PSU
all in a monstrous case.

I'll be installing some older drives and Raiding them 0 (with a back-up of course) as my media drives for this testing phase.

I haven't gotten the Thunderbolt ports to work, but that might be because I'm on Mavericks... Otherwise if anyone out there knows what they're doing with hackintoshes, I'd love to chat! Please send me an email, as it feels pretty lonely out here...

I'll be dropping a deckling 3d and a older GTX 285 as a GUI card for this process, as well... Wish me luck!
Click to expand...
Hey Joseph just wondering what your bios options are for that board as am recently fitting on of them up and can't get anything to load.
Just wondering if there was anything special that I needed to do in the bios?

Cheers
J :eek:)
 
Gonna Follow this up... Sorry I didn't keep up with this thread.

James, I really don't remember if I changed anything in the bios (other than over clocking)... But I think I only played with things to try to get the thunderbolt going.

I've got a GTX 780 in slot one as my Resolve card & a GTX 570 as a GUI card in slot 2. Blackmagic Decklink extreme 3d in slot 3.
I have 3 3tb 7200rpm drives as an an internal RAID 0 as a media drive that backs up nightly.

I upgraded to 10.9.2, and experienced a bunch of (what I think) are Kernel Panics, (screen freezes, and I think on Apple Hardware I'd get the gray screen of death).

So I managed to stabilize the system... by turning off two pieces of software:

Paragon NTSF for OSX
&
Avid Background Services.

Once I did that... Very solid...

I also did some over-clocking & installed basic liquid cooling for the CPU, which really helped out with RED performance. Getting 14fps or so fps on Epic footage. That was far easier than I imagined it to be.

Still haven't bothered to install Windows on a separate drive to test Thunderbolt, which is what I hear you have to do to get it to work, I just haven't had the time.

Overall, I think it was a very good investment for ~2000$, and will help tide me over in between my 2010 mac pro & buying whatever my next computer will be.
 
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