The Definitive TDM hardware recycling thread for Mac OSX

[Emcha_audio]

Originally Posted by tdmwizard

Mac's are no more finicky about pci/pcie hardware than a PC running windows.......because they are also a PC......just running OSX.

If Apple would have included a standard PCI slot in the Mac Pro (easily done since the X58 chipset includes support for native PCI), any of the older Magma chassis with a VHDCI connector would have worked perfectly well.

Since the Mac Pro only included PCIE slots, a different host card was required to bridge PCIE with a P7R series PCI chassis. The ONLY reason the P7R series chassis were/are incompatible running on Mac Pro hardware is due to an arbitrary design decision by Magma to use the Pericom chipset.....which does not work natively with the Intel 21154 used in the older chassis. An interesting choice of chipset since Intel also offers a PCIE/PCI bridge chipset that does work with the older 21154. Intel chipsets are industry standards, not Pericom.....but.....then Magma would not be able to re-sell all those $1600 "upgrade" board sets or the "new" P6 series chassis. Planned Obsolescence, partly Apple's fault, mostly Magma's fault.......and the customer loses in the end.

The purpose of this and other similar threads is to run OSX on a non-Apple motherboard. By ditching Apple hardware these restrictions evaporate. The customer avoids the Apple "hardware tax" and Apple ecosystem lock-in...and can then configure a machine with much improved specifications and flexibility for half the cost or less.

BTW.....I have spent $25K+ on Apple hardware in the past 10 years. I have no issue paying for innovation. In an x86 computer, Intel does the innovating with CPU and Thunderbolt.....everyone else just integrates components, including Apple. In this age of commoditized prices of x86 computers, the pricing on the new Mac Pro is absurd....not to mention the added cost of Thunderbolt pcie chassis and various peripherals. The term in business is TCO (Total Cost of Ownership)....and the Apple ecosystem is completely (and arbitrarily) a high TCO....have to keep that stock above $500. A cute cylinder design with Thunderbolt as the only external expansion option to drive up revenue and prices for Magma type peripheral vendors who arbitrarily introduce "incompatibility" whenever they need to boost sales?........no thanks, time to step off the treadmill.

My dual Xeon E5-2687W-V2 (16 physical, 32 logical cores, 25mb L3 cache per proc), Asrock x79 server motherboard, Ati 6870 graphics, 64gb ram with Atto 8gb fibre-channel card, Chelsio 10gbe nic card, HDX card, firewire card, AND a native PCI slot with a Magma host card (only connected to the P7R464 HD7 Accel chassis for legacy projects) dual boots Windows 7/OSX (from a HP san array) and runs Mountain Lion with PT 10/11HD flawlessly. I bought the graphics and i/o expansion cards off ebay used for pennies on the dollar.

My "Hackintosh" is Pro-Grade, workstation/server class hardware in a Huge Lian Li aluminum case with 140mm cooling fans spinning at 800rpm. You can barely hear it from 5 feet away. Time Machine backups to my NAS server exceed 600mbytes/sec. I was not looking to cut corners or sacrifice performance on this build.

TCO is half of a Mac Pro with nearly twice the specs. Geekbench score is 51,000 with a 90,300 score on Floating Point......ummm, price/performance ratio vs the new Mac Pro......ridiculous in my favor. I win for a change.

What John meant wasn't on the hardware perspective AFAIK, but on how OSX works and the drivers that are within OSX.

[tdmwizard]

Originally Posted by Emcha_audio

What John meant wasn't on the hardware perspective AFAIK, but on how OSX works and the drivers that are within OSX.

That's cool, but, realize that expansion chassis don't use separate drivers like other types of peripherals. PCI bridging happens at the hardware layer on either the PCH or southbridge chipset.

If the OS (OSX, Unix, Linux, Windows) has a driver for a particular Intel chipset, whatever PCI bridging occurs in the system is managed by the motherboard chipset, not OSX or other host OS. OSX see's a bus and a device number for a peripheral on that bus provided by the motherboard chipset. So in that regard it is no more or less "picky" than any other OS.

As long as the "Hackintosh" motherboard running OSX has a native standard PCI slot, it will run any Magma chassis/host card that uses VHDCI connectors on any version of Pro-Tools through PT10HD.

Also, contrary to what Magma says, their "Hi-Fi" cables are nothing more than 1 meter VHDCI LVD SCSI cables. I am a computer design Engineer and I have test fixtures for most types of storage related cables. The pinouts are the same as VHDCI. Length is most important......1 meter or less. I use the HP 126308-003 VHDCI cable with 100% success on three different 64-bit expanded systems, and find them on ebay from $10-20 each.

[Osterhase]

Originally Posted by JFreak

Just be sure you're using ONLY TDM PLUGINS in that "ultra low latency fx box" because as soon as you insert your first RTAS (native) plugin, your mixer will have the very same playback buffer that exists on all native systems.

Yes, I only want to play with real dsp driven tdm plugs.
Really love my MX4-DSP-Mixer (in terms of flexibility) but there was and is a lack of plugins. So I think I blow up my 20 classic hardware synths with some cool eventide tdm fx and play theme in real realtime (the ~ 3 samples of dsp processing time and some samples for busses and routing seems not a real problem, since every hardware fx unit i ever own has the same or more amount of "latency"). Hope this works.


Btw:
Some threads says, there is a problem with dsp allocation on accel cards on large projects, because accel has different dsp types with different ram, while process cards has always the same dsp type ("presto" chip).

Real problem or urban legend?

[s.d. finley]

Originally Posted by Osterhase

Yes, I only want to play with real dsp driven tdm plugs.
Really love my MX4-DSP-Mixer (in terms of flexibility) but there was and is a lack of plugins. So I think I blow up my 20 classic hardware synths with some cool eventide tdm fx and play theme in real realtime (the ~ 3 samples of dsp processing time and some samples for busses and routing seems not a real problem, since every hardware fx unit i ever own has the same or more amount of "latency"). Hope this works.


Btw:
Some threads says, there is a problem with dsp allocation on accel cards on large projects, because accel has different dsp types with different ram, while process cards has always the same dsp type ("presto" chip).

Real problem or urban legend?

Only problem I have really encountered on my HD4 Accel on an 88.2khz session is that some plug ins won't share resources with other plug ins and that can pose a problem in hidef sessions with large plug in counts. It really depends on the manufacture of the plug ins. If the plugs you use all share dsp then you are golden, if not then you run into issues of only using part of your dsp chip for one type of plug in and empty dsp that cannot be shared.

[Raoul23]

I've just found this thread, I have the supermicro board and I'm now very tempted to build a hackintosh. I've ordered 2 new hard drives so if things don't workout I can just reinsert my original Windows hard drives. I'm hoping this works :)