InfiniteMac OSx86 - View Single Post - Searching components for new Intel Core i5/i7 system

naquaada · 01-14-2013, 10:38 AM

Hi there!

like the title says, I'm searching things for a new system. I'm still using the same AMD Opteron 185 systems, 5 years after the forum was founded. They still work fine, upgraded to USB3 and SATA6, but the main problem is the software. Leopard support is dropping more and more, there's no actual Flash for a long time, YouTube is slow as hell. The missing SSSE3 command set and virtualization technology is also a problem. So a new hardware setup is neccessary.

The problem is, I have no idea what is actual today

The last things I know are the Core i7 and the i5, but I don'tknow how many cores and GHz are possible. Because I stopped with Osx86 installations at 10.6, I have no big knowledge about the Chameleon 2 bootloader and its /Extra folder, the experiments I made on my Thinkpad x61t with Snow Leopard and Lion were much more frustrating than any of the other OSx86 setups I made.

I need a system which is fully Mountain Lion capable, most usages are for audio editing and video compressing. For Logic my 2.95 GHz Dual-Opteron is fast enough, but video compression is very slow. So, I first need some infomation about the Core i processor series, what's the difference between the i5 and i7? What model (cpu-cores/GHz) has a moderate price? Is it still so that nVidia graphic cards are better supported, or doesn't matter if it's an ATI card? A silent graphic card would be ideal. What board manufaturers are common now? On Socket 775, the Gigabyte boards were used rather often, what's common on the i series? Ideal would be a board with more than one PCI slot and an onboard serial port.

By the way, is the Disk Utility compatible to Advanced Format harddrives now? Version 10.5 is not, I had to calculate partitions manually.

I'd appreciate your help.

Greets, naquaada.