gaming mac - a project too far?

[233]

quite fancy building a gaming mac, well just for the heck of it,


been mooting this project on and off for a while and whilst not the cheapest system i reckon i should be able to build a bit of a powerhouse especially for games that are heavily multithreaded.


fastest i can go cpu wise would be a brace of 6 core xeon at circa 3.5ghz (i dont believe theres anything available faster for a mac pro. gpu wise i can go 1080ti and 1333 ram




stupid, yes
expensive, very
gaming on osx at higher FPS than the pc gaming masterrace . priceless


still at a very early planning stage before i start shopping and building and its going to be a slow burn in between a Mitx build for a media centre.


watch this space for lots of questions and lots of stupidity

 

[233]

not going to be a hackintosh (again) (never ever again )

it will be a mac pro 5.1 with a cpu/gpu upgrade.

 

[233]

Ah then in that case nice! Limited by games though. What’s the best intense game you can buy for the Mac?

These days quite a decent selection just open steam and select osx for a full list


But far cry 5 would bring most Macs to a stop

 

[233]

I've already got a win10gaming rig


Butjust like the idea of something different
Only problem I see with a beefy GPU will be powering it in a Mac Pro
And the eyewatering price of 10 year old macs Macs amazes me

But dual CPU Mac here we come

 

[233]

still on the hunt for a reasonably priced dual cpu mac pro

prices seem utterly bonkers for 10 year old hardware but i've commited so the ebay and gumtree trawl is on

spec wise pretty settled that i'm after something like this

Apple Mac Pro (5,1)
3.46Ghz 12 Core Intel Xeon
64GB DDR3 1333MHz RAM
GPU TBC most likely one of the current amd lineup
500GB PCIe NVMe SSD

 

[233]

only went and done it eek


picked up a 5.1 6 core (12 thread) 3.33ghz mac yesterday, 24gig of ram in triple channel and a nvidia 680 handling graphics.
next step nvme boot drive and a beastly gpu in there

 

[233]

only limited by your wallet



https://www.macstoreuk.com/product/nvidia-gtx-1080ti-by-macvidcards/

 

[233]

its stupid builds like this that inspire me . guy runs dual titan xps

thats a beastly setup in anyones book

 

[233]

yes it can,

although personally i'm looking at a 580x 8gb

that and running off nvme should see my quite happy for a few years to come,

although the want is still quite high for a 12 core 3.46ghz model

 

[233]

Known as the pixlas mod

It's a brilliant community the classic Mac pro one

People really tinkering and getting the absolute best out of the limited hardware at their disposal

It's great to see what 10 ye old kit can actually achieve with s bit of work or modernisation

Is new GPUs or nvme drives etc

 

[233]

sorry Feek

loving mine,

just need to try and get a tasty gpu in there and i'm set, although the urge is now even stronger for a dual tray 5.1 12 cores of 3.46ghz goodness really does appeal.

 

[233]

The bugs bitten hard

On the hunt for a dual CPU Mac tonsit alongside my 6 core

God help me

 

[233]

nothing to add atm unfortunately,

rocking my 6 core quite happily with a 680 and 24 gig of ram

holding off on adding a new gpu until the 7th for obvious reasons,

plans at the moment are keep the 6 core for a while until the bank balance recovers from buying it then add a 12 core 3.46ghz monster

but for the 6 looking at adding an NVME boot drive and a gpu and thats about it

for the games i play its actually pretty decent had a good couple of hours of cities skylines yesterday and a bit of fm2019 this morning,

might try some F1 later see how it runs under osx

 

[233]

I could be out of date here but nVidia did/ does make available drivers for MacOS.

only a handful of cards support Metal and work under the current osz mojave, theres a bit of a spat between apple and Nvidia thats resulted in nvidia being frozen out also affects them for egpus as well.

pretty much anything from amd seems to work though, right up to Radeon VII albeit these require external power suppliers or power supply modifications