New mobo/CPU

[Captain Jack]

So after using the same PC for over 5 years now on the original Intel i5 CPU (the 760), I thought it was about time to do the upgrade - especially as it's my birthday in 2 weeks!

I don't do any gaming but I do watch a number of HD videos and it does sometimes struggle with the content. I run Mac OS X as my OS (Hackintosh method), as I hate Windows 8 with passion and Linux doesn't float my boat as a desktop OS. OS X is also free! While Mavericks runs fine, Yosemite was a bit sluggish with some UI transitions being a bit choppy.

Sooo.... I bought:

A new Dell U2412M IPS monitor - beats the spots off my old 24" TN panel
A Gigabyte Ga-Z97M-D3H motherboard - I like Gigabyte stuff, nice and reliable. Also, lots of support from the Hackintosh community for it.
An Intel i5 4590 3.3GHz CPU - with onboard HD4600 graphics, which is natively supported by OS X
A Mac keyboard with Russian/Cyrillic layout
A 128GB SSD drive. Toyed with the idea of going with PCI-Express SSD, that have real world speeds of over 700Mb/sec!!!, but the high price ruled that out
8GB RAM - really don't see the point of having more than that in my use case

Very much looking forward to playing with it. The whole thing above cost about £500, which is a lot cheaper than what a real Mac would have cost (an equivalent Mac would probably be about £1200-1300).

The only thing that I need to purchase now is a USB satellite card that I can use from within a Windows VM.

Will also be selling my old hardware (including the sat card) to recoup some of the cost... but will be worth it

Not all my spare cash goes towards satellite stuff! Most but not all...

 

[Lazarus]

re: "Linux", forgive me for saying so, but which Distros (of the very many) are you referring to?

I mean, a fair few nowadays have Desktops which either do resemble (or can very easily be made to resemble) yer actual Windows (XP, 7, whatever).

 

[Captain Jack]

I knew you'd bite, G ;)

Over the many years, I've tried a few. Various incarnations of Ubuntu/Debian, RedHats (does Fedora still exist?) and, yes, Mint. I've actually recommended Mint to my work colleagues who had old weak laptops to run email and web browsing and they are perfectly happy with it. And I personally run a Debian based OS on my Raspberry Pi for simple server duties - again, perfectly happy.

As for my main desktop OS, I never managed to get on with Linuxes. And with Mac OS being offered for free from their official store, it's no-contest for me. And Mac OS X is Unix underneath - does that count?

 

[battenfan]

I have thought of Hackintosh myself so I mean no offense as I share this funny rant:
Linus Torvalds: Apple's HFS+ is probably the worst file system ever

 

[Lazarus]

Yep, Unix counts! ('twas more of a nibble than a bite) ;)

 

[Captain Jack]

I have thought of Hackintosh myself so I mean no offense as I share this funny rant:
Linus Torvalds: Apple's HFS+ is probably the worst file system ever

Let's be honest here. The choices people makes with regards to their OS, hardware, satellite receivers, cars, girls etc. are personal. "One man's crap is another man's treasure" springs to mind.

There are many things that annoy me in OS X but there are more things that annoy me in Windows. It's a question of balance of what you like and what you need. To me, an OS X is pleasing to the eye and has a pretty snappy interface. It's one of the main reasons why I picked it. It actually reminds me of the very first OS that I used - RISC OS that was shipped with Acorn computers back in the 90's. You can run it in RPi as well, if you want to.

It's a shame that I have to use Windows as my work OS, simply because of software that we use for VPN (Juniper - urgh! - at least our company doesn't allow it).

 

[2cvbloke]

I have thought of Hackintosh myself so I mean no offense as I share this funny rant:
Linus Torvalds: Apple's HFS+ is probably the worst file system ever

According to my apple-nut friend, that rant of his should have been back in the 1990s, cos that particular broken filesystem has long since been replaced apparently...

 

[Captain Jack]

Yeah, not sure what Linus is on about. There's very much a case sensitive option in Apple's own Disk Utility...

I do somewhat agree with him about Finder - it takes a bit of getting used to.

 

[Captain Jack]

My toys are here! Well, most of them...

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