I finally have the "courage" (pun intended) to jump, seeing HOW MUCH MORE performance money can buy in the PC world compared to Macs (I'll compare below).
What you guys think of this build? I'll make a hackintosh out of it, run win7 for games (never MS Spy 10) and perhaps linux for funz (probably in a VM though). Main focus is programming, VMs and Adobe Lightroom + Photoshop for editing those 24MP raws.
Extreme silence:
PC Case: Fractal Design R5 Blackout (silent and sturdy, with dampening)
Case Fans: 3x Noctua NF-A14 PWM with low-noise adapter (optimum airflow vs noise, near silent on idle and light work)
CPU cooler: Noctua NH-D15 (super silent and will fit, did research)
PSU: EVGA SuperNOVA 650W P2 (almost inaudabile and 94% efficiency for this system that peaks around 450 Watt)
High performance:
Motherboard: Asus Maximus VIII Hero (light overlock CPU 4-4.2 GHz to 4.7 GHz, support for NVMe and M.2)
CPU: Intel 6700k (quad core, 4 GHz)
Memory: Kingston HyperX Savage DDR4 4x16 64 GB Total 2666 MHZ (auto overlock, not dependent on BIOS for that)
GPU: Asus Strix GTX 970 DC2 OC 4GB (very fast but dead silent for light work and idle)
Fast storage:
Boot drive: Samsung Pro 950 512 GB NVME (should work?
? piker patch + kext on efi boot drive??)
Extra storage: Samsung 850 Pro sata 600 1 TB
Compared to macs:
This build is 6700K 4 Ghz, 64 GB, 1.5 TB SSD, 970 GTX 4GB and costs around
2400 euro's
Closest
15" Retina MacBook Pro: TurboBoost up to 4 Ghz, 16 GB, 1 TB SSD, Radeon R9 M370X 2 GB costs
3600 euro's
Closest
27" Retina iMac 5K: 4 Ghz with 4.2 Ghz TurboBoost, 32 GB, 1 TB SSD, Radeon R9 M395X 4GB costs
4790 euro's
Closest
Mac "Trashcan" Pro (not fair given Xeon and ECC mem, though): Base 3.7 Quad Core Xeon, 64 GB mem, 1 TB SSD, Base Two FirePro D300's with 2 GB vram each costs
5969My point of this comparison is: my build costs around 2400 euro's, closest is the 27" Retina iMac of around 4790 euro's which is almost 2x as expensive and still has comparatively crappy graphics, less storage and half the memory.
So what do you guys think of this build?---
Full disclosure: crossposted on tonymac for advice on hackintosh compatibility with 10.11/10.12