Congratulations?

[Acill]

Its good to see you post again. I agree, its a lot better than in the past. I also left and came back not long ago to the Amiga side. I even went to an Amiwest after the previous one I attended was bad for us MorphOS users.

Much better group of users now a days.

[Acill]

Hey guys (and gals)...

Since about 2010, I've been bouncing around due to the economy and needing to take work where I could find it.  First, at Maxwell AFB in Alabama, then working for the USMC in Norfolk, VA, now I find myself living and working in the D.C. area.  Not my ideal location, but at least they have an Alamo Drafthouse..

Sadly, I very rarely even think about the Amiga (or retro computing in general) any more because I'm always busy building new stuff for work.  I'm the only MCSE that you will ever meet who truly hates Microsoft and all things Microsofty..

About the only thing that could qualify as geeky for me recently is that I built an Intel i7/4Ghz Hackintosh (PC running MacOS X) with 32 gigs of RAM, 2 27" 1440p monitors, and a terabyte SSD.

Just got Thunderbolt working so I could move my 34 TB RAID Array over to it..

It's very, very sweet...  Here's the build and pics.

http://whyzzat.com/threads/building-a-hackintosh-lessons-learned-so-far.27889/

Wayne

Very nice, I got lucky and was able to put in two prototype 6 core processors I got at while working at Intel into my 2010 Mac pro. Both are 4Ghz and I have 32GB of RAM as well. My video card is a custom flashed 12GB Titan X. AMAZING card. I also have a 1TB PCIe solid state drive (again thanks to the great deals from work) and a 12TB sinology NAS I use as my media server. Its about as maxed as you can get in this version of the Mac Pro now. Lucky it still blows away the current model in benchmarks, but not for long I am sure. Booting into Windows X and using it to game is a dream as well as running the games I can in OS X. The WOW Legion Beta for example supports metal on this card and runs at full ultra over 100FPS without a stutter.

[Acill]

You can get the previous generation Mac Pro towers for a great price still if you look. Its a straight forward upgrade to put in a new CPU (have to get a used one on ebay, but still good) and a standard PC GTX 980 will work if you don't care about the boot screen showing up. Just be sure and get a Mid 2010 or 2012 model so you have the better bus speed logic boards. As for processors you can often get a used HP server with the Xeons in them for less than the bare CPU.

[Acill]

I did an upgrade on a friends Mac Pro not long ago from a single 4 core xeon to a dual 6 core 3.46 X5690 for under $300. I found an empty CPU board on ebay and got the two processors out of an HP server for $100.

I dont think a lot of people realize that a Mac Pro is built using a lot of standard server hardware. Its easy to replace a CPU on them.

Here is an example, get this for under $300 : http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-XW8600-Workstation-2x-Intel-Xeon-3-33-GHz-X5260-4GB-RAM-320GB-HD-/231925383397?hash=item35ffd480e5:g:wPYAAOSw3ydVnRyL

Instead of this for $750 : http://www.ebay.com/itm/12-CORE-3-33GHz-Mac-Pro-CPU-Processor-UPGRADE-4-1-5-1-2009-2010-2012-WARRANTY-/231503138441?hash=item35e6a98e89:g:RpMAAOSwqu9VALG8