Performance Testing

That's all there is to it.  Now that we have our Hackintosh up and running, we wanted to test the performance of our components to make sure there are no problems and everything is working as expected.

Cinebench 11.5, the Cinema4D-based benchmark, is one we often use on Windows, and is also available on OS X.

Here, we see the results from both our GPU and CPU seem to fall inline with what we would expect from these components.

As a side note, if you want to utilize CUDA accelerated applications under OS X, you must download the Mac CUDA driver from NVIDIA’s site, which worked without issue for us.

After testing the CPU and GPU, we decided to make sure that USB 3.0 was working, and the system wasn’t just falling back to USB 2.0 speeds.

In order to do this, we connected another Vertex 4 to one of the USB 3.0 ports using a USB 3.0 to SATA converter and ran the AJA system test.  The AJA system test is a video oriented benchmarking application on OS X that includes a Disk Benchmark.

As you can see here, the disk transfer speeds fall inline with what we would expect of USB 3.0.

Next up is Thunderbolt testing. For testing, we used the same setup as with our Windows Thunderbolt testing.  We used a Pegasus R4 RAID enclosure with 4 Corsair Force GT 240GB drives in RAID 0, for maximum throughput.

We ran the same test, using the AJA tool, and came out with speeds that are consistent to our previous Thunderbolt performance!

To make sure both Thunderbolt ports actually worked simultaneously, we installed a Apple Thunderbolt to Gigabyte Ethernet adapter along with the R4 and it worked without a problem.  However, be aware that hotswapping of Thunderbolt devices does NOT work on a hackintosh.  Thunderbolt devices will only be recognized if they are already attached when you boot the machine, which may ruin some of the appeal of the Thunderbolt options.

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