written by: geert
Yes, the current MacBook Pro packs some awesome performance thanks to the Sandy Bridge architecture. People are now also starting to build hackintoshes with it since the new iMacs have been released.Many of us Eigenharpers will eventually step on stage with our instruments. A couple of months ago I built a rack-mount hackintosh to do so and I now provide all the details here:
http://www.eigenzone.org/2011/05/31/rack-mount-hackintosh-for-live-playing/
Thought this might be interesting for others.
Nice job. I doubt I'd have that much patience though. What do you think the advantage is over simply a mac mini?
Got it...performance. Nice.
@barnone, performance, price, flexibility, storage space (SSD + physical HD). The most work was to find all the components, putting it all together was not difficult and installing OSX was quite straightforward. I did spend some time afterwards undervolting the CPU and stress testing it to lower the temperatures as much as possible, but I do that on most real macs also.
Geert, thanks for the post and the effort.
Also, it is important for Eigenlabs to show how to best use the 'harps and having a 'gig-rig' is part of that. The decision to put EigenD on a computing platform was a good one and this effort of yours completes a demonstration of a full, stage-ready, instrument.
IMHO, this is the direction to go for robustness needed for certain settings while still being reasonably portable. That said, there are a number of touring performers using laptops (Zoë Keating comes to mind as a busy performer who does this).
So, FWIW, this is the (32bit) geekbench of a current macbook pro running on battery.
I run EigenD on this laptop all the time now (having moved it my Mac Pro) and am happy with the performance although the memory is a bit tight.
The point is that, with your work, people can now see that the eigenharp system can match any performance setting from informal to rock(ous) group.
cheers, m
Yes, the current MacBook Pro packs some awesome performance thanks to the Sandy Bridge architecture. People are now also starting to build hackintoshes with it since the new iMacs have been released.
I consciously underclocked the processor of my machine to reduce heat and I kept memory at very conservative speeds also. At regular settings my machine is similar to what you posted.
One of the reasons I moved to a rack-mount hackintosh is that it's relatively inexpensive, it's very fast and I'm not tempted to do anything else with it. When I was using my laptop, I also used it for other things and on more than one occasion I forgot that I installed experimental plugins, beta versions, background processes, etc. Having a clean system that moves slowly is important for stability in a live setting. One way to achieve that on a computer you use a lot is to create a second primary partition and to install a barebones system on there. When booting while pressing the option key, you can then select the other boot partition. The downside to that is that you typically want to put this on the SSD hard drive also and thus run into serious space issues, usually resulting into having to carry around an external hard drive for sample collections.
Take care,
Geert
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