Intel i9 Hackintosh Crashing and Stability

[archer]

Hi All,

Last year I had a custom machine build, a Hackintosh with the below specs that I hoped would be my power house machine for mixing and recording, which I do professionally. Sadly its not seemingly playing ball with Reaper my main DAW of choice. The build is as follows:

CPU: Intel i9 10900 ES 10 Core 20 Thread 4.4Ghz boost
CPU Cooler: be quiet! Dark Rock Slim CPU Cooler
Motherboard: MSI MEG Z490I UNIFY Mini ITX LGA1200 Motherboard
Memory: Team T-FORCE VULCAN Z 64 GB (2 x 32 GB) DDR4-3000 CL16 Memory
Storage: Samsung 970 Evo 500 GB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive
Storage: Team GX2 1 TB 2.5" Solid State Drive
Video Card: XFX Radeon RX 560 - 896 2 GB Video Card Case: CiT Serenity Sound Dampened Chassis PSU: Cronus PRO ATX Black Cables 700W 80+ Bronze PSU

I got a lot of unpredictable hanging and glitching, sessions that work fine one minute will then suddenly glitch and suffer unworkable amounts of drop outs. But then it will work again with no clear pattern. Sometimes previously saved sessions will not open without crashing, and it's proving impossible to use professionally without ever knowing when I'll be stalled due to Reaper not being happy.

Much against my desires I started playing with Studio One which hasn't once cashed, is far quicker at starting and stoping, without ever giving me the spinning ball, and carried on ok even when I added 50 instances of Acustica Audio Gold to try as a test.

I don't know if its too do with the multi cores or what, I've already stopped using the master track and instead create a master fx buss as a regular track and that improves performance massively. I also find the more routing, especially folders, I have the worse performance becomes. Im running OSX 10.15.6 and keep Reaper updated, 6.23 currently I believe, the notarised version for Catalina.

Im getting to my wits end and if anyone can help me I'd be happy to make arrangements to pay if you can help me fix it, either a screen share set up or similar. I've tried different buffer settings, to no avail and really don't want to give up using Reaper but struggle to know what else I can do.

Cheers,
Alex