I call all gamers peasants.
Trying to Decide between a new PC or Mac M2
- Thread starter José Herring
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I call all gamers peasants.
This is scary for non experts. What are the main things people need to inspect on all parts, if self building without much experience?
Those pins, mostly - and any other signs of obvious (mechanical) damage. There's no real reason to be scared.
Pier
kiffaudio.com
This is very rare. No need to be scared.
Bee_Abney
How long have I been out?
MarcusD
Tinkerer
Certainly agree with the sentiment if Apple allowed you to upgrade / swap / repair your own hardware - Would be totally FOR swapping over to an M2 and moving away from Windows. The OS and ecosystem is like night and day when working between the M1 and PC. Much prefer MacOS.
But as it stands, don't' really want to fork out extra for external drive bays to house all the NVME's and SSDs I have internally + getting extra I/O for connecting hardware and peripherals. Also the idea of x-amount of days downtime / or traveling to the nearest Apple store (nearly an hour away from me) to get things sorted, is a turn-off.
Definitely a case of personal preference. If you don't have a PC then getting Mac instead maybe better in the longer term. But if you're switching over from PC, there are things to think about for sure. Depending on what you're needs are.
But as it stands, don't' really want to fork out extra for external drive bays to house all the NVME's and SSDs I have internally + getting extra I/O for connecting hardware and peripherals. Also the idea of x-amount of days downtime / or traveling to the nearest Apple store (nearly an hour away from me) to get things sorted, is a turn-off.
Definitely a case of personal preference. If you don't have a PC then getting Mac instead maybe better in the longer term. But if you're switching over from PC, there are things to think about for sure. Depending on what you're needs are.
LatinXCombo
Ambitious, but rubbish.
Agree, obvious-to-the-naked eye.
Oh, and remember, if it doesn't feel like it wants to go in gently, STOP WHAT YOU'RE DOING! Either the part is totally wrong for the socket, or YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG.
gussunkri
Senior Member
Are you… are you still talking about computer parts?
That poor kitty knows it is in huge trouble. :(
Yep. Perfectly safe.
LatinXCombo
Ambitious, but rubbish.
Nature is a very efficient lady, and re-uses concepts and solutions where possible.
Pier
kiffaudio.com
Sorry in advance for the long post... I completed my two PC builds yesterday and kept thinking about this thread. I've collected some of those thoughts here.
On one hand PCs are awesome in thay they give you extreme freedom. You can build anything you need. Salvage old parts. Upgrade and repair without needing anyone else. Etc. And it's great that there's a huge market of competing components manufacturer which pushes innovation, performance, lowers prices, etc.
But all this freedom does come at a cost.
First, there's so much knowledge needed to build and maintain a PC.
For example, I didn't know DDR5 is not backwards compatible with DDR4. My fault of course, but after decades of memory being compatible I never even stopped to consider this might be the case. I thought I could use my current DDR4 RAM and upgrade later to DDR5 if I needed it.
Or that the Ryzen 7000 CPUs by default run super hot. Even with good cooling I was getting like 70ºC just downloading a Steam game. With my previous CPU (3700X) those were the temps when running Cinebench. I've seen people online saying 80-90ºC on idle with not so good cooling. AMD decided to push these CPUs to the thermal limit as the default behavior. You can of course lower the wattage to sacrifice a bit of performance and get normal temps.
Or here's another one. One of the two PCs I built was for a nephew of mine. Gave him the machine with everything running ok. Yesterday night he tells me he plugged his new gaming headphones and he gets no sound which worked when I tested it. Not sure what happened. So now Pier is going to have to spend his Sunday afternoon messing with Realtek drivers or some crap like that.
Etc.
And then don't get me started in how archaic the whole desktop PC building experience is. Like how come there isn't a single cable that connects all the stuff in the case to the motherboard? Or how come the BIOS still loads up in 1024x768? Obviously this won't change in the foreseeable future. It's all a mishmash of standards and the major industry players are unable to sit down and redesign the whole thing properly.
Ah and the cooling/efficiency...
Yes, the top stuff from Intel, AMD, and Nvidia can run faster than the Mac counterparts. But to run my PC I need 8 fans and it's not even a high end machine generating a ton of heat. A high end PC is going to be noisy when pushed. There's no way around the that.
Nobody considers the cost of cooling when comparing RAM and SSD prices. Cooling will easily add $200-300 to your build if you want a quiet PC. Maybe even the cost of running AC for years.
Of course some people might not want/need a quiet PC and that's fair.
And don't get me started on climate change. Close to 50% of humanity's emissions come from electricity generation.
I'm not writing all of this to say "PcS sUCk! gET a mAc!". This is more an expression of my frustration with computers in general. When imagining a computer 100 years from now I guess most people can agree that it should be small, modular, affordable, quiet, efficient, and performant. It does seem like desktop PCs just are unable to evolve into that. Maybe with the switch to RISC-V during this decade we'll see a whole new paradigm emerge that will align more with this vision.
On one hand PCs are awesome in thay they give you extreme freedom. You can build anything you need. Salvage old parts. Upgrade and repair without needing anyone else. Etc. And it's great that there's a huge market of competing components manufacturer which pushes innovation, performance, lowers prices, etc.
But all this freedom does come at a cost.
First, there's so much knowledge needed to build and maintain a PC.
For example, I didn't know DDR5 is not backwards compatible with DDR4. My fault of course, but after decades of memory being compatible I never even stopped to consider this might be the case. I thought I could use my current DDR4 RAM and upgrade later to DDR5 if I needed it.
Or that the Ryzen 7000 CPUs by default run super hot. Even with good cooling I was getting like 70ºC just downloading a Steam game. With my previous CPU (3700X) those were the temps when running Cinebench. I've seen people online saying 80-90ºC on idle with not so good cooling. AMD decided to push these CPUs to the thermal limit as the default behavior. You can of course lower the wattage to sacrifice a bit of performance and get normal temps.
Or here's another one. One of the two PCs I built was for a nephew of mine. Gave him the machine with everything running ok. Yesterday night he tells me he plugged his new gaming headphones and he gets no sound which worked when I tested it. Not sure what happened. So now Pier is going to have to spend his Sunday afternoon messing with Realtek drivers or some crap like that.
Etc.
And then don't get me started in how archaic the whole desktop PC building experience is. Like how come there isn't a single cable that connects all the stuff in the case to the motherboard? Or how come the BIOS still loads up in 1024x768? Obviously this won't change in the foreseeable future. It's all a mishmash of standards and the major industry players are unable to sit down and redesign the whole thing properly.
Ah and the cooling/efficiency...
Yes, the top stuff from Intel, AMD, and Nvidia can run faster than the Mac counterparts. But to run my PC I need 8 fans and it's not even a high end machine generating a ton of heat. A high end PC is going to be noisy when pushed. There's no way around the that.
Nobody considers the cost of cooling when comparing RAM and SSD prices. Cooling will easily add $200-300 to your build if you want a quiet PC. Maybe even the cost of running AC for years.
Of course some people might not want/need a quiet PC and that's fair.
And don't get me started on climate change. Close to 50% of humanity's emissions come from electricity generation.
I'm not writing all of this to say "PcS sUCk! gET a mAc!". This is more an expression of my frustration with computers in general. When imagining a computer 100 years from now I guess most people can agree that it should be small, modular, affordable, quiet, efficient, and performant. It does seem like desktop PCs just are unable to evolve into that. Maybe with the switch to RISC-V during this decade we'll see a whole new paradigm emerge that will align more with this vision.
Yea for me the "suddenly stopped working" thing is sadly part of my experience with windows machines, not saying it's a universal experience but it certainly has been mine.
On the headphones note, I got some new bluetooth earbuds for use with previously mentioned windows laptop, tested and they worked fine on my phone & Mac, but on win 11 the volume was extremely low, tried a bunch of stuff, reinstalled drivers, removed and re-paired etc, only to eventually find out that there was a registry setting that had to be edited in order for windows to output proper levels over Bluetooth! User friendliness at it's finest!
river angler
Senior Member
Mac OS over Microsoft for creative work every time.
Gotta say, I've never used anything but the default boxed coolers (and no extra coolers inside the case) in my own builds and I've never had any thermal issues. With something like a 13900KF that ofc isn't an option, but for most users it should be completely fine to go that route.
Pictus
Senior Member
With a custom water cooler kit, we can place the fans/radiator/pump
into another room or outside, even better when also cooling the GPU.
A lot less heat in the room and 100% silent PC.
I made this for my dad a few years ago.
https://www.tweaktown.com/news/8965...ith-9-fans-can-cool-4-gpus-at-once/index.html
https://www.aliexpress.com/i/1005004621515396.html
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004314190865.htmlhttps://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004622032781.htmlhttps://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholes...42&origin=y&SearchText=Bykski+GPU+Water+Block
If outside or another room is not possible, with a big enough radiator it is possible to
use with VERY low RPM fans and maybe even with no fan, but the heat and pump
will stay in the room.
I recommend everyone to underclock the PC's CPU/GPU a little to counteract factory
overclocking, some CPU undervolt may help too.
AMD ECO mode
Fanless PC
https://www.youtube.com/@fullysilentpcs/videos
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Pier
kiffaudio.com
It's not about thermal issues but the noise. I don't know how anyone can live with that.
Yes of course. Even easier, you can put the machine into another room altogether which I've done in the past.
But my point is that this shouldn't be needed. This is not science fiction. We already have the technology for efficient CPUs and GPUs.
Pier
kiffaudio.com
Indeed. But just the radiator is like double the size of a Mac Studio and the case costs $999.Fanless PC
https://www.anandtech.com/show/18887/streacoms-sg10-case-can-cool-down-geforce-rtx-4080-without-fans
And let's not forget, heat is not magically disolved. It's going straight into the room.
Are they USB headphones? Possibly just a matter of setting the active output device to the correct thing. He needs to learn to figure out that stuff on his own. If he can read and write, he can use google!
If you're willing to pay more than for a mac you can get pretty impressive fanless builds. But that's only viable if your room isn't warm already. (That probably was redundant with the replies I haven't read)
As a PC guy myself it pains me to admit that the climate change aspect is actually huge and Macs right now are way ahead on that front, no doubt. I chose AMD over intel for lower power consumption between the two choices I narrowed it down to. I too hope we'll see more energy efficient PC component architecture in the future.
David Kudell
Senior Member
With a custom water cooler kit, we can place the fans/radiator/pump
into another room or outside, even better when also cooling the GPU.
A lot less heat in the room and 100% silent PC.
I made this for my dad a few years ago.
https://www.tweaktown.com/news/8965...ith-9-fans-can-cool-4-gpus-at-once/index.html
https://www.aliexpress.com/i/1005004621515396.html
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004314190865.htmlhttps://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004622032781.htmlhttps://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholes...42&origin=y&SearchText=Bykski+GPU+Water+Block
If outside or another room is not possible, with a big enough radiator it is possible to
use with VERY low RPM fans and maybe even with no fan, but the heat and pump
will stay in the room.
I recommend everyone to underclock the PC's CPU/GPU a little to counteract factory
overclocking, some CPU undervolt may help too.
AMD ECO mode
Fanless PC
https://www.youtube.com/@fullysilentpcs/videos
That’s pretty cool (no pun intended) but it also kind of demonstrates to me that a PC is a Dodge Charger and the Apple Silicon is a Tesla.
