61–70 of 71 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you want to have a stable system when overclocking 3GHz --> 4.5Ghz, it's a good choice.
Wow, you need to spend that much for decent voltage regulators?
However, never ever skimp on motherboard if you're planning to overclock :)
A lot of that iMac's cost is its retina display, and you didn't bother buying a retina display for the PC. Running a speed test is silly, there are already major differences in the build. To make this remotely more scientific, you'd either need to buy a 4k monitor for the PC, or use a Mac Pro and just take the monitor out of the equation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article also leaves out the cost of their IT guy's time to assemble the custom PC components. How much does an hour of Joseph WU's time cost? How many hours did it take for him to order, receive, unpack, and then assemble the components?
My guess would be most of Wu's time was spent researching which components to order, probably several hours. On the other hand, if he's a full time employee, then it does not cost anything extra to have him do his job.
I'm surprised by HN's response here. I always thought it was common knowledge that a custom PC would be faster than a mac. You don't pay for speed with Apple, you pay for user experience.
Which isn't vastly relevant in a single-application-suite workflow. It's end-to-end Adobe so you plug your SD card in, it copies some files out to an Adobe library and you edit them in Lightroom.
I think many of the problems people are describing is more to do with what's being compared in hardware. Different monitor resolution, different CPU, etc.
My own objection is buying top-end rubbish from a photography equipment supplier. You can get similar spec stuff and much cheaper. This seems to be an exercise in trying to spend $4k (which is actually quite hard when you're not buying a Mac) rather than building for value.
Now, the PC price comes out to $4370+42=$4412, so we need to drop $1146 of from the PC to get a realistic price comparison. The RAM, Screen, SSD, and graphics card are anchored due to our Apples to Not Apples comparison. That leaves the motherboard, case, CPU, power supply and water cooler to drop in price.
I don't know water cooling particularly well, but lets say we leave that in to continue overclocking the CPU, but drop to a lesser model, same with the Power Supply and Case. So revised budget for each is:
Case: $125 -> $80 Power Supply: $140 -> $80 Water cooling: $120 -> $80
Now a gaming motherboard was selected because it's stable for overclocking, but let's throw caution to the wind and drop our budget to half that and hope it still overclocks stable. $480 -> $240
That leaves $261 for the CPU, which buys an i5-6600K (3.5GHz), or we drop the water cooling and run everything at stock to get to an i7-6700K (4GHz). In other words, the same processor in the iMac. If this benchmarks any differently, it's the Lightroom developers fault, not the hardware.
So, the upshot is, spending the same amount on a Mac will get you the same specs in a much better looking equivalent device.
[1] http://www.macmall.com/p/product~dpno~13697228~pdp.jhffibb?s...
[2] http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1190421-REG/apple_z0sd...
[3] http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1190421-REG/apple_z0sd...
[4] http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=&sku=11429...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My guess would be most of Wu's time was spent researching which components to order, probably several hours. On the other hand, if he's a full time employee, then it does not cost anything extra to have him do his job.
If he is a full time employee then the time he spent researching and assembling this computer was time he didn't spend doing the job he was paid for.