211–220 of 448 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Apple has a huge advantage price / performance wise My 7950x machine cost, excluding the enthusiast GPU, $3000. That's less than half the cost of the M2 Ultra.
You spent $3000 before gpu on a custom PC!?
You could easily add another $1K by going crazy with RAM and NVME storage.
The comments here are strange. So many people making claims that power utilization doesn't matter. Perhaps not to them, but it does for many. Energy prices are getting higher and higher in many parts of the country, heck in the world. Devices that consume more power generate more heat. So now one is likely using more electricity to keep their home or office cool and comfortable. Noise matters for many people using wo…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> My Mac uses almost an order of magnitude less power than the PC and I keep the PC powered off. Either you are not measuring power consumption correctly, or there is something very wrong with your PC.
I believe they're saying they keep it powered off because it uses a magnitude more power. And it's an entirely believable statement. A Mac Mini uses between 5w - 20w. Many PCs idle at >50W, and under use hit 500W+.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple's GPU performance is what makes me sceptical about their gaming related advertising. Sure, you can do 1080p gaming with the highest SKU, but you're paying through the nose if you bought an M2 to play games. It seems strange to me for Apple to advertise something they haven't exactly mastered yet on stage. Maybe they have some kind of optimization up their sleeves that will roll out later? I can imagine Apple co…
They announced MetalFX for their upscaling tech last year and by all accounts it works well if developers take advantage of it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It still has the advantage of a much larger memory pool. Why do you think NVIDIA doesn't "just add" "more memory"? To its $40,000 H100s, which top out at "just" 80GB? The answer isn't price segmentation.
Yes, it's not price segmentation, it's planned obsolescence. The 3080 series would be fine for likely beyond the 50x0 series gpu-wise, but current games are already starting to stutter unless you downgrade textures because of its limited VRAM
I think it’s a U shaped curve.
Beyond 80GB, today, the larger chip would maybe all of these: yield less, scale worse, take too much power, etc.
Like this matching of compute resources to RAM is partly the difference between CPUs and GPUs.
Anyway, it’s just to say that it isn’t a business decision. The extra RAM in the M2 doesn’t help the GPU much for the same tasks the H100 excels at, because it isn’t performant enough to use that RAM anywhere near the same way an H100 would, and if it were, there would have to be less RAM. The H100 doesn’t even have a graphics engine. It’s complicated.
The comments here are strange. So many people making claims that power utilization doesn't matter. Perhaps not to them, but it does for many. Energy prices are getting higher and higher in many parts of the country, heck in the world. Devices that consume more power generate more heat. So now one is likely using more electricity to keep their home or office cool and comfortable. Noise matters for many people using wo…
Because Workstation, by a lot of people's definition, are suppose to be the power hungry in exchange for absolute performance?
Whereas raw performance specs are typically high but ultimately dependent on use case.
The M2 has been a bit underwhelming in general through all of its iterations: Apple jumped into such a lead with the M1 [1], so it was disappointing when they slowly iterated while Intel and AMD have made enormous strides catching up. Everyone keeps citing TDP, but given that we're talking about desktops that just isn't a huge factor. Having said that, the 7950X was released late February, and the 13900KS was release…
With power in city downtowns (eg San Jose) at $0.50+/kWh it’s definitely becoming a huge factor. My Mac uses almost an order of magnitude less power than the PC and I keep the PC powered off.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Desktop pcs requiring a ludicrous amount of power and cooling is absolutely problematic. High-end PSUs now overlap with smaller space heaters on power output. My living room is usually 3-4 degrees hotter around my desk than it is by the dining table.I'm looking to upgrade my gaming PC, and getting the power budget under control is surprisingly challenging.
For your gaming PC you likely don't even need a current gen chip. You are probably fine with a 5600 for most games unless you NEED high FPS on certain games and have a monitor with 244hz refresh rate (or you won't even get the frames) Gaming is mostly about GPU (if you're casual gamer and want to run 1440p) but if you do need cpu and high refresh rate then you're likely hardcore FPS or RTS games and you're running at…
Many gamers, like me, probably also use their display for things aside from gaming. For non-gaming computer work I like 4K w/ a high (120hz ideally) refresh rate for well rendered text and smoother movement. But as I also then want to use this monitor for gaming, I need a gaming system that supports this.
TLDR; you might need a current gen chip for reasons other than gaming.
50% slower than the absolute best of class NVIDIA discrete GPU offering that consumes massively more wattage is hardly a damning statement.
The absolute "best of class" Nvidia card is currently the 4090, which can be up to 30% faster than the 4080 in scaling workloads. What would be more interesting is to see how Nvidia's laptop cards fare here though - they're constrained to much lower wattage (80-120w) and would make for a much fairer fight against the ~200w M2 Ultra.
Then you’d be looking for a 24 core CPU, 64GB RAM, 1TB PCIe 5 SSD, mainboard with 6x thunderbolt ports, a silent cooling setup, high quality case that is both small and all the gear while running cool. and if you’re stuck with MS Windows - an Operating System.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it? Why? My machine is entirely silent on normal operations (Zen 3 5600X and RX 6700). All the fans, on both GPU and CPU are stopped in desktop usage. And it doesn't obviously eat that much power (my monitor probably eats more). The only moment I could hear them is if I play games. And then I have headset on, so I can't hear them. I really couldn't care less if it ate twice the amount of power when playing games.
You should care because you're paying for that energy use lol