241–250 of 672 posts
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> Is there a legit reason why they couldn't make these things upgradeable at all even on a studio machine? For the SSD, no. For the memory, yes. The memory lives on the same chip as the CPU and the GPU, it's even more tightly bound than just being soldered on. The memory being there has legitimate technical benefits that make it much easier/cheaper for them to reach the extremely high memory bandwidths that they do.
This, although it's not merely "easier/cheaper", it's "impossible" (unless you sacrifice a ton of performance) Same reason as a) GDDR on dGPUs (I think I read somewhere that GDDR is very much like regular DDR, just with much tighter paths and thus soldered in) and b) Framework Desktop (performance would reportedly halve if RAM were not soldered) SSD reasons I seem to recall are architectural for security: some parts…
As someone who came from the SGI O2/Octane era when high-end workstations were compact, distinctive, and sexy, I’ve never really understood the allure of the Mac Pro, with the exception of the 2013 Mac Pro tube, which I owned (small footprint, quiet, and powerful). For me, aesthetics and size are important. That workstation on your desk should justify its presence, not just exist as some hulking box. When Apple relea…
> That workstation on your desk should Under your desk, right? Right?!
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No it isn't, it is a mini where you can add audio cards, which is basically the only extensions it has available. Hardly workstation class.
It's certainly beefier than a Mini - 6 TB5 ports (which can drive 6 PCIe 5.0 x4 slots in an enclosure if you want), M3 Ultra, up to 256GB RAM.
This is a workstation,
https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/desktop-computers/precision-...
As someone who came from the SGI O2/Octane era when high-end workstations were compact, distinctive, and sexy, I’ve never really understood the allure of the Mac Pro, with the exception of the 2013 Mac Pro tube, which I owned (small footprint, quiet, and powerful). For me, aesthetics and size are important. That workstation on your desk should justify its presence, not just exist as some hulking box. When Apple relea…
> That workstation on your desk should Under your desk, right? Right?!
I bet there’s gonna be a banger of a Mac Studio announced in June. Apple really stumbled into making the perfect hardware for home inference machines. Does any hardware company come close to Apple in terms of unified memory and single machines for high throughput inference workloads? Or even any DIY build? When it comes to the previous “pro workloads,” like video rendering or software compilation, you’ve always been…
DGX workstations, expensive but allow PCI cards as well. https://marketplace.nvidia.com/en-us/enterprise/personal-ai-...
I bet there’s gonna be a banger of a Mac Studio announced in June. Apple really stumbled into making the perfect hardware for home inference machines. Does any hardware company come close to Apple in terms of unified memory and single machines for high throughput inference workloads? Or even any DIY build? When it comes to the previous “pro workloads,” like video rendering or software compilation, you’ve always been…
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Can confirm. I have a Ryzen 9800X3D with RTX 5070, 128GB of RAM and TBs of Gen 5.0 NVMes. Not only it is screamingly fast (the fastest on earth for some workloads), but I can upgrade it easily. And is dead silent too. The best thing is it runs native Linux and it just works.
And a 9800X3D is not even the fastest CPU out there, nor even the fastest CPU you could use with your specific motherboard. A 9950X3D is essentially two of the 9800X3Ds combined, and would be a drop-in replacement.
There are various reasons for this, major one being that the 9800X3D has more L3 cache per thread than the 9950X3D.
And also wrong that a 9950X3D is 2x 9800X3D combined. A quick glance would tell you that, since 9950X3D has 128MB of L3 cache shared between more threads while 9800X3D has 96mb for half the threads, so more L3 per thread.
And most of the times, even when a 9800X3D loses to 9950X3D in games, it's usually within 1-4% margin for most games.
It's a monster for games and some workloads.
It's funny that people who blindly buy 9950X3D for gaming+office workloads without checking benchmarks often end up with similar or slower performance.
Much smarter to use the price difference on other hardware to speedup other things such as faster NVMEs, efficient silent cooling, faster GPUs, etc.
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As someone who worked on the M2 Mac Pro and has a real soft spot for it, I get it. It’s horrendously expensive and doesn’t offer much benefit over a Mac Studio and a thunderbolt pci chassis. My personal dream is that vms would support pci pass through and so you can just spin up a Linux vm and let it drive the gpus. But at that point, why are you buying a Mac? Opinions are my own obvs.
> Opinions are my own obvs. Whose else would they be?
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Except by most all regards that product is great.
By "great" do you mean 8GB of non-upgradable soldered RAM in 2026?
I'd argue that if memory and storage were still customer-expendable, they wouldn't have even considered making this product.