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delegate

Yep.

Yesterday was the first time in many years when I decided to check out how much a good gaming PC would cost me today.

The price for a i7 6700K 4.1GHz, 32GB RAM, 500GB SSD and nVidia GTX 1070: €1515 EUR (case and CPU cooler included).

Add a €360 27" Monitor and the total goes to € 1875. Let's round that up to €2000.

A similarly powered iMac (i7, 32GB RAM, 500GB SSD and an inferior Radeon R9 M395X) costs exactly: 4.189,00 €

More than double the price! Granted, the iMac monitor is much better, but the price difference gives you 2000 EUR to splash on monitors and still be up 189EUR ! Or maybe splash it on VR helmets and a new bike ?

And that thing gives me all the games plus VR and the pretty powerful Visual Studio IDE for hacking.

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> The price for a i7 6700K 4.1GHz, 32GB RAM, 500GB SSD and nVidia GTX 1070: €1515 EUR (case and CPU cooler included).

That's not a gaming pc. That looks more like a gaming-capable Workstation. Absolutely overkill CPU (games are seldom cpu bound), and too much RAM (games don't care).

I suggest a glance at Logical Increments [0], which is definitely biased towards gaming, to see what you can do at a given price point. Note that just because of the gsync fiasco and the cloud-connected drivers nonsense, I'd gravitate towards an AMD GPU if I had to buy now.

[0] http://www.logicalincrements.com/

If I may, Logical Increments is nice, but sometimes leads astray. I develop a hardware recommender, and this is in my eyes a good gaming PC for 1440p: https://www.pc-kombo.de/share/OqqYoLX. i5-6600K with 16GB DDR4-3000 on a Z170 board, good psu and good cooler. When playing on a lower resolution like the usual 1080p, AMD with a RX 480 would be a good choice, otherwise there is no alternative to the GTX 1070.

Intel just released the Kaby Lake processors which are tiny bit faster (because they are clocked higher), currently integrating this. But does not change much.

Agree with the config you recommend except the storage.

Both HDD and SSD are IMO too small.

For HDD, the 1TB is inefficient: €51 for 1TB, €98 for 3TB — that is more than 50% difference in cost/TB (both for WD blue desktop series as listed on computeruniverse.net).

For the SSD, the 256 GB is just too small. Sure that’s enough to boot Windows, but not enough to fit more than a couple of modern games, they easily take 50GB/each. I’d rather recommend 480GB these days.

You are right. The 1TB HDD is inefficient as price-per-gigabyte is a lot higher than 2 or 3 TB. On the other hand, almost always when I recommend bigger drives I get the feedback that 1TB is more than enough… Depends on the usage.

Regarding the SSD, for Windows a 120GB or even a 60GB SSD would be enough (but those are also slower). 250GB is already a lot of additional space for games – again, it depends on the usage. A couple of games is what is the usual way of thinking for what a SSD should be used, and for that 250GB is just right. But if one wants multiple modern AAA games on it at the same time 480GB sure is more useful.

There's another factor, though, which you missed entirely: larger SSDs have muchz much faster write speeds, and also read speeds. The parallel NAND chips provide a sort of intra-device RAID

But I did mention that, for the smaller SSDs? It's also true for 250GB vs 512GB, but the main appeal of having an SSD does not get lost by getting a smaller one – latency and faster load times than with a HDD.

> Logical Increments is nice, but sometimes leads astray.

I'm not a fan of their brackets and they also seem to favor nvidia over amd, but it's serves the purpose of, without actually having to put a machine together in pcpartpicker [0], seeing what can be done at a price point with current pieces.

[0] https://pcpartpicker.com/

Yes. It serves its purpose and is a good idea, but I saw multiple builds based on it that were off (things like: when do you need an aftermarket cooler, when a mainboard with a Z-chipset, …). My https://www.pc-kombo.de/ is an alternative approach which I think is more accurate, and also less work than pcpartpicker, that is why I took the liberty to mention it here.

That looks pretty cool!

Too bad about the language barrier, but I'm guessing more languages (such as spanish or english) are in the roadmap somewhere.

Thanks. Yes, they are :) Currently working on making the hardware selection both broader, customizable and more reliable, and then I'll try (again, turned out to be hard so far) to get into some US-american APIs.

I'm missing an option to disable HDD altogether. I have one hefty NAS, and the other systems only have SSDs (128 GB in the notebook, 256 GB on the desktop).

If you have JS enabled, all boxes (apart from processor and mainboard) have a small black circle with a minus sign at the top right. Clicking on it will disable the category, and that carries over when searching again.

I think at 1080p gaming, CPU power is more important nowadays. Overwatch benefits greatly from the i7 6700k over the i5 6600k, going from 240-260fps to 300fps (the cap imposed by the engine, hitting this cap is useful for reducing input lag). As a result I've seen many gaming builds rocking the 6700k (and even 3000Mhz RAM!)

This just isn't true. Upping the resolution doesn't make the game more CPU intensive by much. Upping the resolution pushes the GPU.

In this context, going to 1080p means lowering the resolution, allowing to use more money for the processor exactly because it means pushing the gpu less. I don't agree that a normal gaming PC needs a i7-6700K (reducing input lag in one game is something for pro gamers playing it as a job), but the logic is sound.

When today's cards are being designed to push 1440p/4k/2x1080p(VR) resolutions, I consider 1080p to be a "lower" resolution.

Depends on your monitor, if you decide on 144fps/hz, that can take a serious chunk out of your CPU. Lets say a game runs easy at 75FPS on the cpu, and lets assume it's 60% used. If you want to crank out 144fps, you have a problem. i7 6700K might be enough though, nut sure on the absolute required specs.

The "games don't use CPU" line is only really true for multiplatform games that must also run on the low performance PS4/XBox One AMD Jaguar CPUs.

If we look at PC exclusives [1] then we can see that these are extremely CPU-hungry games. This hunger only goes up if we want to achieve a framerate higher than 60, say going for 144.

I personally have an i7 @ 3.8 GHz with GTX 1060 and none of these games can hold a stable 1080p @ 144 Hz.

[1] For example Dota 2, H1Z1, DayZ, Civilization 6, Guild Wars 2

Fallout 4, Skyrim, Guild Wars 2, World of Warcraft and many more popular games are heavily CPU bound. Also, considering this is hacker news I think we can assume the gp doesn't need "just" a gaming PC

Visual Studio, or any kind of VM will easily chew through the high end CPU and RAM.

Maybe it's by design but that site runs horribly on my phone. (Nexus 6)

Ridiculous argument. Macs have never been the value proposition, especially when they get fully loaded. Any literally any point in the history of the Mac, you could say "but you can get a comparable PC cheaper!" and it would be true.

Macs have always been expensive, everyone has always complained that they're expensive, and they will continue to be expensive. This isn't new.

Nah. In 2013, macs were slightly more expensive than a comparable PC spec-wise, but still a fairly good deal. In 2016, the prices appear to have almost doubled and is totally unreasonable, while the specs are... malnourished. They even took away the escape key and the magsafe port. :(

According to their Amazon product page, the XPS 13 has a 2.5Ghz i5 and 8GB of RAM. It has a 256GB SSD and a 3000x1800 screen. It's selling for $1,350, original price $1,799.

The 13" MacBook with touchbar has a 2.9Ghz i5 with 8GB of RAM. It has a 256GB SSD and a 2560x1600 screen. It's selling for $1,699, original price $1,799.

I know people love to complain about the new MacBook and believe me, I have some complaints about it too, but it's hard to argue with the numbers. If the MacBook is overpriced, Dell is getting away with the same thing, while somehow being highly recommended in every thread on HN.

MacBook: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01LTHXAEU/ref=dp_ob_neva_mob...

Dell: https://www.amazon.com/Dell-XPS9360-3591SLV-Laptop-Generatio...

I noticed the same thing with phones. I've read a lot of comments that the iPhone was much more expensive than Android phones. But whenever I ask for Android recommendations, the very same people would recommend phones like the S7 that are just as expensive as iPhones.

The difference between the Android & iPhone market is the existence of a low end in the Android market. Flagship Android phones cost just as much as iPhones do. But if you're willing to not get the flagship, you can often get budget models for 30-50% of the cost. The Moto G, for example, is a perfectly good phone, as are various budget LG phones. You don't have that option in the Apple ecosystem.

You do realize that the Dell is 20% cheaper right? That is a large price difference.. perhaps the issue is that people seem to insinuate that 20% price difference isn't much for them so its not much for everyone.

Also, the real value proposition for PC's is that they go on sale more than once a year and you can generally get discounts, replacement parts, upgrades, spares without that 20% premium again..

Any my first entry into this thread was "Apple computers are always more expensive". The rebuttal was "yeah but they're twice the price of a comparable PC". 20% is right in line with "more expensive" but a far cry from "twice the price".

How much will that Dell be worth vs the MacBook in 3 years? While not a fan of the newest MacBook, I don't have to be because they -last-.

Because no one's actually buying the Dell ;).

People complain about things they care about.

Yeah, and in every thread about the XPS, there's someone talking about their horrible experience with drivers and support, all the while saying "but the new ones look nice!".

Honestly I would love if everyone switched away from Mac. Apple (like Intel) is at their best when their back is against the wall. When they're running the show, they get lazy.

This thread was/is about desktop computers—workstations or gaming PCs, at least up to the root comment about an i7-6700K.

Apple's workstation and gaming machine offerings are widely acknowledged to be significantly under-powered and over-priced.

The comment I replied to say "priced have doubled for 2016", but there were no iMacs released in 2016. The latest iMac is from October 2015. So the only way to compare prices for 2016 models is MacBooks. There is no valid comparison between a brand new Windows desktop vs a brand new Mac desktop because there is no new brand new Mac desktop. The Mac Pro workstation hasn't been updated since 2013, and the Mac Mini hasn't been updated since 2014.

There are no valid comparisons between the prices of a modern Windows desktop and a modern Mac desktop because there is no modern Mac desktop.

I forgot to specify I'm looking at non-US numbers. Apple's been hiking foreign market prices quite a bit. Also, the markup gets worse when you venture into higher specced builds.

In 2013, I was in the market for a new computer, and my top choices were a System76 Pangolin for $702, or a 15" Retina MBP for $2399. Their basic stats (CPU, RAM, disk, base screen resolution) were largely identical; I think the Pangolin actually had the advantage in disk & CPU. The MBP had a nicer keyboard, screen, touchpad, weight, and battery life though.

I ended up going back to Macs for my 2015 upgrade, but that was largely because I wanted to do Apple Watch development. You've always paid a "Mac tax" for Apple products, and it's usually been in the 2-3x range.

> They even took away the escape key

Wait, really?

No. The TouchBar has replaced the function row of keys, so yeah, there's no physical Esc key, but there is still an Esc key on the TouchBar if you want one. In practice, it's the same thing and works the same way.

Your argument is also ridiculous.

The biggest difference between a PC and an iMac is the form factor. An windows all-in-one pc with the mentioned specs is probably about as expensive as the iMac (if there even exists one).

It would have been better to compare it to an Mac Pro, which probably would be even more expensive...

As for the general price of apple products, Surface book, lenovo, dell xps (outside of USA) are just as expensive as Macbooks. But sure, you can always get a windows laptop with worse specs or quality.

So you can get a PC with Mac Pro specs for the price of an iMac?

Exactly. This has been true of every Apple product. If you compare only the specs, Macs, iPhones, iPads etc. are more expensive. If you factor in resale value or the fact that they last twice as long as a comparable Acer/Samsung device then they are absolutely worth their price.

This is my thought too. PC has always been interesting to people who care about performance, price, future proofing, free software, etc. Specifically glad the author is going to be well, on the side of the Holy Master Race but overall people who want to buy macs are, in my opinion, paying for the shiny brush and Apple not the guts. I run Debian on my thinkpad e5 series without any problems. Ubuntu 16,04 installed with 4k multi monitor support out of the box. Windows is dead, long live Tux

I don't think so, when you compare Macs to Windows machines with similar build quality. I got my 2014 rMBP because it was $200 cheaper than a Surface Pro 3 with the same specs at the time.

Yeah, it's been a historical constant that Apple desktops were very pricey compared to PC with similar specs.

I just tried to find a screen that's comparable to the iMac (resolution 5210 x 2880 and wide gamut colour space), and those I did find actually were around $2000 (i. e. http://amzn.to/2iPC5SZ).

I also believe the price difference is magnified by the options you chose – Apple does indeed charge too much for additions like RAM. The base model, with the same 5k screen, only costs $2000.

All that's neither here nor there – if I'm spending 10h+/day with something, I'm not going to look too hard at the price. Just the difference in noise is worth a significant premium, not to mention macOS.

Edited: macOS :)

Note the potential extensive value for someone who needs a display they can use with multiple inputs or wants to keep it for the future... There's something different about a standalone display panel. Besides all said and done a custom build PC + 2x 4k panels can be bought for the same price range so why wouldn't you? Because Apple socks the psychology of scale and experience at you so the price is a bit easier of a pill to swallow alongside any other hang backs you may have: closed ecosystem of software, oh and hardware, questionable design changes re: battery life and touch bar in latest MBP, their pattern of designed obsolescence, insert gripe here but that's plenty for me to laughably head to the nearest Dell or Lenovo product when it comes to a laptop and entirely self built when it comes to PC.

Right now I have a thinkpad e560 with 1tb ssd, 16GB rip jaws ram, i76500u at 2.5ghz. Now I know this anecdote is not really the same as what is on the market now but I paid $1.2k, I have a blu-ray if I want it, extra ssd if I don't. Also card reader. And plenty of USB 2/3 and network and even a Fucking VGA out. It's just as fast as my last retina MBP, and I used the cash differece for 4k panel.

Why people upgrade so often is beyond me. Maybe it's a capitalism thing. This human race is fucked.

Well that iMac has 5K display. Try to find that for your PC and see how much it costs together.

For a gaming PC, 5K isn't so useful, because it's so difficult to render 5K at an acceptable framerate and graphics detail.

It's just pointless to compare. A Mac isn't useful for gaming anyways, since only a handful of games are available and drivers aren't optimised anyway.

You can always run Windows on your iMac, but again, 5k is just not a realistic gaming resolution yet.

I bet with a bit of deal scouring one could find a 5k panel that is comparable but not quite as good. The opportunity cost of using that monitor on any other computer rather than just the one mac? Priceless. Fuck Apple, they sell you on the brand not the product they just happen to have good products.

I love my iMac not because if any brand cachet, but I program a lot and love crisp typography on the screen. It is quite simple, you don't have to buy one, no it isn't a gaming machine. No reason to fuck Apple about it.

There are lots of programming fonts designed to be used without anti-aliasing. This is a much cheaper way to get crisp typography.

I use proportional fonts and feel most programming fonts are butt ugly. But even then, there isn't no reason to go with a crippled font designed for low resolution (1080p). The hardware is available now and while not "cheap", is definitely affordable when compared to my monthly salary. Most of us aren't living in the third world.

speak only for yourself, please. I live in EC, but in a less developed country. After monthly expenses, I have 200-300 euros left for gadgets, travel and unexpected expenses.

Hence my qualification. There are definitely places where the price isn't worth it yet. The world is not economically homogenous.

It would seem you love things that aren't exclusive to Apple, crisp fonts and development friendly ecosystem. I make my living writing code and I never game these days so I feel you! I say fuck apple because they know they have a huge market and they can exploit it, for money and not for the sake of the user. There are other ethical reasons to dislike the company but those are my own so idc much what others think there I just say fuck apple since they went and removed the decision making process and told me what I wanted. I had to go find what I wanted instead. Obviously to each their own I'm just spitting my thoughts as per the definition of a comment.

You really really don't have to buy from Apple if you don't want to. I'm considering a surfacebook for my next laptop, and the Surface Studio would be a really cool (but expensive) way of replacing my iMac. Apple doesn't have a monopoly on computers, if they work for you great! If not, there is plenty of competition.

They do seem to still have a monopoly on decent track pads, perhaps we should get the FTC and DOJ involved :).

> FTC and DOJ

Yes, I would do anything for a better trackpad!

Refresh rate for mac monitors are usually low, which is really bad for gaming.

Yet, most people end up down scaling to 1440p due to the sub-par AMD graphics it comes with

I have a number of PCs and Macs at home (even a Sierra hackintosh) and I just prefer working on macOS.

I tried switching to Windows for work but ultimately I need iOS and macOS compilation and I also miss the macOS ecosystem too much (Alfred, Karabiner, BetterTouchTool, iTerm, etc). Also Windows is plagued by legacy software, which is not an absolute deal breaker but who prefers working with ugly outdated software?

If you have big hardware requirements moving to Windows or Linux is a no brainer. Even when money is not an issue, with Apple you are stuck with decrepit AMD GPUs.

Really? This tired old argument again? Nobody buys an iMac as a gaming machine.

I have an iMac and a gaming PC. You don't need to spend even $2k for a capable gaming PC.

Also you don't have to spend $4k for a 5K iMac. Mine was about $2k.

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