Hacker News Reader

Comment by unxdfa | Hacker News Reader

Not sure how long that'll play out. The 13th gen have barely been integrated in stuff and they seem to, at least on single thread, smash AMD in the price/performance ranking. 13700K is a beast of a CPU for not much money. Also the next two gens of Intel stuff is very different. At least AMD are giving them an ass kicking which they deserve.

My PC has a 12400 in it which actually realistically kicks my M1 Pro MBP in the teeth on some things which is embarrassing as it's a junk ass end Lenovo desktop machine that cost <$500.

We live in interesting and exciting times.

View on HN

Keep in mind the prices are changing quickly as of late. AMD brought out the 7700, 7900, and 7950 (non-x) that are cheaper, generate less heat, and include a fan. There's also been pretty heavy discounts on the 7700x/7900x/7950x AMD chips as well. DDR5 and Motherboard prices for the am5 chips are dropping as well. Microcenter is even including 8GB free with a CPU purchase. The price/perf of the AM5 platform has changes quite a bit in the last month.

Intel does win some benchmarks, but often at substantially higher power consumption. The AMD chips run cooler and even significantly reducing the TDP down to 65 watts often has a single digit percentage slow down.

The cost in the 7000 series is the motherboards at the moment. They're still extortionately priced. 2x the price of an equivalent Intel one and that hasn't changed. It's improving but nowhere near reasonable. The AM4/B550 combo is still pretty good however.

99% of what I do is single thread bound so I really want to see some single thread power benchmarks but no one seems to bother with those.

I'm in the market for a PC with the best single thread performance out there at the moment so I've got several machines configured in pcpartpicker and spreadsheets at the moment :(

A520 motherboards should be coming out soon. Hopefully they're cheap and don't suck.

Have you looked recently?

I've been tracking DDR5 motherboard (I think the perf is worth it), MicroATX (don't need fullsize), I don't need blinking lights, watercooling systems, wifi, or exotic sound systems, so I go for relatively barebones motherboards. I do want something small, quiet, 2.5G ethernet, and has dual m.2 slots.

On Newegg I found an Intel ASRock Riptide for $159 [0].

On Newegg I found an AMD ASRock Riptide for $169 [1].

I'll happily take the AMD and end up with a quieter and cooler system for the $10.00 premium. Debating between a 7700 (non-x), 7700X3D, or 7900 (non-x). Hopefully it lasts as long as my current (2015) desktop.

Do you consider a $10 premium "extortionately priced"?

[0] https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16813162061 [1] https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16813162083

UK here. Based on my needs, an Asus Prime H610 board that'll take a 13700K is £85. The cheapest AM5 board is £175.

(I'm checking one vendor here who I know has a decent returns policy when your system integration goes to hell, another common AMD problem from much experience!)

Ah, wasn't looking that low. That gets you half the memory channels, half the memory bandwidth, half the PCIe, and 40% of the ethernet bandwidth. They go for $100-$110 here, doesn't seem worth saving $50, at least if you plan to keep the system for 5-10 years.

BTW, AM5 added the ability to upgrade BIOS without a CPU. So no more nightmares of having to beg a CPU, borrow a CPU from AMD, or RMA to get a compatible CPU<->BIOS setup.

Yeah if I throw a B660 in there the price is closer. I would probably do that.

Good to hear that about the CPU issue. I found that one out the hard way and had to scoot around to a friend's house and borrow his CPU for a few minutes. I bought MSI board after that as they had that built in anyway.

AMD scare me on the reliability front. The 3700X and B450 combo I had before was a dick. It would come up 50% of the times with the fans cranking and have to be powered down and back up again a couple of times for it to boot. My Intel machines never did anything like that for the last 25 years or so but the last Athlon XP I had did the same damn thing.

Heh, I've been tracking desktops for quite some time, not noticed any significant reliability differences between AMD and Intel.

My current desktop is a 2015 Xeon e3-1230 which was CHEAPER then the similar i7, but allowed ECC. I do like that the AMD motherboards allow ECC, it's a bit of a mess, but better then nothing. AMD doesn't guarantee/certify it until you upgrade to the Epyc. So you end up digging through motherboard docs, certification lists, and forums. My previous desktop was some early amd64, had no reliability problems with it. Before that I think it might have been an Celeron 300A that was overclocked to 450 MHz, same silicon as their non-celeron 450 MHz CPU, so overclocking was very common then. So far I've been switching between AMD and Intel every gen, and likely on my Xeon replacement.

Are you consistently buying bargain basement boards? I have a 3700X + X570 and I've never had the fans cranking and it fail to boot.

All of them are bargain basement. Some just have shiny things stuck to them and fancy lights.

I tend to go for Asus Prime or MSI Pro boards these days.

No, some of them have better components too. It's not just shiny things and fancy lights.

I was an EE for years. There isn't much in it between the economy boards, corp shitbox boards and really expensive ones despite the marketing garbage.

What do you think of the sabertooth/TUF series boards (if they still have them around)? I always purchased those because they seemed to advertise better components specifically, but maybe I was being bamboozled.

Are there even quality grades for boards at all? Lets say I go into the super premium high price server space and start buying POWER 10s or something, would you say that the grade on those components (the basic stuff, not talking about anything design wise or the socket or whatever, just the base component quality) is also pretty similar to budget x86 boards?

I'm basically asking if there is any reason I should care at all about motherboards outside of whatever IO/cpu socket/memory its got on it, and if that also applies outside of the consumer desktop space.

All the major branded ones seem about equal. The only lesser ones are the weird Wish and Aliexpress ones.

Sure, but AM5 is a platform you'll still have CPUs to upgrade few gen from now, while Intel keeps the same socket for no more than 2 generations of CPUs.

What are you running that is pushing single thread performance but doesn't benefit from more cores?

Asking because IMHO it's so easy to use multiple cores on some parts of an app I feel like everyone should do it.

Compilation mostly (with shit compilers) and single image manipulation.

Which compilers? Always interested in unusual build-system issues.

These are custom written DSL and rule engine compilers. Mostly written or ruined by me.

I have an old i5 750 with 4 cores running Plex server, file server, Minecraft servers for kids, some home apps etc. Minecraft and transcoding has been pushing it a bit so I've been tempted to upgrade. I wonder if it's finally time to jump over to the AMD camp!

Any time I tried AMD in the past (I stopped trying 10 years ago) the AMD CPUs were cheaper but there was some problem that was just enough to keep me with Intel. Weird compatibility issues when compiling packages. Huge power draw. Weird motherboards. Has this improved nowadays?

Otherwise I'm thinking one of the budget i9 parts.

> Huge power draw. Weird motherboards. Has this improved nowadays?

AMD never fully fixed the USB dropout issues under load, AMD CPU/mobo are still extremely problematic for VR setups. There are also some weird issues around stuttering with the onboard fTPM enabled (which windows 11 wants you to use).

Better than the early days where Ryzen 1000 chips had cache defects that led to segfaults under compiling workloads.

The AGESA-BIOS model foists responsibility onto partners for distributing microcode updates and AMD tends to release buggy microcode that partners then have to fix, and they churn the microcode so fast that the fixes often go stale and break other things, but partners have to do them or people accuse them of "buggy BIOS". It's sort of the inverse problem in GPUs where AMD has to fix other people's game bugs in the drivers... partners have to fix AMD's microcode problems in their BIOSs. Commonly manifests as sensor glitches/offset problems/etc, sometimes this has led to real fun problems when those sensors are controlling core/SOC voltage or things like that.

AMD GPUs still suck for VR, the 5700XT series had huge crashing problems under the windows drivers that were never really resolved for a lot of people, and the 7000 series seems to be on course to replicate those sorts of issues. They did finally bring the 7900XTX's idle power down to only about 45W though.

The fans will vehemently deny it but yeah, you're pretty much right. AMD has gotten better but their software/drivers and user-experience still aren't as polished, either CPU or GPU. It's usually good enough it's not a problem, but you're going off the beaten path and they're not always flawless. On the other hand who knows what's going to happen with Intel with an exodus of staff already happening and likely to continue.

7900X, 7800X3D, 7900X3D, and 7950X3D are great looking parts at the right price but Intel is willing to make dealz right now to keep the cash flowing, they've got DDR4 boards to bring the platform cost down, etc. You have to evaluate the whole build and see what you get... and AMD does worse with large 128GB builds right now too. Although Intel is not flawless either to be fair.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P58VqVvDjxo

Around here microcenter is willing to throw in a free 32GB RAM kit of decent quality if you buy a 7000X (not the base tier and unknown whether this will include X3D) and Newegg was offering a similar promotion at one point. Which neutralizes a lot of the platform cost difference - the DDR5 + PCIe 5.0 capable Intel boards aren't cheap either, but, a bit cheaper than AMD right now. Again, gotta look at the whole cost of the build for your own local costs.

Personally I think the DDR4 compatibility makes Intel a no-brainer for very cheap builds. You can get a PCIe 4.0 + DDR4 Intel board for the usual, expected price ranges... PCPP says starting from $79. If you're a fit for a Pentium/Celeron or a 12100/12100F that's a system cost AM5 can't compete with at the low end, you have to go back to AM4 which are slower systems.

The 12600K, 13500, and 13600K are also very good gaming-focused builds. There's nothing wrong with 7800X for gaming either, especially with the free RAM, but, Intel 13th gen does outperform it. And the e-cores are "free" at the MSRP, so Intel is simply giving you more, but, AMD is also dropping prices below MSRP lately (ymmv depending on your location).

For productivity and "server"-ish workloads, the AMD 7900X is great, particularly since AMD supports AVX-512 while Intel has disabled it on 12th/13th gen. And the 7800X3D, 7900X3D, and 7950X3D should all be very attractive high-end gaming+productivity "crossover" components if you are willing to splash out.

Do you have any information on the VR issues? I'm getting really weird issues if I really push MSFS2020 on my Ryzen setup.

official acknowledgement: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/lnmet0/an_update_on_us...

later update: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/m2wqkf/updated_agesa_c...

general discussion, a couple of which are post-update:

this one is interesting because the user has traced it to specific USB controllers and notes that one controller is perfect while the other 2 have problems: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/lrcp8q/x570_usb_dropou...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/p5ygve/anyone_consider...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/wud1xo/was_the_usb_dro...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/twph8r/if_youve_build_...

this is all my personal summary/analysis and not fact, but: it does not seem to be tied to a particular generation of CPU or model of chipset (and this is significant because X570 is actually completely different from every other chipset which are all OEM'd by Asmedia). The symptom is that the USB controller stops responding under load (and I think probably drops frames at that point). Since VR is a very heavy USB load (especially Oculus) this is a semi-reliable reproducer but there's nothing inherent to VR that causes the problem, I think it just seems to be a "happens under load" issue.

AMD put out an AGESA patch which seems to significantly reduce the problem. And again, I think the idea that microcode fixes the problem, and that the problem exists across both AMD OEM and Asmedia OEM chipsets, suggests it's not a hardware problem with the chipset. Actually it may be the opposite, and the problem exists with the SOC implementation of USB and the chipsets themselves are fine. Some boards use the onboard SOC to drive the USB and that sounds like maybe the problem - others drive it off the chipset's USB and maybe that works better. It's possible the CPU themselves have a hardware defect or it may be a problem with the USB software stack inside the SOC. The AMD PSP is like the Intel ME, it gets in underneath the user experience and while you'd hope that USB is not implemented there maybe it is, or maybe it's interfering (mailbox overflow?) or something like that.

Again it's hard to know whether the residual crashes are something the mobo companies themselves might be doing to try and fix AMD's problems... maybe a fix that worked before is now crashing something else. It's hard to say. That's the problem with shipping glitchy microcode to partners. A lot of partners literally have one or two core BIOS devs for the whole company. This came up during the crisis around Zen2/Zen3 BIOS support, and after elmor left ASUS, that basically ASUS really only had a couple guys for the whole damn company and they're not the only ones. And AMD in particular pushes a lot of workload onto their partners. Great that they're moving fast but they break stuff which ends up being someone else's problem, and they're churning code so fast they break the fixes other people are doing for them. They don't publish source, only binaries, and they make the partner's lives very difficult.

https://youtu.be/JluNkjdpxFo?t=1276

https://youtu.be/36kCBQt7YBk?t=237

https://www.overclock.net/search/1039852/?q=agesa&t=post&c[u...

If I was personally in this situation I would try a standalone USB card, and pick from the list curated for the Oculus rift even if you are not using a rift, I think they are just better USB controllers. Put it in a CPU-direct slot and not one attached to the chipset. See if that helps, go from there. Maybe the card works in a chipset lane, maybe the chipset lanes work natively, etc, once it's working try to pin down the delta that causes crashing.

But like... there is this whole gaslighting cycle with the AMD fans. You saw the same thing with the 5700XT. "I have one, there are no crashes, it's 100% stable for me, you're making it up" -> lots of users report it and the gaslighting intensifies (HUB finally ran a poll on 5700XT after months of denial and it turned out over 1/3 of their very technically adept and very pro-AMD userbase reported issues) -> AMD acknowledges there is actually an issue and they're working on it -> patch released and it doesn't fix the issue for everybody -> "OK so there was an issue but it's all better now, if you're still having problems it's your fault!" -> everybody moves on to the next product and if you still have problems welp sucks to be you, my 5800X3D is amazing!

Same thing happened with defective Zen2 early silicon... GamersNexus had their 3950X miss its advertised boost clocks by up to 450 MHz (they actually understated it by 100 MHz, the advertised clock was 4.7 not 4.6), basically 10% of its advertised speed. People did the "it says up to", some people went as far as making programs that just run NOPs in a loop to show that a program could actually hit the advertised clocks so it wasn't technically false advertising. AMD acknowledged an issue, released a patch that didn't help (GamersNexus' review was after the patches, they go into F10c later in the video), the fans moved back to gaslighting, and everyone moved on and forgot about it. Later silicon was higher quality I think and just didn't have a problem but AMD wanted to ship some marginal silicon that didn't quite meet spec and didn't think anybody would call them on it. And indeed they were pretty much right, the fans shrugged and moved on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3sNUFjV7p4&t=254s

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/cfli2n/i_discovered_ho...

Issues with Intel or NVIDIA are front-page news, everyone freaked about POSCAP-vs-MLCC back at 30-series launch, the connector at the 40-series launch, some soldering defects with EVGA 1080s, the whole New Worlds thing (even though that killed some AMD cards too, everyone treated it as an NVIDIA issue), etc, and the AMD stuff is completely downplayed and shoved under the rug even though it's pretty often not fixed, or not fixed 100%, and it's pretty aggravating.

But AMD really stokes the reddit set, they were pioneers in going direct-to-consumer and stoking the fires. GN talks about it earlier in one of those videos, and LTT and Der8auer have said the same thing. Like, it's calmed down a lot over the last couple years but during 2017-2021 it was bad.

https://youtu.be/JluNkjdpxFo?t=259

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x03FyPQ3a3E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rscDxMrZmGU&t=1304s (this is the LTT video that got him set up with a bribe from AMD to bury his Vega FE review, the threadripper preview and the holocube, if anyone remembers that little bit of pocket-sand!) https://youtu.be/oVxVIkw0xd8?t=261

And honestly the gaslighting aspect of that really has not gone away, which I still find incredibly annoying as far as internet discourse. Say there's a problem and people get defensive and will happily generalize their own experiences to tell you yours aren't real. Just say "AMD has driver problems" and someone will pop out of the woodwork to tell you they've been good for 10 years now, as if 5700XT and Vega and Fury X just all didn't happen. Sometimes the drivers/firmware/BIOS are great, sometimes they're not, and if they're not they don't always get fixed, or don't get fixed fully for everyone.

My daughter has USB dropout issues on her 5600 desktop interestingly.

With Plex if you're using the iGPU on the Intel chip, best to stay with it since Ryzen iGPU still isn't supported. Then again, if you're otherwise planning to go i9, an equivalent Ryzen CPU would be more than capable of handling a few transcodes, although obviously wouldn't be as efficient as hardware acceleration.

>The 13th gen have barely been integrated in stuff and they seem to, at least on single thread, smash AMD in the price/performance ranking.

Costs more to run, costs more to make, runs hotter and louder, by "smash" we're usually talking single digit performance gulfs, and performance is worse in a fairly broad amount of applications and where Intel's performance IS better it often is in an application where you would never be able to tell the difference without measurement tools.

The 12400 "kicking the m1 in the teeth" is likely due more to software optimisation than the 12400 actually being meaningfully better.

Your like of Intel's products as a consumer isn't really a reflection of their competitiveness. The only reason you're willing to buy their products at all is that Intel is cutting their margins to the bone whereas AMD is making stacks on every sale. Intel has had the best single core performance for eons and that hasn't saved them from their decline.

In synthetic benchmarks, indeed. In my workloads there's about a 20% lead and yes that might be due to software optimisation etc or something like that but that is a real factor in the outcome. If it saves me 5% of my time that gives me 10 days a year back.

To be clear I'm no loyalist. I went from an AMD 3700X to a 2020 M1 Mac Mini originally because that spanked it. Then to an M1 Pro which was regrettably no real improvement. Then to a 12400 because I had one as a comparison point and it was faster. Now likely a 13700K. Next time, it might be AMD, might be an M3. Who knows?!

I'm mostly just glad I can jump around and pick whatever is on the market rather than being locked into one product or platform now.

Personally, I went 4950, 1700x, 5800x, 12700k. I considered giving intel another try after the 5800x, so I went with the 12700k. I needed a computer quickly, and my previous machine was unavailable.

The next chance I am giving intel is relatively far into the future. Likely in 5-6 years at best given how many stability issues I have had.

Do note that this is pure anecdata, n=1 and likely suffering from a degree of confirmation bias.

What OS are you running on the Intel? I had problems with Linux on it where it'd slow down and then it would freeze entirely. It runs Windows 11 now begrudgingly and have had zero issues.

I am dual booting PopOS and Windows 11.

PopOS has had a surprisingly high number of instability issues and random freezes.

I considered the possibility that the build is the problem, but it’s the same nvidia LTS 22.02 build that I used with the 5800x.

Windows runs fine.

If I didn’t rely on cuda, I’d probably use github’s code spaces for programming and just stay in windows, or run a VM.

Was the same for me then. It’s clearly not year of the Linux desktop yet then.

Amd has been great on Linux, both gpu and cpu drivers, and the linux user base has been increasing at a rate sufficient to cut into windows’ segment.

> PopOS has had a surprisingly high number of instability issues and random freezes.

Is by any chance your disk encrypted? That's the only (major) reason nowadays why I hear about freezes in Linux.

No, my disk was unencrypted, it was a routine installation with distro defaults. I tried Manjaro that was a horrific experience from the get-go.

It's possible that a lot of this in Pop_OS is related to wayland and gnome. The previous machine run a 5800x with a 1080ti, this runs a 12700k with a 3090ti, same distro otherwise.

My 12700k has been rock solid stable. It’s fantastic chip.

I dont jump hardware this often. I would consider am5 100% of the time because the upgrade from a ryzen 7000 would be a used high end am5 cpu years after am6 is out.

I feel the need to interject that in order to fully utilize a chip like 13900kf as done in benchmark scenarios by e.g. youtubers, one needs to put a lot of money on cooling, and control the ambient temperature.

The wattage difference between AMD and Intel cpus is not just a matter of feeding it more electricity. Heat dissipation, air flow if air cooling, or reservoir capacity if water cooling, and control of ambient temperatures matters a lot.

Then, one also needs adequate power delivery to deal with stability issues.

MBP is the only computer I can run intense workloads at high performance while it remains completely silent. I’ve been waiting for such a machine for a long time. When intel can match that they’ll have my attention.

My 14" MBP is not silent under load. It's not loud but not silent.

You can build a suitably quiet PC. Be Quiet power supply, case, fans and cooler. Job done. They run very quiet. I had a 125W TDP CPU in one of them and you could barely hear it under load.

I’ve tried some pretty intense undervolts and power throttling but my PCs have always been annoyingly loud. I think I just need to get a case full of noctuas in my next build. But the dgpu will always be loud as shit regardless.

You can get the GPU to be quiet if you go watercooling combined with quiet fans attached to the radiator. Much more expensive, much more complicated, but also much more efficient when it comes to cooling your equipment.

probably not in their form factor and quality

Can't disagree with the form factor but the quality is equivalent if you ask me. They both are likely to last 5 years+ and stay out of my way.

My Tuxedo Computers Pulse Gen 2 was specifically built to be quiet. I also have a Macbook Pro (2019) here that run a similar workload for testing, and I can tell you that the Pulse is far quieter.

I have 16 cores at 100% right now as I type this and there's no fan noise at all. I'm parsing 10,000+ php files and modifying them for an upgrade. I've done this before and the Mac makes a lot of noise.

MBP is good but it's not all there is. This is a AMD Ryzen 7 5700U with a dual fan setup. It's got performance and efficiency cores similar to the newer Apple chips.

Just throwing it out there! I hope more people support great laptops like this one.

damn that looks really slick. i had no idea anyone cared about fan noise in the windows/linux laptop space. how is the keyboard?

The keyboard is great, normal sized keys and nice to type on. I don't use it a lot but I have big fingers and no trouble with it.

Is this MBP have apple silicon?

No, 2019 is Intel.

Big complaint about your comparison: that (2019) is the last Intel MBP. The 2020 and up MBP are so much quieter under load it's not even funny.

And the Macbook Air doesn't even have a fan.

Sure.. I just meant that Macbooks aren't the only quiet ones. I have them and use them but AMD has made progress, too.

I also spent about $2,500 less than the option with 64GB of RAM from Apple.

My coworker's M1 MBP sometimes sounds like a jet engine.

Who runs intense workloads at high performance on a laptop? There are cloud servers for that.

I've found that simply lowering maximum fan speed on my laptop works well. The fan on what I'm using is nearly inaudible at 30%, yet I still get 90% of the performance on long-running tasks. Much as with desktop CPUs, you pay a lot for that last 10%.

On that note, a lot of laptops have goofy fan curves. In theory, you want the fan to move just enough air that the CPU doesn't throttle, since the rate of heat transfer is proportional to the heatsink-to-air temperature difference.

Apple to oranges. 12400 has a TDP of 65W while M1 has 13.8W. What can a 15W Intel do? Not much

Don't really care. I use my MBP as a desktop machine and the TCO over 5 years including the electricity of the PC is much much lower.

I use my 150$ hand crafted hammer to screw in screws, but it gets beaten by my 5$ screwdriver at screwing performance, shameful.

To get an equivalent metaphor here, you'd have to include "the $5 screwdriver also destroys $300/year worth of projects more than the hammer-screw"

And then yeah. Shamefully short-sighted to use the $5 tool.

Using which equation? I run an 8 year old system76 laptop with a desktop grade CPU and my yearly electricity usage is about 100kwh (I measure pretty much all of our electrical usage), or $35.

In my experience, the biggest electricity hog isn't gonna be your CPU, its gonna be your display(s), if you use any. I don't use any external monitors for my work setup.

The displays are a big part. I did a full breakdown here of costs if you are interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34812247

That's not true at all, M1s in MacBooks absolutely draw more than 15W - they can go all the way up to 90W for whole package.

M1 are silly efficient but not 10x magical: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...

The equivalent Intel laptop is at 220W for both CPU and GPU in the same scenario.

So no 10x, but clearly 2.5x.

Well the (nominally) 15W 1260P is ahead of m1 and the 1280P is faster than the M2. Of course Apple still has better GPUs and is ahead in power efficiency.

The 1260P is rated at 28W, not 15W. It also has 4 more cores than the M2, and it could be considered way more expensive at $480 (the Mac Mini is selling at $600 in its base configuration, for example).

Hardly comparable.

Yeah, doesn't really change the fact that 15W TDP claim is far from truth.

There is no such claim, though.

Apple has published the power figures for some of their systems, and nowhere it says that they draw or dissipate 15W [0]

[0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201897

> My PC has a 12400 in it which actually realistically kicks my M1 Pro MBP in the teeth on some things which is embarrassing as it's a junk ass end Lenovo desktop machine that cost <$500.

And if you factor in power consumption at EU prices?

Yes measured with an average power meter. 12400 Lenovo shitbox is £0.26 per day including the monitor (Iiyama 27" 4K). MBP is £0.19 a day including the monitor (Apple Studio Display). From spreadsheet:

TCO over 5 years for Apple is £3838 (outlay) + £247 (electricity) = £68.08/month

TCO over 5 years for PC is £1045 (outlay) + £405 (electricity) = £24.17/month

That's shit change really but the cost difference is immense.

Also the PC value has gone up since I bought it as I got it on a one day offer. I can shift it for £120 more than I paid for it. The mac, not so much.

The Mac depreciates in the first 18 months more than the entire PC set up and electricity costs.

> including the monitor (Apple Studio Display)

honestly it's impressive that you gratuitously threw in a 1700GBP display on one side of the scale and the cost difference was still only 36% lol.

Also just because the retail price has gone up doesn't mean you can actually sell the PC for the retail price. Resale value of x86 laptops is garbage... it's better for desktops of course especially if you can retain pieces of it, but this is still a super loaded comparison and even then Apple only came out 36% more expensive according to your numbers?

Not sure how you managed to get 36% more expensive. It’s 2.8x the cost.

I’m just reporting where I am not how I got there (which was mostly me going “ooh shiny”)

Those are your numbers, you said GBP 0.26 per day vs GBP 0.19 per day. You didn't show your math on residual value/etc so there's no way for me to go deeper than that, I'm just taking your numbers at face value.

I assume I write the hardware off as assets are a sunk cost immediately and there is no guarantee of a return. So I’m comparing the monthly TCO (over expected lifespan) not just the energy usage.

All you said is relatively true but ignores better power performance for AMD.

"Smashing" ST performance while consuming 150w is not an ideal situation for anyone but gamers and benchmarkers.

And most gamers probably lack the cooling needed for those chips.

AMD has the edge on performance per watt though.

I have a 12400 and a M1 Air. The Air is faster on pretty much anything I've tried, even most benchmarks.

Not when you hit swap it’s not.

Most stuff is multi threaded now, even games.

When they come down in price they should be a damn good buy since it looks like they're much more efficient than AMD chips

Reply on news.ycombinator.com