Comment by margorczynski | Hacker News Reader

Comment by margorczynski | Hacker News Reader

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I think you went way overboard with the costs - a good AM5 MOBO is around $200, case $150, AIO cooling or good fan $100 and a good PSU would be $200. That's a total of $650. Add to that assembly and sanity checking for let's say $100 (many times it comes free for these upper end setups) and we get $750.

That's a total, with your estimates for the CPU and GPU prices, of $2300 which is around $1000 lower than the Studio while having more power. I agree the power efficiency is worse but also note that the Mac simply doesn't have access to the same compute power. Also the CPU and GPU are redlined by default and going down to almost 50% TDP only causes a 5% drop in performance so it is not that bad.

Of course there are advantages that you mentioned (form factor, better support) but, at least for me, that is not worth a $1k+ premium. Also using MacOS for me at least is a pain compared to Linux.

You're comparing against the ultra. I'm using (and talking) about the base model Max, which is $1999 all in. (The Ultra is 20 core, btw. It's essentially two Maxes fused together.)

I will agree that the Ultra ($3999) is probably not a great value for most people, since outside of synthetic benchmarks, it's usually more like 10-20% faster, not 100%, as outside of editing 8k video or AI, there really isn't much that scales well to that many threads.

Another thing I'll mention, and that I think really is a big part of the special sauce, is the insane memory bandwidth.

A 7950x has a maximum memory bandwidth of 83.7GB/sec. An M1 Max has 409GB/sec.

It's really hard to outrun RAM that's essentially soldered directly to the CPU.

I’m generally a pretty big fan of self-built systems in general and Intel in particular (what can I say, every couple years they pulled a rabbit out of their hat during my childhood, it was really magical).

But that memory bandwidth is some envy inducing stuff.

The ram is regular package on package stuff, it's not the reason for the high bandwidth.

The bandwidth is due to apple giving more area and pins to more channels.

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