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Comment by sangnoir | Hacker News Reader

> I think this easily beats any sort of desktop PC you can buy at that price (let's exclude custom builds, they're not the same market).

This is squarely in the NUC/SFF/1l-pc territory, and there is plenty of competition here from Beelink and Minisforum.

I just found the Beelink SER7 going for $509, and it has an 8-core/16-thread Ryzen 7 CPU, 32GB DDR4. The 8845 in the beelink is very competitive[1] with M4 (beaten, but not "easily"), and also supports memory upgrades of up to 256GB.

1. https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m4-vs-amd-ryzen-...

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When you factor in memory bandwidth (80GB/s for DDR4) - that's not even close to the M4 (120GB/s base model).

Which regular desktop tasks are kneecapped by 80GBps memory bandwidth?

You really start taking into account bandwidth when you need 64GB or more (which is rarelly).

If it's audio/video, spawning VMs, it doesn't matter much. If it's for generative software, it might become an issue.

If local LLMs become mainstream then you want as much memory bandwidth as possible. For regular home and office use two channels of DDR4 is more than enough.

Unironically, small LLMs

LLMs and fast GPUs without having a giant PC spring to mind.

It is not more than 60 Gb/s for extreme overclocked DDR4-4000 and sometimes much less than 50Gb/s for regular 3200 DDR5 is reaching 100 Gb/s overclocked for Intel, and 50-70 Gb/s in stock.

When factoring in motherboard, CPU etc, then yes. The max speed is only theoretical, unlike the Apple chips which actually benchmark on the speed specified.

That's such an Apple fanboy trope. The bandwidth is shared with the GPU part that actually uses most of it. You can't starve the CPUs for data in typical PC with the "standard" DDR5 bandwidth and they have much higher bandwidth for GPUs.

You know it's almost like if PC industry hardware designers are not complete morons.

There's a huge difference there. Those PCs have to be ordered from Aliexpress, or some other Chinese site, or else from Amazon via a third party resellers that adds their own markup on top.

Neither gets you any kind of useful warranty, at least for most people, who are unwilling to deal with overseas companies.

Apple has actual physical stores, and a phone number you can call.

> Those PCs have to be ordered from Aliexpress, or some other Chinese site, or else from Amazon via a third party resellers that adds their own markup on top

I anticipated this concern, the $509 I gave earlier is the Amazon price that includes the mark-up. The Beelink SER7 costs only $320 on AliExpress.

Modern solid-state electronics are very reliable, most reliability issues for electronics are related to screens or batteries; which desktop computers lack. I guess there was a bad-capacitor problem over a decade ago, but nothing since then. If your risk-aversion for a desktop computer is high, you pay the Apple premium (possibly buying Applecare), or self-insure by buying 2 SER7s for nearly the same price ($640) as one regular M4 Mac Mini and keep the other one as a spare.

IF you're ordering them in the context of a larger buying program like a university or other office you'd at least get some sort of account rep and Apple support as well. I'm not sure if you could get that from Beelink, could you? I see some benefit in that use case.

But that's aside from the main topic which was the personal and home use case. On that topic you get a decent set of products as well such as Pages/Numbers/etc. and others along with software support for the Mac Mini. I'm guessing the Beelink runs on Linux? That may be hard for some to work with (which is unfortunate since it's really not), or maybe they have to separately buy a Windows license? Something to consider in the comparison.

Where can you get 2x128gb sodimms?

Crucial.com is my go-to, but you can also get them from Amazon.

I'm not sure 2x64GB SODIMM kits are available yet. 2x128GB SODIMM kits would require memory chips that definitely don't exist yet.

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