Comment by ACow_Adonis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ACow_Adonis | Hacker News Reader

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Out of pure curiosity, this is the comparison of that M1 Ultra Geekbench score against my setup which is VERY CLOSE to comparable: AMD 5950/3090/128gb workstation. Same version of Geekbench. What I would describe as well-thought out hardware configurations (no bling or neon, built with a vague sense of budget/performance in mind for work) and only "reasonable" stock settings (i.e. no manual overclocking, but XMP enabled, RAM chosen for Ryzen).

See: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/13330272?baseli...

I think you'd expect the M1 to outperform a bit on the multicore because it has more cores, but the comparison suggests a lot of the current benchmark score is being driven by exceptionally high scores in a handful of benchmark sub-tests.

On single-core I'd describe them as very very comparable at the moment.

There's another issue that was made apparent when I benchmarked my setup which suggests that a significant portion of people running 5950's are leaving a portion of performance on the table (i presume that's some mix of not setting things up right or not having the right mix of hardware).

I'd say this is an issue that doesn't happen with Macs, but...I'm aware that their past laptops have run really really hot (and dropped performance below their apparent specs due to insufficient cooling?), although everything I've seen shows the M1 family to be a a relatively great performer in this regard (to the point where I recommended my wife pick up the new M1 Macbook Air).

> my setup which is VERY CLOSE to comparable

How much did your setup cost all finished?

It depends a bit depending on how you account for other machines and peripherals (given that you can reuse/replace parts when doing it yourself), but the general price off the top of my head was:

- CPU $1100 AUD

- GPU $3000 AUD

- RAM $1000 AUD

- Motherboard $279 AUD

- NVMe Drive $300 AUD

- SSDs $150 - 300 each AUD

- SATA drives $100 - 300 each AUD

- Powersupply $240 AUD

- Case $250 AUD

- CPU cooler $170 AUD

That prices the full thing as new at about $6000 to $7000 AUD, which is vaguely in line with about what I recall my budget being, though I've had it for a year or so now.

That would put it at roughly 4k - 5k USD by my napkin math, but as a general rule US consumer tech prices recieve a bit of a discount compared to us over here, so you could probably come in on the lower end if you could physically get everything (i don't know what part supplies are like at the moment in the US).

Taking the AU Apple store price, accepting that their CPU probably outperforms mine in some multithreaded performance, and going for the top GPU option, I'd price the Apple M1 Ultra rough equivalent between $7000 to $10,000 AUD depending on where you want to cut it.

So like for like i'd say 4k-5k USD for mine vs 5k - 7k USD for the M1 in my locality.

Not a bad price.

The thing that kills me with PC builds though is longevity and when they don’t work. I’m getting too old to play RMA when something doesn’t work. I want one single point of contact. I moved from a Ryzen 3700X running windows in 2020 to a bottom end Mac mini after spending two months debugging a random crash.

What is the performance comparison? On RAM, bottom end M1 Mini is a paltry 8GB non upgradeable.

Well it was mostly used for transcoding and compiling Go. The bottom end 8Gb Mac mini was significantly faster than the Ryzen on both.

Also consider the value of your specialist labor and expertise in designing and building your rig, as well as warranty support comparison.

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