a mate is offering me his 2019 mbp for AU$600 (about US$385 apparently). i5 2.4 GHz x 4, 8 GB RAM, 512 SSD. my 4GB 2015 one is sluggish these days but… what do we think… i don’t have a heap of discretionary income and don’t need to do anything more intensive than like, video streaming and maybe using the affinity suite. but will 8GB be much better than 4 with everything in electron?
yeah, tough call between 4GB really not being enough but dropping a significant chunk of your cash on 8 not being an amazing idea either
looking on reebelo and gumtree for australia (sorry idk what y’all use) it looks like that’s a little less than a 2020 m1 air runs? i’d definitely get an m1 anything over even a very nice intel mac right now
8gb is probably fine for browsing and video streaming and discord etc.
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my dad treated the switch from a 2019 16” to a refurb m1 like a revelation but idk how much of that was just battery life
otoh if you want to dual boot something or run old 32-bit stuff the intel could be a plus?
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It kept playing by accident when I least expected it!
Steve Jobs’s version of “It really whips the llama’s ass”
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I don’t think there’s any non professional/gaming reason to get any laptop besides an m1 mac
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you want ray tracing but also want a Mac so you buy into M3/M4
they didn’t have Wifi 6E until M2 or AV1 decode until M3 and I consider those both to be pretty nice to have, I certainly think they’ll see more use than RT on a Mac
nedge is right in spirit though
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Anyone who is looking to play pc monster hunter wilds on a budget next year should 10000% wait to see if the intel chips are right for you. In most use cases their B580 is a better value than equivalent nvidia and amd cards. Kind of exciting time to be getting into pc gaming. I wish I didn’t just buy a mid tier card for $600
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Yeah, reading the B580 reviews going up today and it sounds like, outside of a few problem cases, they’re pretty solid cards.
Edit: Oh wow this is wild.
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According to someone I know, they were originally made for crypto and AI applications and they are selling a few off to the general public in order to make a quick buck.
The last ones had great benchmarks too, until they started to get weird long standing problems with games that came out after the cards were released. I suspect these will behave similarly.
Intel in general is a company I wouldn’t trust right now. They had a ton of QA problems at the top and responded by…doing layoffs to QA folks at the bottom.
(Also while it’s a niche use case it’s worth noting these don’t have support for VR of all things, on the off chance that matters)
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wait, what? they don’t support VR at all? like they can’t render two viewports?
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oh yeah the lack of 6E on m1 is pretty annoying, that’s true
i don’t own anything with 6E but manage to stream 4K/120hz moonlight with 2ms of latency so i don’t know what i’m missing out on
I assume one side of that equation is wired for that to work on 5ghz
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yeah, I think people who want to believe that new GPUs can be cheap again in spite of their too many other uses are kind of overlooking the extent to which Nvidia and to a lesser extent AMD are a platform and a rendering target in their own right… even though Intel is theoretically reimplementing the same open Vulkan standard and w/e as the other manufacturers, in practice, that standard is highly, highly worked tailored and patched by and for market leaders. take a look at all the per-platform workarounds that you get on chrome://gpu if you want to see a fun breakdown of everything that’s been toggled on deliberately for your particular machine, then imagine Intel (who is absolutely selling these as an afterthought to pretend they’re competitive in AI) doing the same thing for new and old game releases.
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also s/o to PC Gamer for making this point with a Lana reference
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I think it’s more like Intel made a general compute core that just happens to have born from and double as the tech for the iGPU and can scale up to discrete levels
like Larrabee
people remember Larrabee, right
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well, the board already knows about the smokescreen
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I feel like I hallucinated it because I can’t find it anywhere online but I once read this quote re: (I think) LMP1 cars: “the engine’s only there to keep the turbocharger running.” That’s a flawed analogy here but to me it represents the relationship of general purpose to GPU compute nowadays. It strikes the core of my personal frustration with current consumer hardware, that there’s no scaled-up version of e.g. nvidia jetson/tegra (or scaled-down grace hopper).
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