honestly Apple’s GPUs are already like better than AMD’s so
or like just do what I’ve been doing for years and build a desktop for all your high end compute needs and select your laptop based purely on compatibility and portability
my rule has always been “if the Mac costs more than like $1200, stop at that configuration and build something else” and there’s nothing a little rsync can’t fix
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I’m already doing that now – my desktop does all my rendering now and outputs the results to my NAS.
Unfortunately, my dumbass freelance “career”, as well as my teaching, requires a laptop that can do moderately heavy-lifting, as I can’t do that work remotely. Meanwhile my 6-year-old MacBook Pro is beginning to increasingly creak and groan while, eg, working with 4K video, rendering moderately-complex unoptimized scenes in Unity (say, with messy photogrammetry models), etc.
The MacBook Pro exists for a reason and has a use-case. The problem is that Apple’s spat with Nvidia prevents the devices from being price-competitive in terms of performance and the overall lower performance makes it unlikely that I’ll be able to get 6 useful years out of any of their current models.
You nailed it here:
you forgot Intel’s 5 years of shit and Apple’s newfound inability to make a functioning keyboard
there are ways to fix this without them making up with Nvidia (which seems the least likely of the available scenarios), it’s just that … none of them are happening right now
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Yeah I’m currently hoping one of MSI’s “creator series” laptops will eventually have an accurate screen with an expanded color-space.
I just had to manually delete some windows update files and change a group policy after it reinstalled the same (outdated vs. what is automatically delivered via geforce experience) GPU driver update at 1pm four days in a row for no reason so have fun going back to windows
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I have similar needs to you (that segment they used to call ‘media’ laptops). Dell’s XPS 15 comes with the correct specs – MacBook Pro with a midrange Nvidia GPU, good monitor, not embarrassing to look at.
Unfortunately my exact one, the one I purchased to replace the lovely tank 17" XPS from earlier is a bit of a lemon, but institutions buy them in large enough quantities that I think I ran into year-1 teething issues.
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petition to start listing “baremetal Unix coincident with commercial support” on spec sheet
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XPS 15’s screen is AdobeRGB which is the wrong colorspace for video (it’s basically the opposite of the expansion from sRGB that DCI-P3 provides). Apple’s attention to these details is why they hold a certain market segment hostage for laptops.
ah, I see. Never had to do color-sensitive work myself.
Decided that a low watt PSU was a really dumb bottleneck to limit myself with and got a 600w PSU for the same price.
Overkill for what I have now, but it should give me some options down the line.
(Also I gotta emphasize that I don’t know shit about building computers, so maybe this is a bad move! Does open up the option of using AMD cards, I guess. Either way, I return the 430w PSU and am out all of like $2 and the time it takes to return it, so I may as well.)
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Well… As you can see, you can get your GPU to hover somewhere around the card’s limit easily, (albeit still pulling somewhat 60ish fps), so thats slightly more than half of the wattage of your former PSU already eliminated… granted, a second VEGA64-card would be Overkill (in the Valkyrie Profile sense as well as literally), but it is possible to get there…
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Alright y’all I’m doing this and I’m in over my head.
My coworker warned me that my motherboard would probably only support two fans - one for the CPU, one for the case. My house is fairly hot/dusty, so I went ahead and threw two 80mm fans on the back.
Overkill, in general, but I kinda wanna get into these guts like three times, tops (this time, another HDD, and a graphics card down the line).
Anyway! I’ve got a Y-cable he recommended that looks like it oughta to let me connect all three to the motherboard at once. Is that, uh, safe? The main big fan is .42 amps, and the little ones are .16 each.
Just don’t wanna plug this thing in and fry it out of the gate.
Thanks in advance, because I’ll probably have more paranoid questions as I go with this.
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seems like building your own computer is like having kids
first time you’re jumpy and scared and you wear that anti-static bracelet and set up a clean room
second time you might brush your hands on your pants and just mash pieces together until everything fits in a slot
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Haha, gonna take that as an “probably OK?”
honestly you’re probably more likely to fuck it up with the Y cable than you would be by not giving a shit about how many fans you have
I feel like most modern motherboards have more than two fan ports on them? What’s the model number?
A y-cable is almost definitely fine, just know that you’ll only get fan speed monitoring on one of the two fans (the one with 3 wires going to it). If your mobo can do fan speed control (and I would be astonished if it couldn’t), it can limit the current going to the fans and worst case it can’t supply enough and the fans spin slowly or not at all. It won’t fry itself.
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It’s all good guys. I fucked up trying to install the cooler and wound up pulling up the processor and bending the shit out of a bunch of the pins.
None broken off inside the motherboard! At least I didn’t pay for this processor! But…goddamnit.
Time for several beers I guess.
I exclusively do the smallest viable builds that don’t preclude me from getting beefy GPUs and ITX boards definitely only have the one CPU and the one system fan header
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that sucks! what case isn’t going to have at least a front and a back fan?