Been watching dozens of these review videos and reading every thread here and have been surprised at how difficult it is to get a clear feel for which upgrades are wise investments and which are overpriced for the performance difference. Maybe it's just too early in the process and people are still waiting on most of the upgrades to ship?
As best I can tell the best bang for the buck so far is to order the off the shelf base model with 10 gig ethernet. It would actually be more expensive to build that model when you consider the 5k monitor, the peripherals, speakers and webcam. That said, for those that need better performance it becomes much murkier.
Upgrades worth it:
10gig ethernet.: (Increase resale, future proof, opens up a port, gives expansion possibilities, a dongle costs just as much)
Moving up to mid model: aka 256->512MB SSD (comes with faster processor, much faster SSD)
Moving up to high model (faster processor, better graphics 5300 to 55000xt)
Upgrades not worth it:
Nano glass: (even if you need it it's terribly expensive and difficult to clean)
Apple memory: (buy your own)
10 core: (this one is more open to debate but I think due to cooling and throttling the difference, especially for single core is not worth it)
Would love some assistance in determining the difference in performance for the following upgrades:
Are these worth it?
512mb to 1tb SSD: (People have received them both but no one has done 1tb benchmarks yet to compare in the forum thread.) The 2tb benchmarks seem impressive and the 4tb is much faster)
5500xt to 5700 with 8gigs: Really surprised no one has done this benchmark yet. Everyone's doing the 16gb with is a pricier upgrade.
5700 with 8gb vs 16gb: Again, need performance comparison. Generally 8gb of vram isn't worth a few hundred dollars difference?
As best I can tell the best bang for the buck so far is to order the off the shelf base model with 10 gig ethernet. It would actually be more expensive to build that model when you consider the 5k monitor, the peripherals, speakers and webcam. That said, for those that need better performance it becomes much murkier.
Upgrades worth it:
10gig ethernet.: (Increase resale, future proof, opens up a port, gives expansion possibilities, a dongle costs just as much)
Moving up to mid model: aka 256->512MB SSD (comes with faster processor, much faster SSD)
Moving up to high model (faster processor, better graphics 5300 to 55000xt)
Upgrades not worth it:
Nano glass: (even if you need it it's terribly expensive and difficult to clean)
Apple memory: (buy your own)
10 core: (this one is more open to debate but I think due to cooling and throttling the difference, especially for single core is not worth it)
Would love some assistance in determining the difference in performance for the following upgrades:
Are these worth it?
512mb to 1tb SSD: (People have received them both but no one has done 1tb benchmarks yet to compare in the forum thread.) The 2tb benchmarks seem impressive and the 4tb is much faster)
5500xt to 5700 with 8gigs: Really surprised no one has done this benchmark yet. Everyone's doing the 16gb with is a pricier upgrade.
5700 with 8gb vs 16gb: Again, need performance comparison. Generally 8gb of vram isn't worth a few hundred dollars difference?
