Too bad you're in the UK, I'd probably buy some of your stuff as you switch
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Flip Flopping between macOS and Windows
- Thread starter LiE_
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Too bad you're in the UK, I'd probably buy some of your stuff as you switch
Build done.
Gives me the same impression than the stupid hypertrophied SUV with an over-dimensionned grille...
Build done.
A machine to produce hot air?
Nice job, I love the idea of air cooled over water cooled. Provides a superior experience and low noise.
D5's are pretty quiet, and with the right tools you can use fan stop on the radiator if your temps are low enough.
EDIT: Noctua is working on an AIO for those that don't want to spend the money on custom loops.
The Thermalright Peerless Assassin is £35 and offers excellent performance. You also have the Thermalright Phatom Spirit which is the GOAT value to performance.
I did want the Noctua NH-D15 G2 to go for a black and Noctua themed build, but the price was too much for me right now, so I ended up with Be Quiet! fans which are decent enough.
Yeah, I much prefer Noctua, but a close second is Be Quiet.
I watched a video on putting together an AMD build as it's been a long time.
The news on semiconductor tariffs at 100%, no date on when they start, has me wondering what to do with my Windows PC. Options are do a build with these same components though I was considering a 9700X instead of the 9900X here, buying the PX13 (Ryzen AI HX 370 / 4060) at Best Buy as it's discounted to $1,300 ($500 off) and I wouldn't have to do any work putting it together, using my Yoga to drive the desktop monitor, or do nothing. The Windows PC does my production stuff just fine - but it's slow for anything else that I do. I looked at the Yoga Slim 9i and that's discounted $400 but still $1,600 after the $400 off.
I could just buy the parts at Microcenter and have them install the parts and test it for me.
I'm going to do the build on my testing desk today or tomorrow and we'll see how that goes. I'm in Boston next week for tests at Dana Farber so I could drop in at Microcenter.
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FYI, this weekend is the tax free weekend for Mass. I think its sat/sun (not today), so if you feel so moved to drive to Microcenter, you have that option and it may save you some money
I have appointments for tests at Dana Farber on Tuesday and I have to start prep on Monday morning. So I'd run to Microcenter then if I wanted to do a build. If buying an M4 Mac, then I'd try to get Best Buy in NH to price match it. A build would be about $900 in parts which would be $54 in MA taxes so the effect would be fairly small.
We're working on the build today. I've gone through videos on the CPU (looks as easy as Intel now), and the cooler which looks like it will be the hardest part as air coolers are huge these days. The goal is to get the motherboard assembled with RAM, Cooler, and NVMe and then we decide if we want to do the replacement today as well which would be swapping out the motherboard and PSU.
To some extent, the build today will influence whether or not I want to do one for my own Windows PC.
Motherboard is assembled.
One thing that bothered me is that the CPU cover didn't pop. It came off but it didn't pop. I hope that there aren't any issues.
It was more work than I expected as securing the NVMe drive was tricky as I needed a Phillips 0 from my Mac toolkit.
RAM was easy.
The hardest part was the cooler and it's a dual fan, dual heatsink design. One of the fans was sitting on the RAM sticks so I nudged it up a few ticks.
I'm taking a break for lunch and we'll see if I'm up to removing the old MB and putting in the new one this afternoon.
It is worth it to pay MicroCenter $150 to build and test it for you if you don't feel confident about it. I'm kind of paranoid about doing a build and watch videos and read manuals on how to do things and where the pieces are. It's pretty easy to get things wrong as documentation is considered an expense.
One thing that bothered me is that the CPU cover didn't pop. It came off but it didn't pop. I hope that there aren't any issues.
It was more work than I expected as securing the NVMe drive was tricky as I needed a Phillips 0 from my Mac toolkit.
RAM was easy.
The hardest part was the cooler and it's a dual fan, dual heatsink design. One of the fans was sitting on the RAM sticks so I nudged it up a few ticks.
I'm taking a break for lunch and we'll see if I'm up to removing the old MB and putting in the new one this afternoon.
It is worth it to pay MicroCenter $150 to build and test it for you if you don't feel confident about it. I'm kind of paranoid about doing a build and watch videos and read manuals on how to do things and where the pieces are. It's pretty easy to get things wrong as documentation is considered an expense.
about 50% of the time, the CPU cover doesn't pop for me, and I thought I saw somewhere that's more of thing now with newer motherboards.
The AMD CPU installation is now as easy as the Intel installations and some people remove the plastic cover before clamping. It looks like we're going to try the rest of the build which means taking stuff out the old MB and PSU and putting in the new stuff. The case was purchased around 2010 and the PSU is original and should be replaced. I think that 15 years is definitely beyond planned component life.
One thing about gaming with a Gen 4 NVMe SSD - you may start up a game at a predetermined time and then wonder where all of the other players are. And then you realize that they're running SATA drives and they're loading game elements. The time difference can be 30-60 seconds.
I removed the old motherboard out of the Cougar case and plan to put the new one in tonight to try it out on my test station (desk, monitor, keyboard, mouse). I have a bootable Windows 11 installer SSD to try the install.
The availability of YouTube instructional videos is a massive amount of help. I was trying to figure out how to remove the IO shield and I found 13 second instructional video. The approach of the video was to take the handle of a screwdriver and bash the io shield and it will pop into the case.
Tough deciding on Mac vs PC these days. Low-end GPUs are at MSRP while the 5080 and 5090 both have large premiums.
And Microcenter has the M4 Studio with 48 GB of RAM and 1 TB SSD and 40 core GPU for $2,299 or $400 off or 14%.
The availability of YouTube instructional videos is a massive amount of help. I was trying to figure out how to remove the IO shield and I found 13 second instructional video. The approach of the video was to take the handle of a screwdriver and bash the io shield and it will pop into the case.
Tough deciding on Mac vs PC these days. Low-end GPUs are at MSRP while the 5080 and 5090 both have large premiums.
And Microcenter has the M4 Studio with 48 GB of RAM and 1 TB SSD and 40 core GPU for $2,299 or $400 off or 14%.
My opinion is that its hard to justify a PC build with anything under a a 5070.
Performance
- M4 Max studio comes close to a 5070.
- The top end M3 Ultra comes close to a 5080
- No Macs can keep pace with a 5090
- M4 Max Studio (base) $2,000 vs. PC/5070/32GB/5070/1TB $2,000
- M3 Ultra 80 Core GPU/96GB/2TB $5,900 vs. PC/5080/96GB/2TB $3,284
- PC/5090/96GB/2TB 5,200
I don't think it's quite that simple. If you need lots of internal storage or RAM for whatever reason it quickly shifts back to PC. And M4 Max/M3 Ultra GPUs are good at some tasks like blender but are pretty mid at gaming.
I can generally run my workload on an iGPU but there's one thing that a dGPU helps with and that's virtual desktop switching. It's quite slow on an iGPU, somewhat slow on my GTX 1050 and fine on the GTX 1660. When the nVidia drivers aren't broken that is. They were late 2024 and for a few months in 2025.
I will eventually migrate from the iMac Pro because it only has another two years of security updates. I might switch to an ASD to save power too but I'd need a second Mac to go that route. Either an M4 mini or an M4 Studio. My software has a bug where it won't run if the horizontal resolution is over 3x4k so I can't run everything on one system on macOS. There are some other things that I need Windows for like playing around with the firmware on my watch or I get the odd file in a Windows format. I could use a Windows virtual machine but it can be easier just to install the program on Windows and run it to look at the data.
I'll know a lot more after I get this AMD system built. If it POSTs today, then doing another 9900X build is a viable option. I do wish that I could borrow an M4 Mac to test my software out but it would require an account with my financial institution so the only safe way to test it would be to buy one to try out and return it if it wasn't an improvement over my old Windows desktop.
The upside of a VM, is the data is on your computer, and so its easier to move to the mac. I've not tried ARM windows lately. I did install Parallels when I first got the mac, but when I found crossover working so well, I just uninstalled it.
I'm debating whether having windows running on my Mac, is something I want, or more precisely paying the parallels subscription. I think they still offer a one time purchase, but I've not delved into that too much. That last time I used parallels on my M1 MBP, I found I really wasn't using it, but then at the time ARM windows was a lot less polished.
A virtual machine might or might not work for you. It is often a good enough solution but they can be quirky. Sometimes they fail or fry which is why I keep one good version which I don't use and then clone it if my current one fries. VMWare has better performance but it lacks an integrated shared folder which makes it harder to get things in and out of the virtual machine. You can setup a macOS network share to access from Windows 11 or use an external USB drive but the latter doesn't always work. So it may be usable overall but there can be glitches with it.
I've tried Parallels, UTM and VMWare and my preference is VMWare. It's quite a bit more work to setup a VM on UTM and VMWare but you don't have to setup the VMs that often. I've not tried VirtualBox in a few years but VirtualBox has traditionally been the worst performer for me. It's what I've used lately if I want to run macOS on Windows. I used to use Docker-OSX but the setup on that is really hard. Docker-OSX is used by macOS bug bounty hunters.
I've tried Parallels, UTM and VMWare and my preference is VMWare. It's quite a bit more work to setup a VM on UTM and VMWare but you don't have to setup the VMs that often. I've not tried VirtualBox in a few years but VirtualBox has traditionally been the worst performer for me. It's what I've used lately if I want to run macOS on Windows. I used to use Docker-OSX but the setup on that is really hard. Docker-OSX is used by macOS bug bounty hunters.
I'm not sold on VMware Fusion, perhaps due to how broadcom manages vmware, not sure.
I used to use VirtualBox for my job, as that's how Oracle would provide updates to certain applications my company uses. That application tended to be slower and less featured then Parallels and vmware. I largely shy away from virtualbox, I don't think its a priority with Oracle.
Parallels is one that provides the most features, and best performance - mostly because its a paid app. If I were to use virtualization, it definitely would be Parallels but that's me - YMMV
Oracle bought Sun Microsystems back in 2010 and VirtualBox came along for the ride. Oracle made VirtualBox an open source project and spends some money on support but they'd rather you buy Oracle VM which is their enterprise VM server solution.
The notable thing about VirtualBox is that it's relatively easy to run macOS on other operating systems with VirtualBox. I think that you have to hack VMWare executables to do the same thing. I've never seen anyone do that with UTM though there are lots of QEMU front-ends like UTM which are designed specifically to do just that.
VMWare was paid up until about two or three years ago except for personal use. They made everything free but don't provide support - that's done through the community. It looks like they spend some money on development though. The old free license wouldn't have been appropriate for commercial use but the current one would be. It is possible that VMWare goes the way of VirtualBox but that's not the case at this time.
VMWare is the best-performing of the free versions. Parallels is the best overall. But I've seen complaints over their price increases recently. In terms of overhead, my M1 Pro MacBook Pro normally runs between 34 degrees in the winter to a high of about 48 degrees in the summer. Running Windows 11 ARM in a virtual machine increases the temperature to up to 60 degrees. This is with the fan off though. Sometimes the fan comes on if I'm running something moderate on Windows. So there is overhead.
I find running Windows virtual machines to be fine off external USB4/Thunderbolt 4 SSDs to be fine on performance. If you're running virtual machines, then 512 GB can get tight.
I've gone the physical Windows machine for laptop and that's what I'm doing on the desktop. It's the most efficient and best performance. It's not the most convenient though. I might wind up with a MacBook Air 13 + Lenovo Yoga when traveling.
Oh I know the history, like I said, I've been using VB due to Oracle's delivery methods, they largely ignore that application. Oracle buying Sun was one of the worst things that happened in the computer industry. They own the license rights to javascript but don't' do anything to that, other then sue people for trademark infringement.