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Hardcore PC enthusiast's who converted, chime in.

lpolarityl

lpolarityl

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Dec 1, 2009
529
342
Ohio
Hi all, I'm a long time lurker but I'm now a 100% converted Apple user. I've built many PC's throughout the years starting from the age of 14. Now, 28, I've realized I really love Apple products, so much that I now have many Apple products which you can see in my sig.

I was curious how many people on these forums were in the same boat I was, the hardcore PC enthusiast boat. When I say hardcore, I'm referring to custom builds that were overclocked to extremes, water cooling, LN2 cooling, etc. I even built my own tech station for overclocking sessions.

In the passed two years alone I've built up 3 PC rigs consisting of an i5 750 2.66 @ 4.0 (4.4 suicide runs), i7 920 2.66 @ 4.2 (4.4 suicide runs), and an AMD 1090T 3.2 @ 4.2 (4.4 suicide runs). All of these were water cooled at one point but I go through cooling options like socks so nothing was ever the same.

Here are links to my recent builds. Pics, specs, etc.

http://www.techpowerup.com/gallery/2472.html
http://www.techpowerup.com/gallery/2231.html
http://www.techpowerup.com/gallery/2017.html

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Times have changed.

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Anyone else wanna chime in? I can't be the only ex-PC nut on here! :D
 
I built a PC last year more powerful than any new iMac for half the price. Times aren't-a changing.

That said I'm still torn at whether to build my own gaming PC or buy a new iMac. They're damn quiet. And that's a big + for me. It means I can play at night without having to turn the volume up and wake up others.
I think I'll just build a quiet PC :p.
 
Dagless said:
I built a PC last year more powerful than any new iMac for half the price. Times aren't-a changing.

That said I'm still torn at whether to build my own gaming PC or buy a new iMac. They're damn quiet. And that's a big + for me. It means I can play at night without having to turn the volume up and wake up others.
I think I'll just build a quiet PC :p.
Click to expand...

You can build such a nice PC for about $600, stuff is so cheap now. With most games not using more than two cores, you can build a nice rig with a E8400 or E8500, give it a light OC and play pretty much any game out right now.

BTW, when I said "Times have changed " I mean for me specifically. I would never be Apple only a year ago, but my preferences and needs have changed.
 
I got turned off when MSDN and all the other programs started getting rediculously expensive. Then came the Windows Genuine Advantage that tried to disable my perfectly legit installs. Then came Vista... I screamed Uncle and never looked back.

It was actually a seriously bad Dell machine that really made me want to switch. Dell actually got sued because they shipped a machine that contained components that didn't work and refused to refund / make it right.

I'm typing on a 2006 Intel iMac that works as well as the day I got it. That's saying something. I haven't had to touch it, reinstall anything, defrag, virus check, adware remove, deinstall, you get the idea, in all these years. It's the first machine I've ever had that I spent more time doing things than fixing things.

I just pulled an older laptop for a relative that needed to borrow it for a while. I spent the better half of today just doing windows updates to get it up to the latest and greatest. Seriously, MS needs to figure out a better way.

I know about Win7 and all its greatness. I tried it, didn't see any great improvement over Vista (aside from the annoying pop ups). At this point, I'm not going back. I've successfully converted just about everything over the course of 4 years. Unless something overwhelmingly compelling arises to make me want to switch again, I'll probably never go back.
 
I used to be like "why would someone pay that much for a Mac when you can get a PC with equal specs or greater for less". Then I bought an Acer laptop with Vista, and Vista drove me off the edge. I got my MBP last summer and it runs just as well now as it did when I took it out of the box.
 
Well I switched when I found out how much more elegant and easy to use System 7 was over DOS 6 and Windows 3.1. I only bought Macs for quite a while. Then five or six years ago I built my first gaming rig and found out I knew so much about computers it did not matter which I used.

I still have an affinity for the Mac OS. Really it does not matter much to me which I use anymore. Now I choose based on which will best meet my requirements for a computer for the best price.
 
I'm only 15 but i absolutely HATED Macs. In November of 07 i got my first mac, a white macbook. I liked it at first then i hated it because its "graphics card" (intel X3100 :mad:) was a POS i used to tell myself i could have gotten a much better pc for the price.

Then i started collecting vintage macs, got a gaming desktop and an alienware m15x. Now i pretty much hate windows. XP and 7 are ok but vista makes me want to blow up something.

Now, i really love macs. After figuring out i wasted so much money on a POS alienware that doesent f$*%(*& work well anymore because of dam vista and the fact that it shuts down randomly, i like macs even more and i don't know if i will ever buy a pc laptop again. Well, besides a netbook because i love mine and when it dies ill replace it.
 
fun173 said:
I'm only 15 but i absolutely HATED Macs. In November of 07 i got my first mac, a white macbook. I liked it at first then i hated it because its "graphics card" (intel X3100 :mad:) was a POS i used to tell myself i could have gotten a much better pc for the price.

Then i started collecting vintage macs, got a gaming desktop and an alienware m15x. Now i pretty much hate windows. XP and 7 are ok but vista makes me want to blow up something.

Now, i really love macs. After figuring out i wasted so much money on a POS alienware that doesent f$*%(*& work well anymore because of dam vista and the fact that it shuts down randomly, i like macs even more and i don't know if i will ever buy a pc laptop again. Well, besides a netbook because i love mine and when it dies ill replace it.
Click to expand...

You have a lot of hardware for a 15 year old, hah.

But yeah, Vista was a disappointment, yet I liked it cause it had DirectX 10. Unfortunately, there weren't many DX10 gaming titles (Same case with DX11) so Vista was a waste especially when you factor in how horrible it managed memory and how horrible it was in general. 7 is just a patched Vista (with many changes), but its still not what I was hoping it would be. OSX to me, is the pinnacle OS. It's beautiful, its easy to code in/for, it has heightened security, and its very simple to navigate and use. Microsoft needs to adapt those little features that Apple has now made common, because even now, 7 feels old in comparison.

So on to the topic, I can't be the only water cooling building, crazy overclocking, non-stop benchmarking ex-pc user on MacRumors! I wanna see some pics peoples old PC beastly setups!
 
I started out as a big PC user. Built a nice gaming machine (E8400 @ 4.0, GTX 260 superclocked, etc.) back in August 2008.

3 months later I had a MacBook loaned to me to repair. Fixed it the first day, held onto it for a month 'til I saw the owners again. That was all it took :D

I still have the PC, I just transplanted the HDD into my Mac Pro and now use that to game with (it's got a GTX 285). Works wonderfully.
 
CJS7070 said:
I started out as a big PC user. Built a nice gaming machine (E8400 @ 4.0, GTX 260 superclocked, etc.) back in August 2008.

3 months later I had a MacBook loaned to me to repair. Fixed it the first day, held onto it for a month 'til I saw the owners again. That was all it took :D

I still have the PC, I just transplanted the HDD into my Mac Pro and now use that to game with (it's got a GTX 285). Works wonderfully.
Click to expand...

Hah, that's a nice way to fall in love with Mac's, by complete spontaneity.
 
Heres a pic of my gaming desktop. If you cant see that price sticker says: $229.00 It was lurking in the electronics section of an East Coast store called Building 19. It came with a 320Mb 8800gts but then i put the 1Gb 4870 in.

I almost $H!t myself when i got home and realized i got a 2.4Ghz quad core machine for 229! Its a Velocity Micro desktop.
 

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fun173 said:
Heres a pic of my gaming desktop. If you cant see that price sticker says: $229.00 It was lurking in the electronics section of an East Coast store called Building 19. It came with a 320Mb 8800gts but then i put the 1Gb 4870 in.

I almost $H!t myself when i got home and realized i got a 2.4Ghz quad core machine for 229! Its a Velocity Micro desktop.
Click to expand...

Wow, that is a hell of a deal.
 
fun173 said:
I almost $H!t myself when i got home and realized i got a 2.4Ghz quad core machine for 229! Its a Velocity Micro desktop.
Click to expand...


Heh, I got a quad core 2.6GHz Phenom with 4GB ram and an 8600GT for free not long ago, it's shocking how the value of gear falls these days.
 
I never stopped being a PC enthusiast. I got a Macbook Air for various reasons and I do like it as a laptop which I rarely use but my main rig is a PC and I wouldn't have it any other way. It's a gaming system with Phenom II 940, 2xGTX260/216 in SLI, 8GB RAM, Intel SSD and more. It will own your average iMac (and some Mac Pros) in games and for less money. I would not get Apple for games. They're just not built for it.

Windows 7 is a good upgrade over XP x64 that I had for a year too. I think it's a good OS all around and much more gamer-friendly.
 
I just built an i7-930 that blows the doors off the iMac, for a fraction of the iMac and Mac Pro.

As other's stated, times aren't a changin.
 
being an amateur film maker i switched to mac, realized i HATED the apple editing apps (Sony Vegas FTW) and switched back. Probably not what you were looking for in this thread though...

I do love my MBP though.
 
chrmjenkins said:
Is that your reservoir below all the cooling points in your system? Still, a very clean setup. What case is that? I love the cases that have that panel to hide all the cabling.
Click to expand...

Yep, that is the res below, but right to the right of the res is a 120x58mm radiator that you cant really see, my system has two radiators. 120x58mm to the right and a 140mm dual on the top. Also, the res sits right on top of the pump. It's a pump/res EK combo. :D

But yeah, nothing at all wrong with PC's, I'm just more suited for a Mac for what I do day to day at home.
 
I'm more of a PC enthusiast who loves the mac operating system, that is why I have gone the hackintosh route. There is nothing like customizing and assembling your own hardware at the price point of your choosing, something you can't get from Apple's limited hardware options. To make my hackintosh even more Apple-like, I'm even in the process of modifying a G5 case to accept PC ATX boards.

However for portability, I will always choose Apple laptops. I just haven't seen a laptop that ousts Apple in categories that matter to me.
 
I'm slowly becoming an ex-Mac user who likes both good hardware and a good OS. I'm leaning towards hardware right now though.

I've got a fairly nice gaming rig I custom-built. i7 920 overclocked @ 4 Ghz., and a GTX 260. I play more strategy games and RPG's than demanding FPS's though, or I'd have a better GPU.
 
People say Macs are great for graphics work, yet the best graphics card available in any mac out of the box is an ATi 4870. A great card, released around July 2008.

The new Adobe suite has CUDA accelerated graphics rendering on the PC, yet not available on the mac. Other CUDA / OpenCL / Stream optimizations that occur on graphics cards are also not available to those using OSX. the shiny toy maker (apple) is just that: a maker of shiny toys.

I'll be sticking with non-propitiatory hardware, as for anybody doing real work (or playing games) OSX (and the hardware that supports it) is just too bloated, too expencive, too slow, and too poorly supported.

Cheers
Jordan

Bootnote Lets not even get started on OSX's woeful performance while playing titles on Steam or the complete lack of Drafting software (CAD / CAM) packages.​
 
On the contrary OS X is fantastic for doing scientific work because it's POSIX compliant.
And the hardware within a Mac is just normal PC hardware, nothing proprietary about it.
 
Quad SLi 295 said:
People say Macs are great for graphics work, yet the best graphics card available in any mac out of the box is an ATi 4870. A great card, released around July 2008.

The new Adobe suite has CUDA accelerated graphics rendering on the PC, yet not available on the mac. Other CUDA / OpenCL / Stream optimizations that occur on graphics cards are also not available to those using OSX. the shiny toy maker (apple) is just that: a maker of shiny toys.
Click to expand...

I have noticed Photoshop CS5 runs a lot better on Windows, but I generally do my work under XP anyways.
OSX for media organisation and writing. Windows for Photoshop, games and other work apps. For me.
 
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