Building a PC — really hard for an Apple Fanboi to admit

[the MfM]

I’ve always had apple computers. Even had os7 era Mac clones and played around with emulators but I’ve held out long enough. My iMac is randomly shutting off more and more. Tired of the high prices and no reasonable upgrade path with the mini and iMac. Looked briefly at the $$$mac pro$$$ thought about a used trash can Mac.

But in the end all I want is reasonable priced Tower...so after 20+ years as a fanboi I’m done. Feels good to say it. Though I did consider a Hackintosh (not crazy about the legality and lack of official Apple support)

Nice thing about making the switch is without the Apple tax computers are pretty cheap these days. Got most everything already and thanks to Amazon warehouse deals I’ll have less then $1200 into a amd 3800x cpu amd rx5700 GPU build. Even splurged on a gen4 nvme 1tb SSD.

Saved Part Lists

pcpartpicker.com

 

[Beachbummer]

Nice!!! Welcome to the dark side.

 

[BrentEB]

Good post! I'm still using a Macbook Pro that's state of the art - or was in 2008. I don't close it these days 'cause the screen will probably flicker. Of course, the machine is hardly supported technically, and there have been no OS or other software upgrades available for years.
I've Window's experience from work and am not a fan. So enjoy seeing what alternatives there are. I hate to see a machine pushed out of use.

 

[the MfM]

Good post! I'm still using a Macbook Pro that's state of the art - or was in 2008. I don't close it these days 'cause the screen will probably flicker. Of course, the machine is hardly supported technically, and there have been no OS or other software upgrades available for years.
I've Window's experience from work and am not a fan. So enjoy seeing what alternatives there are. I hate to see a machine pushed out of use.

I think Apple has taken the form over function concept too far. Hard to upgrade, properiteary parts and poor cooling mean they expect people to replace/upgrade too often.

The Mac mini isn’t bad...I almost bought one. Probably closest spec wise to what I’m building. But when I priced it out I’d be over $1800 for a slower 6 core cpu, slower ssd/ram and no dedicated GPU... Still if it was in a tower I’d probably gone with one.

Nice!!! Welcome to the dark side.

Not quite there yet...
The YouTube algorithm brought me down a rabbit hole. Apparently with the win10.edu key my wife can get for free we will have more or less the pro version of win10. Which supports virtualization. So in theory I should be able to run osX on a VM. My old iMac has a gen1 thunderbolt connection so I can use it as a monitor...If I run OS X through a vm on the iMac monitor am I really violating the EULA?!? I’m a little out of my element on all this. But seems like fun to try to get that all working.

 

[Beachbummer]

It's not a foul until the referee blows the whistle.

 

[Julian]

I’ve always had apple computers. Even had os7 era Mac clones and played around with emulators but I’ve held out long enough. My iMac is randomly shutting off more and more. Tired of the high prices and no reasonable upgrade path with the mini and iMac. Looked briefly at the $$$mac pro$$$ thought about a used trash can Mac.

But in the end all I want is reasonable priced Tower...so after 20+ years as a fanboi I’m done. Feels good to say it. Though I did consider a Hackintosh (not crazy about the legality and lack of official Apple support)

Nice thing about making the switch is without the Apple tax computers are pretty cheap these days. Got most everything already and thanks to Amazon warehouse deals I’ll have less then $1200 into a amd 3800x cpu amd rx5700 GPU build. Even splurged on a gen4 nvme 1tb SSD.

Saved Part Lists

pcpartpicker.com

Welcome to the dark side! Your saved parts list was blank...

What are you planning on doing with this machine? Not sure I'd ever buy a tower pc ever again....unless I was planning on some serious gaming (and I really don't have the time to play....and these young kids have insane hand to eye coordination that I just get my old ass kicked! LOL). Perhaps thinking of some Virtual Reality play??

 

[2kwik4u]

Welcome to the dark side! Your saved parts list was blank...

What are you planning on doing with this machine? Not sure I'd ever buy a tower pc ever again....unless I was planning on some serious gaming (and I really don't have the time to play....and these young kids have insane hand to eye coordination that I just get my old ass kicked! LOL). Perhaps thinking of some Virtual Reality play??

I'm the same way. I'll never buy a tower again.

I run a Thinkpad Yoga X1 as my daily driver machine. i7, 32Gb RAM, 512Gb SSD. It handles all of my work tasks (including a fair amount of computation heavy FEA work). I have a tower at the office, but will be handing that over to the "new guy" when he comes in. Going to put an eGPU on my desk to drive the (3) 24in HD monitors I work on.

With the power that is in a laptop, there are VERY few use cases for a desktop/tower anymore. Combine the laptop with an eGPU and you can still easily game on them as well if you really want to. I just don't see the compromise with a laptop that used to exist.

*edit*....I should mention upgradability here......Most towers are VERY easily upgraded. SOME laptops are easily upgraded, most are not. This is a decisive "win" for the tower build. I've found that a new laptop every 7-9yrs keeps me current enough to get by though. Just sold my Thinkpad X230T for the X1 Yoga. Had the X230T for ~6yrs, so it was a little bit early on that one. New owner is still using it daily though

 

[tabbibus]

I built my towers for many years but my current one is about 7 years old. Honestly I no longer need to upgrade it as it is good enough for its use. I kept it updated for gaming, which I rarely do now. And I've migrated to Xbox gaming (a thing I said I would never do, ha!)

If my tower died, I would just get a Dell XPS or even a MSFT Surface.

 

[the MfM]

It's not a foul until the referee blows the whistle.

Apple is turning a blind eye to the Hackintosh for now. But I’m old enough (and young enough) to remember when people thought Napster was a good idea.

I just think the two users, one CPU idea is kind of cool and makes use of an otherwise disposable iMac 27”. I’ll probably try a simple version of Linux to see how it goes

Welcome to the dark side! Your saved parts list was blank...

What are you planning on doing with this machine? Not sure I'd ever buy a tower pc ever again....unless I was planning on some serious gaming (and I really don't have the time to play....and these young kids have insane hand to eye coordination that I just get my old ass kicked! LOL). Perhaps thinking of some Virtual Reality play??

I hear you with the kids these days. I can still beat my nine year in a kids FPS but I won’t be able to much longer.

Try this link

Saved Part Lists

pcpartpicker.com

I built my towers for many years but my current one is about 7 years old. Honestly I no longer need to upgrade it as it is good enough for its use. I kept it updated for gaming, which I rarely do now. And I've migrated to Xbox gaming (a thing I said I would never do, ha!)

If my tower died, I would just get a Dell XPS or even a MSFT Surface.

We are going the opposite way. My son is already complaining about lagging. Though he is using a Xbox on a 110” 4K screen. Figure when the new consoles come out we will transition to the master race.

...

Going to use this as a family PC in the den...some light video editing and 3d rendering (fusion 360 and blender)...Basic productivity and stuff and the wife will use it for some tele-health work stuff she does.

I know I could have spent quite a bit less and had a functional PC but without the Apple Tax it’s so cheap! And I won’t have to spend $400+ on the next console. I had envisioned building for $800 or so...maybe an APU instead of a CPU/GPU.. but with the latest X570 chipset and NVME etc. Would have been enough for our uses. And over time adding a GPU and then when next years CPUs are old add one to gain some cheap power. But with no Apple tax and r/buildapcsales I went a little overboard.

 

[drewkaree]

Wanna get nuts? Lets get nuts! Dual boot that thing with Linux. Start with something "easy", like Ubuntu or Linux Mint. I've ran Fedora, Ubuntu, a few "light" versions of Linux on some old PC's, and I currently run the easiest-to-deal-with version of Linux I've ever dealt with, Linux Mint. I've used Mint since version 12, they're up to 19 now. I haven't built a PC since I last built an HTPC about 10-ish years ago, it's all been laptops since that point. I have one laptop that I dual-boot with Windows simply because the tax software I use just sucks out loud. It doesn't run properly in a VM, and I prefer the physical discs - the online version of the software is dog slow. I also use that laptop for the Toyota software that I use to tinker with my cars. Can't recommend Linux enough, and it'll be like a Ferrari on all that shiny new hardware!

 

[the MfM]

Got the last box of parts. Thankfully Package theft isn’t a problem here.

 

[the MfM]