> That RAM is DDR4 while the MBP uses DDR5 (low power). MSI has stated that DDR5 will cost at least 60% more. Known prices are actually 3x higher.
Naturally it's DDR4. The 5950X only supports DDR4. If it had DDR5 it would be twice as fast on all the things the M1 Max is doing well on as a result of having more memory bandwidth.
> That SSD is 2600mbs while the MacBook is 7400mbs. The Samsung Pro is the only SSD in that territory.
This is kind of fair, but then that's the other problem. For most workloads a 2600MBps read speed is already going to move the bottleneck somewhere else, especially on a machine with 64GB memory to use as cache. If you're the rare exception who actually benefits from it, the Samsung one is available, but for everybody else they get to save $170 by not coupling the fast CPU they actually want with an expensive SSD that wasn't their bottleneck and has a poor cost benefit ratio.
> Buy a cheap motherboard and you'll pay the price later.
How do you mean? At best it won't have some ports you eventually want and then you buy the add-in card later and spend half as much on it because by then the price is lower.
$155 is a fairly high price for a motherboard. $300 is a severe price. The most common ones are like $70.
> A keyboard with a fingerprint reader will set you back at least $50 with a Surface keyboard costing $100. A comparable trackpad would be over $100, but even a midrange $50 mouse.
The logitech keyboard and mouse are perfectly serviceable and on par with anything you get when you buy a complete PC from the store. I would take them over the chiclet thing that Apple makes.
You can have a $100 keyboard and a trackpad to use with your desktop, but now you have an advantage over the Macbook, because you get to buy it once and use it forever instead of it being permanently attached to a machine that will be obsolete before the keyboard is. So you get to amortize the cost over several hardware generations.
The same goes for the monitor for that matter.
> A non-garbage case will be around $100 plus or minus a little.
How is the thing provided a garbage case? What am I not getting from it that I actually care about?
> A decent air CPU cooler that will keep your CPU from throttling way back is going to run close to $80-120.
That was a decent air CPU cooler. It has copper heat pipes and a 92mm fan. The crappy ones are like $13:
For the cooler, I wouldn't put that Zalman in anything much more demanding than a commodity office box with a low end APU. The Hyper 212 is more or less entry level for a CPU an enthusiast might actually select (Ryzen 5600X and up) and even for that you're going to be leaving a decent chunk of performance on the table due to Ryzen's temperature-based scaling behavior.
The coolers bundled with some CPUs have similar issues, and are noisy to boot. Unless budget is hyper-restrictive, one is doing themselves a disservice by not bumping cooler budget to at least $50-$60 for something with a 120mm fan, decent number of heatpipes, and decent fin surface area like a Scythe Mugen 5 Rev B, Scythe FUMA 2, Be Quiet! Shadow Rock 3, or Noctua NH-U12S Redux which will all be significantly more quiet and better performing.
> For the cooler, I wouldn't put that Zalman in anything much more demanding than a commodity office box with a low end APU.
I had a Xeon workstation from one of the big name OEMs. Dual socket, each CPU had a TDP of 135W. The fans they shipped it with were rated for 140W. They were essentially their version of that Zalman thing, but with 80mm fans instead of 92mm. The rating was the real limit for what they could handle.
Which worked fine for one 135W CPU, but the sockets were positioned so the hot air from the first socket would blow over the second one. The second CPU would get just over temperature and thermally throttle. So I replaced them both with the Hyper 212 and the temperatures dropped 25 degrees.
What I gather from this is that the smaller one was good for a 135W CPU as long as its inlet temperature wasn't already high and the bigger one was good for it even if it was.
The 5950X has a TDP of 105W and all AM4 boards have one socket.
Do the even more expensive fans cool even better? Probably. And if you're the sort who likes to pay more to have a little slack, do as you like. But it's not what you'll get from an OEM.
The cheaper coolers will work fine yes, but as I said with Ryzen specifically they won't allow the user to take full advantage of their hardware.
Put simply, it has a particular temperature target that it tries to stay at as much as possible and it'll adjust its clockspeed boosting dynamically to achieve that. The more easily it can maintain that temperature, the higher the CPU will boost. With a lesser cooler, this means the chip may barely be boosting at all depending on the cooler's capabilities, especially for hotter chips like the 5800X, 5900X, and 5950X (which interestingly all share the same 105W TDP despite considerably different power consumption characteristics). Depending on how bad the mismatch is between CPU and cooler you may be better off saving money and buying a cheaper CPU with performance closer to what your cooler is capping more expensive CPUs to.
And yes you're right, you're probably not going to get cooling that competent from a major OEM. That's why it's not a great idea for home users to buy from a major Windows PC OEM unless their needs are fairly pedestrian.
Naturally it's DDR4. The 5950X only supports DDR4. If it had DDR5 it would be twice as fast on all the things the M1 Max is doing well on as a result of having more memory bandwidth.
> That SSD is 2600mbs while the MacBook is 7400mbs. The Samsung Pro is the only SSD in that territory.
This is kind of fair, but then that's the other problem. For most workloads a 2600MBps read speed is already going to move the bottleneck somewhere else, especially on a machine with 64GB memory to use as cache. If you're the rare exception who actually benefits from it, the Samsung one is available, but for everybody else they get to save $170 by not coupling the fast CPU they actually want with an expensive SSD that wasn't their bottleneck and has a poor cost benefit ratio.
> Buy a cheap motherboard and you'll pay the price later.
How do you mean? At best it won't have some ports you eventually want and then you buy the add-in card later and spend half as much on it because by then the price is lower.
$155 is a fairly high price for a motherboard. $300 is a severe price. The most common ones are like $70.
> A keyboard with a fingerprint reader will set you back at least $50 with a Surface keyboard costing $100. A comparable trackpad would be over $100, but even a midrange $50 mouse.
The logitech keyboard and mouse are perfectly serviceable and on par with anything you get when you buy a complete PC from the store. I would take them over the chiclet thing that Apple makes.
You can have a $100 keyboard and a trackpad to use with your desktop, but now you have an advantage over the Macbook, because you get to buy it once and use it forever instead of it being permanently attached to a machine that will be obsolete before the keyboard is. So you get to amortize the cost over several hardware generations.
The same goes for the monitor for that matter.
> A non-garbage case will be around $100 plus or minus a little.
How is the thing provided a garbage case? What am I not getting from it that I actually care about?
> A decent air CPU cooler that will keep your CPU from throttling way back is going to run close to $80-120.
That was a decent air CPU cooler. It has copper heat pipes and a 92mm fan. The crappy ones are like $13:
https://www.newegg.com/cooler-master-air-cooler-series-rh-a3...
A really great one is $39:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005O65JXI
I went to see what you would get for $120 and for that price some of the coolers included a CPU.