Attempting to answer the age old question: Computer now or later?

Hardware Build a PC
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History

My previous computers have often been refurbished or highly subsidized by the fact that the parts were at least >3 years old and didn’t have resale value standalone. It wasn’t till around the Zen launch (back when Kaby Lake was new) that I was in a position to buy a computer… for work.

As a result of collecting money, circumstances allowed me to finally go from my Core 2 Quad/[insert i3 chip that i bought for <$100] and iGPU/[insert the cheapest NVIDIA graphics card was still being supported and had HDMI] to a Ryzen 7 1800X and a Radeon RX 480.

I primarily needed the machine for (what I then envisioned would be on Linux) development and went Ryzen/Radeon for that reason, maximum price-to-performance and while I didn’t get the motherboard everyone was recommending (the ASUS PRIME X370, as it was out of stock everywhere), I found myself with a decent MSI Krait Gaming instead.

Where I screwed up

I found myself platform hopping (macOS, Windows, Debian-derivatives, Arch-derivatives, GhostBSD, even) as I was trying to figure out a workflow that best suited me (a combination of collaborative creative work and development where the ability to get into the weeds was a must) and three years after purchase, realized that Linux-based operating systems won’t do it for me. Windows requires me throw away everything I’ve learned on Linux and WSL isn’t making the cut for what I do.

Naturally, the only compromise between the app library of Windows and the *nix heritage of Linux, macOS… is where I feel at home, the ability to run creative collaborative software. So now we’re entering Hackintosh territory.

First screw up? I bought a Ryzen CPU. Now Ryzentoshing is mature to a point where most can daily drive it and calling it a screw up might even be dramatic but it’s definitely different from running an Intel CPU (Hackintosh work on OPEMU has been retired ever since macOS went “goodbye 32-bit” even though I need 32-bit macOS software) and I want macOS Mojave because I need to run legacy macOS software, the more recent versions feel too constrained for me.

Additionally, I really don’t like having to deal with Intel MKL related crashes in the middle of work or having to re-patch Discord after every update.

Second screw up? Timing. This wasn’t in my control, I needed a machine ASAP and got one, my new job depended on it and a slow machine wasn’t helping. I bought into Zen, not Zen 2 and didn’t benefit from architectural improvements, I was also an early adopter of DDR4 and didn’t benefit from improvements and price efficiency that subsequent memory modules got.

TL;DR: I was an early adopter and I had to pay the early adopter tax and got less performance for my money. I also picked the wrong chip for the job that I didn’t know I would be most comfortable doing when buying it

The Problem

I’ve been tolerating these inconveniences for as long as I can but I’m reaching a breaking point. VirtualBox is not a viable alternative to Hypervisor.framework (which will not work on Ryzen chips), I need Docker and VMWare Fusion and I have to be on Monterey as my job requires it (even though I love Mojave, Xcode 13 doesn’t)

I’ve tried running a thin Linux-based hypervisor and running macOS in a KVM instance but my motherboard’s IOMMU grouping makes it less conducive for actual use (even with patching the kernel to split each device into its own IOMMU group) and audio crackling (even with patching QEMU) is a consistent problem despite owning an external USB audio device.

With DDR5 on the horizon (well, it’s out but it’s still time before it becomes optimized cost-effective), I see myself in the same position as I was in when DDR4 came out and I was compelled to get a computer.

Back then, Zen vs Kaby Lake was the start of something interesting in the desktop computer space. Now, that year is 2023, the year when Meteor Lake will come out (and hopefully, by then DDR5 will become the norm and the economies of scale would make it affordable) and the year when Apple Silicon would reach levels of maturity that would make it worth it for me to make the jump (the M2 Max is where I’m comfortable giving Apple my money, even then, only for a Mac Mini, not for a Macbook Pro)

Conclusion

I don’t mind spending a pretty penny on good computers but I can do so only if I spend once per generation. There is no used market for high end components here so “buy now, flip before launch and get the latest gen” isn’t an option for me.

Hackintoshing is getting old and the future for me seems to be within the Apple ecosystem (for better or for worse), I want to give Apple my money but Apple Silicon isn’t mature enough for the work that I do and their devices aren’t easily repairable (which is why I turned to Hackintoshing in the first place, I need hardware I can repair), their SoC being a single point of failure is a dealbreaker for me. I already pay the developing country tax buying an Apple product, having it fail on me due to Apple’s engineering deficits (Rossman’s videos on Macbook repairs do not inspire any confidence in me) just ramps up the hurt.

Despite all that, I might bend if matured, professional-grade Apple Silicon (basically, the hypothetical M2 max) comes to the Mac Mini. But that’s 2023.

Alder Lake is out but I see myself repeating the same mistake as I did with my first big desktop computer with Zen/DDR4 if I were to buy today. I bought at the beginning, when prices are highest and performance is lowest (compared to the rest of the DDR* lifecycle) but had no choice then.

Meteor Lake is scheduled for 2023. It’s the Zen 2 of the generation I bought into. The DDR5 RAM I buy now is the DDR4 RAM that I bought then which costed a lot for a lot less performance.

What do I do?

This is my first post. Sorry for the walls of text.

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Personally, I always tell people to buy now, unless you are 2 weeks away from the launch of a new product, then wait a bit and if they’re on sale, buy the older one if the performance is not too different, otherwise buy the new thing if it’s not too different (as in, jump to a new RAM generation, or new PCI-E generation etc.). It’s probably at least a month before a new launch (Zen3+ or Zen4 or Zen 4D / 4C or whatever). And the launch doesn’t automatically mean it will go on sale the same day.

Now it’s a pretty good time to get an upgrade. I would normally suggest you only buy a 2nd gen Ryzen and swap your old one, so you can at least run W11, but given that you seem to be a potential Mac user, yeah, I guess a full platform upgrade could be worth it if it helps your work. Sell this system or keep it and use it as a virtualization server without any passthrough, or maybe a NAS and video streaming box, dunno, you do what you can with it.

I would suggest you still go with a Ryzen 5000 series CPU, either an 8 core (which would be somewhat equivalent of an imaginary 10 core first gen Ryzen, maybe close to TR 1920x in performance), or get the 12 core 5900X or 16 core 5950X if you want to be balling. I’d still say that the 8 core is plenty, unless you need some more, then 12 cores. 16 is pretty stupid if you don’t find a way to use them all IMO. Get some fast RAM, since DDR4 is mature and it’s still cheaper than DDR5. 3600-4200 MT/s should be ok. You could go with Intel 10th or 11th gen if you find them for cheap enough, because the 12th gen is a mess at the moment and I doubt you will be able to run virtualization, do PCI-E passthrough or even make a hackintosh using 12th gen Intel right now. Still, Ryzen is still your best bet in this case.

One thing to note is that you should look up what motherboard has decent IOMMU groups and still run Linux and virtualize both macOS and Windows 11 if you find yourself needing both of them. If you find yourself in need of more PCI-E expansion, a side-grade to a Threadripper 3000 series might be ok, they are still solid CPUs, especially if you want to run both macOS and Windows each with GPU passthroughs.

The thing is, the more you wait and sit on your money, the less you will get to enjoy a new platform and the more you will keep “struggling” with your current CPU.

I guess an alternative to all of this, if you want to be running Windows 11, could be to add an MSI TPM 2.0 chip, which apparently your motherboard supports. Just as the pages say, adding a TPM doesn’t mean your system is suddenly supported, just that the motherboard supports TPM 2.0. But honestly, I don’t see a reason to upgrade to W11 for at least a year, maybe even 2, until it gets ironed out. W10 1507 launched around July 2015 and I didn’t upgrade the PCs until close to when Microsoft cut the free upgrade a year later, I think I upgraded about 300 PCs from W7 and 8.1 to W10 version 1607, so I skipped 1507 and 1511 releases. Now, I’m not maintaining PCs anymore, but on my personal devices, I wouldn’t jump on W11 until at least 1 or 2 feature releases are… well… released. And my personal tablet, I upgraded from W8.1 to W10 1507 just because W8.1 was using way more storage (and I only had 32GB of eMMC), so I was kinda forced to. Then I didn’t upgrade again until 1507 stopped receiving updates completely (given, I haven’t used my tablet that much during that period), so I jumped about 2.5 years ahead, to 1709 a few weeks before 1803, then upgraded again.

Sorry for the tangent, but the point is, your Ryzen 1800x is still a decent CPU, so unless you really can’t make it work, it’s a bit of a pity to throw it away. And again , regarding waiting, if you get it now, even if it’s older, you will benefit from it much earlier than if you buy a more performant computer later.

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Thank you for your reply!

Sell this system or keep it and use it […] a NAS and video streaming box, dunno, you do what you can with it.

That’s what I’m planning to do. If I’m sticking with AMD64 PCs, then re-use the same case for the new computer and get a case with hot swappable drive bays and put my 1800X-based system in it and use it as a high performance at-rest-encrypted NAS that contributes to BOINC/FAH when idle.

I have no plans on throwing it away and resale is not gonna happen due to lack of a healthy second-hand market.

I would suggest you still go with a Ryzen 5000 series CPU […] 4200 MT/s should be ok

Ryzen and macOS (and I’ve tried to daily drive Linux and Windows, I really have) have growing pains, here are some of the common issues I deal with (on bare metal)

  • Hypervisor.framework relies on Intel-specific virtualization extensions and as a result, VMWare Fusion >10 (which is essentially a must on Big Sur and above) and Parallels breaks. VirtualBox is notoriously finicky on Big Sur and above.

    • As a result of this Docker (or honestly, anything that isn’t VirtualBox or interfacing with VirtualBox) will refuse to run (reddit thread)

  • Work on running 32-bit code on AMD by bridging differences between Intel and AMD has ceased ever since Catalina has been released and the Hackintosh community has embraced in-memory patching and (reasonably) no longer wishes to work on modifying the kernel sources directly.

  • Additionally, programs that use the Intel Math Kernel Library (like for instance, the Adobe suite) require to be patched before use.

    I have to re-apply patches so that I can use Discord and plugins in Ableton Live (that work on Intel Big Sur systems so I know it’s not a 32-bit library issue) crash without grace with no remedy.

In virtualization, I get my precious 32-bit support back but at a very large cost:

  • Anti-cheat software is not happy (I can live without it tbh so not a biggie)

  • Despite purchasing an NVIDIA GPU and an AMD GPU (so I can disable AMD drivers and pass the PCIe device to the VM while still being able to get into the hypervisor to fix things if something goes wrong), it either takes away all my GPUs or none of my GPUs

    • It takes five to six minutes before I get to see something on my screen and between pressing the power on button and seeing the OpenCore bootloader, it’s anyone’s guess what’s happening

  • IOMMU groups are a headache and buying a new machine only to possibly lose the IOMMU lottery the second time is way too scary for me. I manage to get it working and then for some reason it breaks again.

  • I cannot passthrough my WiFi card no matter how hard I try (and SSH’ing into the hypervisor OS and changing WiFi networks is way too jank, even for me)

  • Even with patching QEMU, audio is crackly at worst and oddly pitched at best. This apparently is something that cannot be mitigated due to latency sensitivity (if there are developments that make the previous assertion obsolete, I’d be really excited to give a shot)

  • USB2.0 passthrough is hit or miss, let alone USB3.1, which I use extensively.

  • Random freezes or crashes at the worst possible time

I’ve spent a whole month trying to KVM macOS, I’m done.

[…] unless you need some more, then 12 cores. 16 is pretty stupid if you don’t find a way to use them all IMO […]

Don’t worry, my line of work is very multi-threaded :slight_smile:

[…] if you want to be running Windows 11 […]

God, no. Windows 10 in its prime gave me grief.

The thing is, the more you wait and sit on your money, the less you will get to enjoy a new platform and the more you will keep “struggling” with your current CPU.

I feel this but I really don’t wanna get punked again into buying into the very beginning of a new generation and missing out on stability and overall improvements.

For me it’s a matter of “spend once on something you won’t regret”

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Ok, I empathize with your grief with KVM and macOS. I thought maybe you can make it work by pretending you have a different CPU. Proxmox and Virt-Manager (it’s just qemu) can trick the VM into thinking it’s running on an Intel CPU (Haswell, Skylake, Cascade Lake, Ice Lake, Broadwell and more, alongside AMD Epyc and older Opteron chips).

Not sure if that would solve the issue with the CPU not having the same architecture, it depends on how the programs behave (Wendell mentioned that at some point, the Intel MKL behaved not-normal when detecting it doesn’t run on Intel CPUs, but no idea if it’s just a bit flip regarding the name of the CPU, or if actually using specific hardware in each CPU - and probably QEMU doesn’t try to emulate the CPUs themselves, just tricks the VM into believing they are running on said CPUs). As for the QEMU audio cracking, not sure if that could be solved by using the GPU audio, but maybe it’s worth a try?

I personally wouldn’t use Virtualbox for anything, but I’m just slightly biased against Oracle (I only like their Linux and that’s about it).

Also forgot to take into account VMWare. So, yeah, probably a lot of things to consider. However:

I specifically said not to go with the new stuff and to buy what it’s now pretty mature, like 10th or 11th gen Intel, or AMD TR 3000 or Ryzen 5000 series. You are going to have a lot of headaches with both Intel 12th gen and the next release of AMD Ryzen, so wait at least until 1 more generation shows up. But can you wait around 1 or 1.5 years more? I think that’s not a wise decision to make, especially when you need hardware now and you need it to be solid and not get through early adopter stuff. So buying now makes a lot of sense, even if it’s a side-grade.

Unless you want to find a 2nd hand older Intel Mac / Pro and run whatever you want on it and call it a day. Especially if you want to run old version of macOS, like, what, Mojave?

It depends on your personality and priorities. If you just can’t get used to Linux and changing your workflow to suit it and maybe do a Windows VM with GPU passthrough for everything else, and if you don’t want an older and slightly weaker Mac, but that doesn’t come with the headaches of hackintosh or vmtosh, then your only sane option right now is to get the most stable current platform that has been battle tested, which is Intel 10th gen, 11th gen, AMD Threadripper / Pro 3000 series and Ryzen 5000 series (maybe even 3000, but kinda not worth it if you can find 5000). Going with 12th gen Intel or waiting for the new Ryzen with DDR5 and possibly big.LITTLE will probably make you regret your decision, because they will struggle with a lot of programs.

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I have 2 1800x machines I got back in 2017 I think.

I will definitely be using them on my network after I got my new AMD Ryzen 9 5000 series build I am working on. I will happily use it to its full potential and wait for the next generation Intel and AMD offerings. With scheduler confusion for the new Intels and DDR5 and PCI 5 components still in the unobtanium realm for those without secret society memberships, I will wait the one or two years until we have familiarity with the next gen options. :slight_smile:

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Computer nao.

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Normally say buy now, but with the stock situation it’s not like that’s an option… do what you can to ride out the chip shortage.

I’ve seen a few people say this but all I’ve seen from AMD is that they are committed to sticking with “big” cores only?

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If you’re a Mac user:
buy an M1-Pro or max based machine.

My 14" absolutely smokes. Not in the on fire way. In the ripping through work with no fan noise way. 99% of the time it is SILENT. Quieter than my all-SSD, liquid cooled desktop is AT IDLE inside a Fractal design R6.

Seriously. I’m considering this thing as a desktop replacement and getting rid of, or relegating to mining, my 6900XT based desktop. You forget how nice it is to have something properly quiet.

No it won’t run all AAA games but I’m time poor anyway.

Think I’m happy at this point to wave goodbye to x86

If you’re “waiting for pro grade apple silicon”… it’s here already.

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Nothing gets cheaper in the future.

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Cross posted from another forum, but a user on MacRumors:

Yesterday I was rendering 30fps 4k loops from After Effects whilst C4D/Redshift was rendering a sequence of hi-res (4000x4000px) 32bit EXR stills with ~15 AOVs each to Dropbox in the background, system still completely responsive, After Effects UI snappy and responsive, no fan noise whatsoever, Finder, Firefox, Spotify, Mail, Adobe Cloud, Dropbox etc all running and no lag, Mac completely silent and this is all running on battery. Absolutely astonishing. 16" M1 Max 64GB.

Dude is coming from a Mac Pro, which would not handle that workload as well.

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Don’t worry about hot swappable, get bigger disks and save on power, space, noise, port count, maintenance grief instead.

It’s way easier and cheaper to run a small box at home with 4x 14TB or 4x18 TB disks with something like mergerfs + snapraid or btrfs or ZFS draid than 56x/72x 1TB disks on a disk shelf with controllers.

More spindles means more parallelism and performance, but also more grief and tinkering. Whereas 4 drives mean 1-2 deaths a year if you’re unlucky (take a look at this burn-in process that can help you shake out bad drives that shouldn’t have really left the factory or may have been damaged in transport somehow)

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I specifically said not to go with the new stuff and to buy what it’s now pretty mature, […] 1.5 years more?

I got so lost in the excitement for 7nm, PCIe Gen 5, DDR5, new socket and platform, direct storage that I completely forgot how big.LITTLE would mess things up. Apple will no longer be developing Intel-based Macs so hackintoshing with 12th gen and above are essentially wandering in the shadow realm, 11th gen is the last stable platform for Intel-based Macs.

Windows’ scheduler has had problems, so has Linux, macOS (at least in my opinion) will not be happy to say the least now that I take that into account.

Unless you want to find a 2nd hand older Intel Mac / Pro and run whatever you want on it and call it a day

Costs about the same as a side-grade and difficult to repair, I’ll have to pass on that even though I’ve seriously considered it at one point in time.

If you’re “waiting for pro grade apple silicon”… it’s here already.

Pro-grade, mature Apple Silicon (in software and hardware) isn’t here yet. A coworker of mine owns an M1 Pro and running regression tests are markedly slower on his brand new machine then on an AMD64 machine from two years ago (we’ve verified that it’s running native, not over Rosetta and that it’s an optimization issue)

My problem with buying the M1 Pro/Max (aside from optimisation issues, which I could probably live with) is that it’s lack of repair-ability in part due to its laptop form factor.

Due to my geography, everything costs a whopping lot more, from purchase to repair and their nonchalant behavior with Monterey (the memory leak posts on r/mac are getting old) and history of engineering goof-ups don’t give me confidence.

If the M1 Max comes on a Mac Mini, I’m getting one, begrudgingly, but still getting one.

Think I’m happy at this point to wave goodbye to x86

When I daydream of ARM64/RISC-V, I think the same, then I remember that a lot of software (especially specialized tools from now defunct companies) will never get native ports to those architectures and that I cannot escape AMD64 (or even x86 for that matter, they really put in a fuck ton of effort to keep things backwards compatible)

Don’t worry about hot swappable, get bigger disks and save on power, space, noise, port count, maintenance grief instead.

I’ll admit, I was doing it for the sex appeal, you make good points there.

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My opinion after considering a lot of this info is to go with AMD, maybe the 5900x if you want bang for buck, and build around that. It is a known quantity and has very good marks and excellent low power tech compared to everything coming out as new. Good DDR4 RAM will give you good results I think at this point. I believe it is going to be frustrating trying to use the new tech (both blue and red) over the next year or two: prices, availability of new tech at high prices, practical benefits for now of new tech after all the efforts to secure and pay for it. M1 is new tech and frustrating in some areas of concern as well. I have several intel machines and a nice iMAC and now 3 AMDs (2 x 1800x and one 5950x) Another option could be x299 but you seem to want to move forward at least.

One bright spot that I am predicting is availability of some current high-end video cards with a possible 5-10% drop in asking price. (I just received a new ASRock Phantom … 6900 xt for less than $1500). As has been opined on, prices are not likely to get cheaper for anything.

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