Long time new build

[keith with the teef]

Yeah. The new MacBook Air featuring the M1 SOC looks stunning on paper and no need for fan cooling! as it runs so cool?

Not for me, but fan boys will jump at it.

[The Duke]

Never owned a Mac personally, there is a handful in the house (my eldest worships at the alter of Steve Jobs), however I did get an iPad pro 2020 and the stupidly expensive keyboard, and it’s a cracking “laptop” and probably quicker than most proper laptops.

I once had an iPad 2 and the think must of lasted 7 years or more. It impressed me, even thought i actually never liked it. My 2 year old used it daily untill she was about 10. She now has has a fist gen iPad pro.

Thought if I was byimg today I’d get the new air, it does all the pro does at a fraction of the price.

[Ed P]

My Apple loving son is faced with two years of living in a building site (revamping his home), and will be without a study and his usual multi-monitor setup. He is seriously considering a networked  Macbook Air as his main/sole production machine (compile time is a big consideration for him).

[keith with the teef]

You do have to wander now that Apple have switched to Arm. Are the days of x86 dominance coming to an end.

But then The apple chip must be limited in some ways. maybes alot?

[Ed P]

It is built like a pad so it has the limitations of a pad. Multitasking is OK but not great . It is in games that limitations of the built-i graphics will be evident. In terms of grunt it is faster than a 1050Ti, but graphics isn’t just a question of threads and flops.

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

I never did like the X86 architecture, in my opinion the 8086 was just two 8085’s bolted together so Intel could say they had a 16 bit processor. The segmented memory addressing seemed to be the result of just paging in 64K blocks like the 8085 could address. There was no memory protection and the CPU its self had no notion of an interrupt priority level. It was not even in the same LEAGUE as something like the Motorola 68000.

Over the years though, all the above shortcomings were fixed and the AMD 64 bit extensions finally introduced a CPU operating mode that ditches most of the historical baggage.

Intel themselves tried to replace X86 with the all new Itanium but the huge base of existing X86 software made it a non starter.

I wouldn’t hold my breath for the death of X86 just yet if I were you 😁

[The Duke]

The chip in the iPad is fantastic. Just watching such a small “pc” rendereing video faster than most pcs is astonishing.

Right guys, I got the bundle Dave mentioned 2700x iirc. Now my kids don’t want a ps5, so what is a decent card to pair with this set up. (I’m currently out the loop), the 970 I have doesn’t look that bad, for 1080p and the price for something better.

 

So guys what Should I do?

I’m a bit tips so spelling may be off 😃

[JayCeeDee]

The Duke wrote:

I’m a bit tips so spelling may be off 😃

Actually, it’s miles better than most other posts from you – but don’t take that as validation to get p*ssed more often!! :yahoo: :whistle:

[The Duke]

<p style=”text-align: right;”>Hi guys, off the top of my head I can’t recall if I got a 250 or500 Mme drive. Can I Chuck a 1tb HDD in and merge the Mme to the HDD, and use it a a huge cache. Or is that not a thing no more?</p>
I’ve not even got version of Windows for it yet. I was gonna “borrow one” untill I don’t have to.

Though I will be using it form work once or twice so I may as well put a propper version on it 😉

 

Before anyone moans I’ve got 3 win laptops and 2 ligit desktops, so I alway pay up in the end.

[Dave Rice]

You want AMD’s StoreMI

B550 coming in Q3 so might not be available just now. I installed the previous version on the same bundle you’ve got and it works well. Backup apps don’t seem to understand what’s going on though so I don’t do “system” or o/s backups and just stick to file backups.

[Drezha]

The Duke wrote:

I’ve not even got version of Windows for it yet. I was gonna “borrow one” untill I don’t have to.

You don’t need a product key to run Windows.

Apparently.

I don’t know how the digital licensing works but I changed my system and signed in and Windows is using a Pro license that is attached to my account apparently. :scratch:

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett

[Dave Rice]

Cheap enough on E-Bay, that’s where I get them for less than a fiver. Look for ones with instant delivery.

If you need one to upgrade from Home to Pro makes sure it specifies that and there’s often a trick you need to do to get it to work even with one you get from MS (involves disconnecting from the net, putting in a generic key then rebooting). Upgrades take less than 5 mins.

[wasbit]

There are also Microsoft generic keys though I’ve always removed the ethernet cable before installing, which also allows me a local account

– https://winaero.com/generic-keys-to-install-windows-10-version-2004/

 

--
Regards
wasbit

Rig 1: Optiplex 3050 SFF
Rig 2: Asus ROG G20CB (rebuilt wreck)
Rig 3: HP Elitebook 8440P

Dear Starfleet, hate you, hate the Federation, taking Voyager. - Janeway

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

In my experience, if you buy a pro key to upgrade from the home version and use the ” Anytime upgrade” option then it will say that your key is invalid at the end of the upgrade process but you will find that it actually DID do the upgrade and all is well 🤔

[The Duke]

@ricedg and anyone else with knowlage with this set up

Don’t know of you will see this but just got a ryzen 5 3600 16gb ram 1.5 Tb mvne.

I obvs don’t wan’t the fastest and best system, but what would be a decently matched gfx card. For now I’m gonna recycle my gtx 980. But suspect it’s gonnaxfall short.

 

[Dave Rice]

One for Teafie really, he knows a lot more than I do about these things, but I used a MSI Radeon RX 580 ARMOR 8GB OC GPU in the one I built for a teenage gamer. A year later and no complaints.

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

The base spec of you PC is fast enough to support almost any card, so the real question is ” How fast can you afford to go ?” 😁

At the VERY top end you would experience a small amount of bottlenecking  but even then a faster card will run faster so fill your boots 😃

[keith with the teef]

Yes that’s almost my system.

Amazing CPU you got there. It kicks ass in games. I was amazed. Ram you need to set it to 3200xmp.

GFX card. Well now then. My GTX 1070 plays all my games at ultra=60fps with said CPU.

Except 1 Metro exodus but thats because there game engine has always been buggy now matter how good the eye candy is.

Cyberpunk2077 The word is that it is barely indistinguishable. The eye candy settings between Medium and ultra and at Medium a GTX1070 will run the game at 60fps.

I would look for 2nd hand card the likes of the 1080, 1070, 1660ti prices must be dropping off a cliff by now.

[keith with the teef]

Here is a good key for which to set your GPU target.

Looking at it i would go for the 2060 super 8GB or RX5700 8GB.

[The Duke]

Cheers guys. Helpful as always

[Author]

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