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Flip Flopping between macOS and Windows

I suspect the base M4 mini is similarly sold out in other MicroCenter stores. What I'm seeing is that they get inventory and it hits their website late in the evening and they get about 15-20 units. These are sold out in the morning by customers reserving the units and then going into the store to buy them the next morning. I would like to buy one of these for testing. My analysis says that these are slower than my i7-10700 Windows PC but it would be nice to actually have data on this as I'm just doing a linear extrapolation.

What I'd like to do is use the local Best Buy to see if they will price match the Microcenter price but Microcenter would have to have them in stock and they aren't in-stock during the day. What I've heard at Best Buy is that you get the manager to approve the price match.

Alternately, if someone here has an account at Fidelity Investments and an M4 Mac, I'd appreciate it if they could run a test for me on it. The use case would be to use the M4 mini for the specific x86 program on it and run my other stuff on the Studio due to the mini's other limitations. If the M4 were enough, I could just replace the M1 Max Studio with the M4 Max Studio and I wouldn't need the Windows PC.
 
pshufd said:
View attachment 2591088
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For giggles, I built out an upper mid-range PC and the price wasn't terrible, thanks to the bundling deals.
Just under 1,800 before taxes

Build included details: AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D, ASUS X870E-PLUS TUF GAMING motherboard, G.Skill 32gig of DDR5-6000 ram. 1 TB of Samsung storage, Asus RTX 5070 gpu (and assorted components to flesh out the build).
 
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maflynn said:
For giggles, I built out an upper mid-range PC and the price wasn't terrible, thanks to the bundling deals.
Just under 1,800 before taxes

Build included details: AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D, ASUS X870E-PLUS TUF GAMING motherboard, G.Skill 32gig of DDR5-6000 ram. 1 TB of Samsung storage, Asus RTX 5070 gpu (and assorted components to flesh out the build).
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I got my wife that exact same PC--except it's a 9700X instead of a 7800X3D. It was a prebuilt MSI PC, and it was $1300 on Black Friday. Really nice PC.

It's on sale again! https://www.bestbuy.com/product/ace...ia-geforce-rtx-5070-1-tb-ssd-black/JX5V2XG2LW
 
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I feel myself wavering. I'm burnt out on the current game I've been playing since building a new machine and my friends have moved onto path of exile 2, which I played for a little, and didn't gel with.

I picked up Expedition 33 and it's a beautifully presented game, but I don't have the desire or time to learn all these new mechanics. So I find myself again with no desire to play. I could easily sell the desktop and go back to a Mac Mini, mainly due to RAM prices going nuts.

Starting to think the Mac Mini with GeForce Now was the sweet spot.

For now I'll just take a break.
 
LiE_ said:
Starting to think the Mac Mini with GeForce Now was the sweet spot.
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I've been using GFN and its been pretty good, I think if you go with the Mini, GFN is your best bet even over crossover. I found Crossover inadequate on the M4 Pro mini, never mind the base model
 
LiE_ said:
I feel myself wavering. I'm burnt out on the current game I've been playing since building a new machine and my friends have moved onto path of exile 2, which I played for a little, and didn't gel with.

I picked up Expedition 33 and it's a beautifully presented game, but I don't have the desire or time to learn all these new mechanics. So I find myself again with no desire to play. I could easily sell the desktop and go back to a Mac Mini, mainly due to RAM prices going nuts.

Starting to think the Mac Mini with GeForce Now was the sweet spot.

For now I'll just take a break.
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Man, y'all must have some amazing internets. I would rather have my gameage locally.
 
eltoslightfoot said:
Man, y'all must have some amazing internets. I would rather have my gameage locally.
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I have 900 Mbs on my internet and that's generally satisfactory for most of the games I'm playing. I don't think that's overly fast. With that said, my preference is to play locally, and so I rely heavily on Crossover which does a great job
 
maflynn said:
I have 900 Mbs on my internet and that's generally satisfactory for most of the games I'm playing. I don't think that's overly fast. With that said, my preference is to play locally, and so I rely heavily on Crossover which does a great job
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900 Mbps is insanely fast for large swaths of the world LOL. I was on Centurylink DSL right near the fiber hub and was only getting 100 Mbps. Now with Starlink I get 300 to 400 Mbps. So definitely glad I go with local it sounds like. :D

Then again, I have a Jellyfin server and don't like cloud based services anyway. If my kids weren't addicted to Apple Music, I wouldn't even have that LOL.
 
diamond.g said:
www.computerbase.de

Cinebench 2026: Der Community-Benchmark-Test!

Maxon hat überraschend Cinebench 2026 veröffentlicht. Die Community weiß, was das bedeutet: Community-Benchmark-Test!
www.computerbase.de www.computerbase.de
I don't see anyone talking about CineBench 2026 here. Looks like Computerbase is compiling results from folks.
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Here's the Tom's article:
Cinebench 2026 out and ready to hammer CPUs and graphics cards six times as hard — updated benchmark includes an SMT core test

I'll download it and start compiling the results for my home data center :p
 
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I found someone to test my software on an M4 mini and it performs about 10% slower than my 2020 i7-10700 desktop. Microcenter had a dozen M4 minis for sale for $400 a few hours ago but they're sold out again. It's not worth replacing my old computer with something slower though.

I opened up the old desktop and found out why my front USB3 ports aren't working. It was a disconnected cable that I thought was a power cable. The machine is nicer to use now as I don't have to use the USB3 ports in the back. I also put the RTX 1660 Ti back in so virtual desktops are faster. I have given some thought to upgrading to a 12th/13th/14th gen Intel as there are boards that support DDR4 that work with these Intel generations but the instability issues on the 13th and 14th gen models bother me. If I see a board and CPU at a good price, I might do it. But I can just use the old system as is for now.
 
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LiE_ said:
I'm burnt out on the current game
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Don't force it if you don't feel like playing. Having the PC there (in the previous page, you say it works well as your personal machine) when you feel like playing is the way, having a system with wider game support, M&KB and not dealing with ******tification of streaming services.

When I got rid of my last PC and moved to console gaming, I was just frustrated with the controller (as a FPS (skill issue, I just can't aim with it) and RPG player (inventory management)) and performance. While I don't play much now, it's nice knowing I can play what ever when I feel like and have it run well.
 
pshufd said:
I found someone to test my software on an M4 mini and it performs about 10% slower than my 2020 i7-10700 desktop. Microcenter had a dozen M4 minis for sale for $400 a few hours ago but they're sold out again. It's not worth replacing my old computer with something slower though.

I opened up the old desktop and found out why my front USB3 ports aren't working. It was a disconnected cable that I thought was a power cable. The machine is nicer to use now as I don't have to use the USB3 ports in the back. I also put the RTX 1660 Ti back in so virtual desktops are faster. I have given some thought to upgrading to a 12th/13th/14th gen Intel as there are boards that support DDR4 that work with these Intel generations but the instability issues on the 13th and 14th gen models bother me. If I see a board and CPU at a good price, I might do it. But I can just use the old system as is for now.
Click to expand...
From what I gather the issue with the 13/14 gen chips was limited to the top two or three models and was made worse with overclocking.
 
diamond.g said:
From what I gather the issue with the 13/14 gen chips was limited to the top two or three models and was made worse with overclocking.
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I thought it was all the K variants (i5/i7/i9) that were impacted. For me, while I don't over clock, that used to be my go to SKU for intel CPUs. I think overall this issue had hurt the brand so much that non-K SKUs were impacted in the sense of people avoiding Intel CPUs more then usual.
 
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maflynn said:
I thought it was all the K variants (i5/i7/i9) that were impacted. For me, while I don't over clock, that used to be my go to SKU for intel CPUs. I think overall this issue had hurt the brand so much that non-K SKUs were impacted in the sense of people avoiding Intel CPUs more then usual.
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It's not just K variants. Most of the desktop 13th/14th gen SKUs. Lower power desktop and mobile CPUs are supposedly safe. Higher power draw is apparently part of the problem, so overclocked and higher end CPUs are at greatest risk.
 
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diamond.g said:
From what I gather the issue with the 13/14 gen chips was limited to the top two or three models and was made worse with overclocking.
Click to expand...

I don't overclock but I usually go for the i7 which was one of the models affected. The HX models are a lot safer but I don't think that you can buy those at retail.
 
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