[cwaffles]

I think this is not a fair comparison.

1. a 750w Corsair PSU is ~$100

2. CPU cooler should be $30. A Thermalright cooler is way more than enough to keep at full boost speeds.

3. case is ~$50, its just a box

4. Windows is not the platform of choice for GPU/LLM work

Easy $400 savings. I would also also buy a B660 motherboard as X series motherboards only really offer overclocking options, and modern CPUs do not overclock anymore. $190 at newegg: https://www.newegg.com/gigabyte-b650-gaming-x-ax/p/N82E16813...

[hajile]

You need to compare likes as much as is reasonable. I literally priced everything out on Newegg.

1. You certainly can, but that's the Corsair with the crappy components rather than one with good guts. If I were being completely fair, I'd be spending well over $300 to buy a GaN PSU.

2. Maybe you're different, but I'm not spending almost $500 on a high-TDP CPU only to cripple it with a crappy cooler.

3. I went with a midrange case. In truth,You can't even buy a case on-par with the MacBook Pro case. Even trying to get close would be in the $400+ boutique range.

4. I never mentioned what work was going to be done. If I were going to compare for LLM work and be competitive with Apple, I'd have to go WAY more expensive on the GPU.

B650E and X670E are for overclocking and you'd pay WAY more to get them over their non-E counterparts. x670 offers quite a bit more IO. Maybe that's more IO than Apple offers, but the cost difference for a decent B650 isn't very much (maybe 3-4% of build cost). Certainly less than upgrading the other things you mentioned.

[cwaffles]

I see nothing wrong with the CX750M PSU [0]. What do you consider good guts? Compared to the macbook charger, which gets fairly hot under load, I see it as more capable.

2. Cooler cost has very little to do with performance. Thermalright units compete with liquid coolers for a fraction of the cost[1].

3. What does a macbook case offer? Holes for ports and the keyboard, hinge for the LCD. The components themselves do the work. What does a ~$50 case [2] not do? Plenty of cooling, mounts all your components.

4. For llama.cpp text generation, an M3 pro does ~31 tokens per sec with the Q4_0 profile[3]. A 3070 does ~34 tokens per second [4].

WRT the motherboard, I'm not sure what did I suggest upgrading? I recommended cheaper parts than the original post.

[0] https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/corsair-cx750m-2021-pow... [1] https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/thermalright-peerless-a... [2] https://www.amazon.com/Zalman-Computer-Workstation-Preinstal... [3] https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/discussions/4167 [4] https://kubito.dev/posts/llama-nvidia-3070-ti-benchmarks/#pe...

[sbuk]

That's still around $2400 - which is $1400 more than the mythical $1000 comparable desktop...