Your Computer

If you are in the UK and time is no object, I would still recommend my PC company; Linky

Mine took 3 weeks, they say 1-2, but I got free ****. Like Borderlands 2. Anyway, I digress. my build was £535 delivered, PCpartPicker wanted £650 and cyberpower and mesh wanted £690-£720.

I took the marcodon 3570k and added on some upgrades.

- i7 3770 (what I think you were looking at atm); On a side note, Unless you are editing then a 3570k will suit your needs
- Asus P8Z77 V - LX (Very good mobo, I have it. Seems cheap, but in most cases better or only up to 1% worse than super high end X79 mobos
- 8GB of super speedy Corsair 1866mhz RAM (upgrade to 2133 mhz for £10)
- 120GB Corsair Vengeance SSD for OS
- 1TB Sata 3 HDD for normal day to day use
- GTX 550ti (for modelling, and if you want video editing, it's good enough)
- Onboard audio
- Storm Enforcer

No keyboard/mouse/monitor, I recommend getting those yourself off of Amazon.

Grand Total: £883.89 (VAT included in price)
(add on £25 for shipping and building!)

If you want the pcpartpicker list, go do it yourself, you lazy person. I doubt it will be cheaper.

EDIT: Nope, PCpartpicker is cheaper, but I skimped on some of the stuff like the HDD, etc

 

Yeah, my setup is just over £1k without building, but I got motherboard/CPU/fan as a bundle for cheaper than normal.

Which 7770 are you basing your fps guesses off? I looked through the stats and they seem to be very similar.

This is the card I'm getting: Asus Radeon HD 7770 1GB Video Card (HD7770-DC-1GD5) - PCPartPicker United Kingdom

Compared to yours it's slightly faster in Core Clock speed but otherwise is very similar.

I don't see how one would be able to give out an extra ~20fps over the other.

 

ATI Technologies - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Probably what actually happened is you were actually looking at ATI branded hardware. They only stopped using the name in 2010.

 

Battlefield at 60 fps ultra. I might dip to maybe 56 fps while playing it. I also play skyrim with 9 uGrids, and a ton of graphic mods (ENB, Static Mesh Improvement, Skyrim HD, and more. I average about 50 fps with that, but that's because of the unstable uGrids causing video memory dumps. If you have one of these higher-end graphic cards, you won't have to worry about over-tweaking, EVER. Graphics aren't everything, but I can't help downloading as many graphic mods as I can and just stare at my games, drooling.

I highly recommend you buy one of these graphic cards soon, you won't have to worry about specs for almost two years.

Also: on the ATI GPU thing you'd say it like AMD ATI Radeon HD **** series.
Though they were bought a few years back the name hasn't completely faded.

 

Nope, they've dropped the ATI branding altogether now.

Product range

Quote from Wiki page

People still call them ATI through force of habit, nothing official any more.

 

Yeah that thing really is stunning. I'm hoping high end PC manufacturers catch up soon, graphic design applications are a clear reason to have something that high res, but seeing it available on gaming laptops would be sweet. I also hope that Apple start putting those displays in non-devil machines.

 

Hardly anything that even uses high enough resolution to make use of it right now. In fact, it's hard enough just to fill current screens properly.

 

It should be about usability for the price you're paying. If I want nothing but looks I can spend that money on art.

 

It's more like paying several thousand more for an identical car just because of the brand name.

 

What I'm saying is that they are pieces, and paying 2-3 times more for those pieces is criminal. They don't even work any differently, either. The only point of contention is the OS, which is subjective anyway.

 

Did we actually just turn this from a "retina displays aren't utilised yet so are a pointless investment" argument, one which I largely agree with, in to an "Apple are overpriced" debate? FFS, I'm genuinely disappointed. Not just in you, but in myself too, because I'm about to bite.

Since laptops are the main point of contention in this discussion: Build quality. I know you'll be like "Oh, some PC makes have great build quality too." For one, very few, secondly, generally not to the same level. In terms of major brands and examples for right now, you've got Sony's Vaio range, which are overpriced as **** in their own right too, and actually overrated in terms of build quality. Secondly you've got the major enterprise lines of laptop, Latitude being a great example. You know how they get that build quality? They build them like ****ing tanks, and they also charge a reasonable price for them as well. Not as high as Apple by and large, but still high, and the difference can be accounted for, in part, but again they're much heavier and bigger as a result. They take a certain approach to build quality, one which is appropriate for purpose.

Asus are actually a pretty good example of solid machines at a decent price. Not as good as Apple imho, but a lot cheaper too, definitely a fantastic balance of price and quality with some of their models, but not all by any means. But at this point the stupidity of the Macbook vs Laptop debate in hardware terms is revealed. PC isn't a manufacturer. Sony are. Asus are. HP are. Dell are. Vaio are overpriced and not even that great, so why don't we have Sony vs. Asus debates? Because people aren't interested in that. They mix and muddle the discussion by drawing a line based on OS in an argument about hardware. The fact that Apple are both hardware manufacturer and OS developer isn't true on the other side of the discussion, so the parallel breaks down.

Look at ultrabooks as a rather timely example. I've tried a lot of ultrabooks, looked at a look of varied reviews, and have friends who have done the same. I've even managed to convince one of the most staunch anti Mac friends I have to buy an Air, because having performed an exhaustive search for his ideal ultrabook over the past few months, he hasn't run in to a SINGLE ONE which doesn't have a major issue, except (dah dah dah daaaaaah) the Macbook AIR. When you look at high end netbooks with build quality higher than a sheet of paper, it isn't even that expensive, depressing as that is for me.

Furthermore: RnD. It's not just about build quality, it's about effort put in to ergonomic design, something that most PC manufacturers apart from Sony put bugger all effort in to compared to Apple. Not only are Apple products well built, they're very nice to use on a day to day basis. Nice keyboards, nice case designs which are (stupid as it may sound) easy to just close, open and grab. I know it sounds like a trivial thing to pour money in to, but the balance on stuff like hinges vs. base matters to a lot of people. It may not matter to most, and fair enough, THEY would be stupid to spend money on something they don't care about, but that doesn't mean anyone is stupid to do so. RnD costs money, this is reflected in hardware cost. NOT spending this money is reflected in hardware use.

If you'd used Apples at all in the last few years, you'd know that Apple trackpads have been miles ahead of any PC competition for that entire time. This is partly down to hardware, and partly down to functionality built in to the OS. I HATE using windows laptops now because they lack things like momentum scrolling, and even gestures (though this isn't nearly as big a point as the scrolling). Hell, it took YEARS for PCs to start integrating two finger scrolling, and Windows STILL can't do it right. Line by line scrolling is clumsy, and I've yet to try Windows 8, but I hope for damn sure they've tried to address that.

Now, on to non laptops: The Mac Mini is an interesting example, and one that few people lay in to, because it's kinda niche. It is, still, a little expensive. But it's also very well built for a small form factor machine, and how those things don't overheat or even really clog up with dust after years of use is beyond me. You can get cheaper small form factor PCs, and by and large they're pieces of ****. You can get similarly priced ones, and they're actually pretty good, but at this stage it becomes a moot point.

iMacs: You've got a frigging screen in there, and a nice one too. I personally think these are some of the worst offenders in terms of price, since Apple do charge a pretty penny for their screens (separate or built in to an iMac), but they are seriously nice. Especially since the ergonomics and RnD arguments hold much less weight here in anything but aesthetic terms. But still, it IS a nice screen, and really that's what you're paying for here. To be fair, if you look at all in one PC's (which is the fair point of comparison for an iMac, NOT a tower), they're generally pretty expensive and have bog standard screens, look at the higher end of the spectrum and once again you get closer to Apple prices.

Mac Pro: Again, something that few people attack, because it isn't really in the public eye. But look at the thing. In hardware terms, it's basically a server. You're looking at either one or two Xeon processors, current gen, either quad or 6 core. Server grade (ECC FB) RAM. Do you buy many high end Dell Poweredge towers? I'm specing one up right now, and I went with the basic Poweredge tower server and tried to configure it to the same level as the basic Pro. You can't even put a processor in past 2.8GHz, and the basic Pro comes with a 3.2GHz Xeon. I ended up with a machine that was worse spec, for more expensive than a Pro. The only thing the Dell had that the Mac didn't, was RAID support, which to be fair is a sizeable whack of money, but when you account for things like processor speed difference, smaller HDD, less RAM, complete lack of proper GPU, let alone something pretty useable like the basic HD 5770 in the Pro, this whole price difference thing is shown to be more and more bullshit with the pro.

ALSO, something you have to factor in is that I pay £14 for the current OS. Fourteen. Pounds. I paid £21 for the last one. You don't see a disparity there?


Now, on to my Apple focused bitching: A current gripe of mine, graphics cards for Pros. A small issue, but one that affects me. They're overpriced as ****, and there's no difference. It's the same card, but with Apple EFI support rather than standard firmware. You can flash PC cards but they never work quite right, you'll run in to issues with multiple displays and often trouble seeing the boot screen (which is seriously problematic for booting in to my Windows partition). It's a true tip off, but the basic argument here is that they sell basically none of them. It's a way to claw back money on something that doesn't form part of their core profit base but they still need to provide, and annoying as it is, I'll put up with that because I accept that I'm a niche user.

Also, all the above caveats that I accounted for. I would never tell people that Macs are a better option than PCs, since for most people they aren't. Most people don't care about the aspects of RnD that I mentioned, or screens on iMacs, and fair enough. What I do hate (and, I would argue, more than you, since as a Mac user but not Apple fanboy I get lumped in with a bunch of retards), are exactly those you criticise: those who buy them for the logo, or the image. There are droves of them, and they're incredibly annoying, especially when they walk up to me thinking I identify with their hipster but also mainstream "lifestyle" (whatever the **** that means with respect to a goddamn computer choice). But that's not the point, we're talking about hardware and software, not the kind of people that buy it. You know what this is telling of? The fact that Apple are great at marketing and pretty damn unscrupulous (as if anyone needed to be told that anyway). They make largely professional grade solutions, and then they made them cool, so people who don't need them just throw money their way. Hell, Apple basically invented pretty significant kinds of marketing, you only have to watch TV ads after the iPod and iPhone ones to see the effect they've had. Perhaps THIS is where those dollars I can't even begin to account for are going, makes a lot of sense, but at the end of the day the difference is much less than people make out, and one I can take on the chin for enjoying every day of my computer experience more, and not because even a single person sees me using this computer. If I could put it inside a brandless case, I would.

Oh, sorry, last chapter of my little book here: second hand Macs. This is my home, and I LOVE it here. I'll defend large aspects of Apple pricing in many instances, but even I won't actually fork out for them in most cases, because I know the second hand market enough to get a good deal, and that's both fun and means I don't give money to a frankly horrible corporation like Apple. The wonderful thing about this market is that there's a sizeable drop in price from current gen to last gen, but past that they hold their price pretty well. I love wheeling and dealing with second hand Macs, cause I get things like a last gen MPB for £400 cause of one tiny little dent that'd sent most Mac using hipsters recoiling, but I realise is true of most second hand Laptops as well. I'm also happy to use a Mac Pro from 2006 cause I realise it's still a quad core Xeon beast, and as a result paid £650 a couple of years ago rather than £2000 for a current model, and am now about to sell it for £600 after getting two years of use out of it. These are the things people fail to account for, and see something like the Retina display MBP come out with a monumental price tag (and, again, in this case, one that I feel has few real world benefits until other things catch up) and just assume that any other PC maker who went to the effort of making a beautiful display like that wouldn't also do in a heartbeat.

Gah, now why would you make me do that? My wrist hurts now, and I haven't even gotten around to watching the volleyball replays yet

 

Actually Insane, I saw a brilliant video the other day; Did Apple Really Invent ANYTHING?

This is mainly aimed at the whole stupid suing about rounded squares, but it makes a legitimate point too. While you think you are buying some that apple has "invented" you are just getting a ripoff of something that already exists, and contains things that do not belong to them. The samsung chips, the intel chips, the ARM chips, the mouse, etc etc.

They have taken the invention of chocolate and cake, and just made a chocolate cake.

 

The iOS debate is not one I want to weigh in on right now, nor is it what was being discussed here. Their approach to hardware patents is atrocious, genuinely despicable, but that's down to the fact that Jobs was a genuinely nasty man with an ego from here to Mars. If he'd still been alive, NASA could have saved a lot of money and just driven curiosity along it rather than sending a rocket.

The "who invented who" argument is not what's being addressed here, and it's a stupid one whoever brings it up. THAT is the kinda thing those Mac fanboys I talked about focus on, and it's fruitless and stupid. We're talking about A) quantifiable value and B) computers, not tablets or phones. This stupid argument is just used as a smokescreen to stop people talking about discussions where you objectively assess the nature of each system, by instead talking about intellectual property and bringing the culture of brands in to it. It's not helpful, please don't perpetuate it.

EDIT: Just to be clear, I'm not saying it's a pointless discussion overall. Apple should be held to account for this crap they pedal about inventing stuff, and how Android "stole" OS features and OEM's "stole" their design ideas. We need to stop this before it goes any further, and I hope to god that this Apple v Samsung case doesn't go in Apple's favour, or it'll set a very dangerous and horrible legal precedent for patent trolling, and what even constitues patentable material. I'm just saying that it doesn't pertain to the discussion of whether Apple computer hardware is worth it, and it's generally brought up as a criticism in discussions (like this one) where it doesn't have much place.

 

Ah, i've misread the discussion. And massively pissed you off

And as for the hardware component is of a better quality argument, that is simply bollucks.



This is the i5 3550 that goes into the new mac, as a £100 odd extra.



This is the i5 3550 that goes into windows PCs.

The components used are not of better quality. I'm sure this comes down to the case. You are comparing a £70 piece of metal/plastic with a £10-£25 one. Apples to oranges. Looking at a £70 case vs a £70 is a better argument. Some may argue that the £70 PC case will win, because the build quality is equal, but the mac box is plain and smaller.

And who even looks at the thing anyway? In a house where you are just sitting do your work, do you do extra well in your work knowing that your box is more shiny? Or cost £2000? Not really. I'm not a massively aesthetic person though. All mac has going for it is aesthetics, and at that price it's something you expect. You buy a £2000 surround sound system from Bose and you get genuine support, one to one advice, demos, tips, even replacement parts within a day from the showroom. And after a new one has come out, they still support you and your investment. With Apple, it is quite literally a case of "OMGITS SHINY GIVE US YOUR MONEY!" and after the next shiny V2S comes out, they deliberately stop giving you updates and support so you give them more money.

So on a service related level, I don't agree with the pro mac argument. At a high price you expect service. And compared to a £10 fossil from a scary looking guy in a crater in the ground yes, you do get a nice looking support base, but when you consider that you are spending that much money, you should just expect it. And it doesn't fall level with equivalent purchase prices.

Also, how did this become a Windows Mac debate? What is this, the lolbox?

 

As I explained in my post above, that's not true. Subjective though this is, I've never used a laptop as nice as the current gen Macbook of the same time, not only in terms of how it looks. Things that are less subjective are build quality (which I still feel you're not fully accounting for) and things like the trackpad. There is no way you can argue that any Windows laptop has as nice a trackpad as the Macbook, in part because they're generally cheaper on most laptops, and in part because (even when some manufacturers do put the effort in to this aspect) Windows trackpad support is pitiful in comparison.

Lol, you just dug your grave with that one. The Apple store is many things, foremost being pretentious, but you CANNOT fault them on service. Free appointments at any time, regardless of having a warranty or product receipt or not. Geniuses get a lot of stick, and honestly the requirements for helping most customers in there day to day must be very low, but when pressed with an actual problem they generally know more than they're credited with. Pas this, they go out of their way in terms of physical support. My dad took his iPhone in a while ago, with a screen problem that it's pretty obvious was down to customer neglect, he's a bit careless with it. This thing is a month and half out of warranty, not bought from the Apple store (through his network instead), and with an issue that is at least partly his fault. They hand him a new one then are there, no questions asked, and even apologise that this new one can only have a 90 day warranty because the original one was out of warranty.

Example 2, my old 2008 white Macbook suffered, as most did, from cracks eventually forming. Whilst this doesn't entirely help my build quality point, it's not a problem with Macbook designs at large, and how they deal with it speaks volumes. I took mine in cause I was selling it, and they didn't need a receipt or anything (which I didn't have cause I bought it second hand), just booked it in, called me 45 minutes later saying it was done, and oh hey, they even gave me a new keyboard and trackpad as well which wasn't mentioned before. All free and no questions, because it was a recognised issue with that machine.

So yeah, the customer service issue really isn't a good point to argue here.

Please see above. Dell offer pretty good support on an enterprise level, but please find me one company that offers that level of service on a consumer level, even if they're also expensive. My friend had mixed experience with his expensive ass Alienware (which is basically Dell anyway), on the one hand they sent out a friggin' service guy to his house who replaced the inside case and even put new rubber feet on it. But on the other, when a recognised issue with that model (again, we're talking a £1,100 laptop here, and for a tiny 11" laptop with not great spec considering, sound familiar?) came up, they completely ignored it. This issue was a hinge crack, and much worse than the case crack issue I experience because it began to impact upon the function of the thing. And he got outright ignored.

I agree about this debate, it started out as saying that Retina displays aren't utilised to a level which justifies them as an "extra cost for extra function" addition, and then somehow (read: inevitably) turned in to a more general Mac vs. PC argument (which, again, makes no real sense in laptop terms, people really need to specify examples of brands here).