Caporegime
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Use the Caldigit then you have 2.5gbe, if you don’t need the full 10gbe, saving £100?
Nevermind, you ordered, nice!
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Poll: *** The official Mac Studio thread (it has Apple Silicon, lots of ports and everything!) ***
- Thread starter Feek
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Use the Caldigit then you have 2.5gbe, if you don’t need the full 10gbe, saving £100?
Nevermind, you ordered, nice!
I find the 2.5 GbE interface flaky at times, I haven't narrowed it down yet but full 10 GbE will be useful for my lab work.
Caporegime
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I think in my next upgrade in 2 years I might opt for at least a Mac Mini with a Pro chip or base Studio. Want more than 16G of RAM and better video/GPU.
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That's the thing, when you bump the base spec up of the Mini and add 10 GbE, it's not far off the price of the Studio even with education savings. I think £1,779.00 for a refurbished Studio from Apple is a good price for what it is. Hopefully it should last me quite some time, I want to get a drone so will be editing drone footage as well as all the workflow I already mentioned.
Caporegime
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That's how they get you, the incremental upgrade is not worth it. Whilst the M4 does everything I want at the moment, I really could do with more RAM than just 16g.
Now I’ve got the rest of my office sorted, I’ve been considering what workhorse machine to get for when I want to dabble in game dev again.
Starting pricing up some MATX/ITX systems and realised that a full new PC these days is costing you £2k for a solid spec machine. Suddenly the Studio package looks a lot more appealing.
Could I live with Mac OS for game dev….probably. I guess the nice thing with Mac is that they hold their value way better than PC hardware.
I’ve hovered over the buy button on the 40-core GPU 64Gb 1tb model a few times already. The only thing stopping me is that the MBA M4 is so good already.
I’d probably want to upgrade to 10Gb Ethernet and build an NVme NAS first mind.
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Thing is my gaming rig is already powerful, I have a 4090 in there plus the newest AMD 8 core gaming CPU (can’t remember the name). For AI stuff the 4090 will run rings around the M4 Max. I just don’t like using Windows.
I’ll see how it goes but I may return it and get an M4 MacBook Pro to replace my M1 MacBook Pro instead. I just get annoyed with the whole docking/undocking process and a powerful Mac desktop really appeals.
I'm still pleased with the refurb Mac Studio M4 that I got a couple of months back. Its quiet, stupidly fast does everything I could need it to. I went with the mid spec with 64GB Ram and 1TB drive over the base one, as I wanted more ram.
I'm going to see how I get on. I think 36GB should be fine for photo editing and basic 4k video editing. But I think I'd prefer more storage, but again I have a NAS and I can always buy an external NVMe. Thankfully I have fast broadband so streaming files in iCloud/Google Drive etc should be fine also.
I noticed they have the 2TB model on the refurbished store but it's £2289!
Yeah more ram would be nice but I’m getting along fine with 16GB. I give my Windows 11 VM 8 GB and have two safari tabs running in the background. Works fine.
Checked the MacOS Activity Monitor and its using about 12GB with these apps running.
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Few hours in, bloody hell it's quick. I thought my MacBook Pro M1 was quick, but this is on another level entirely.
Sat importing my entire photo library from my NAS, CPU temp is high, but I can't even hear the thing.
Very, very impressed so far. Now I'm debating sending it back for one with more onboard storage.
Sat importing my entire photo library from my NAS, CPU temp is high, but I can't even hear the thing.
Very, very impressed so far. Now I'm debating sending it back for one with more onboard storage.
That is the one regret I have with my M1 Max Mac Studio. I only got 512GB of storage.
I just use an external NVMe drive I put together with an old 1.92TB M2 drive as the boot drive. I don’t need the AI stuff.
As far as MacOS is concerned I’ve got 1.92TB of storage.
Some things are a pain in the arse to move to external drives though. I already have a 2TB and 512GB SSD external drives.
Yeah but mine is the boot drive with MacOS installed on it therefore you don’t have move anything to it. Everything is saved to it by default.
Ah, I see. That makes sense. Thank you!
I'm glad I've got the internal 1TB drive, but having lots of fun with compatibility with USB4 drives where they won't detect, and I already have a USB4 enclosure, Samsung T5 and T1 drive. I need to spend some time seeing if it a combination of them or specific ports that cause a problem. I picked up a 2TB EX400U and the mac refused to boot when I plugged that in which was a bit of a surprise, as had hope to retire the old T1 drive that I use for backups.