Yea, but unfortunately it comes attached to a Mac.
An issue I've encountered often with motherboards, is that they have brain damaged default settings, that run CPU's out of spec. You really have to go through it all with a fine toothed comb and make sure everything is set to conservative stock manufacturer recommended settings. And my stupid MSI board resets everything (every single BIOS setting) to MSI defaults when you upgrade its BIOS.
Also be careful with overclocking, because the usual advice of "just running EXPO/XMP" often results in motherboards setting voltages on very sensitive components to more than 30% over their stock values, and this is somehow considered normal.
It looks completely bonkers to me. I overclocked my system to ~95% of what it is able to do with almost default voltages, using bumps of 1-3% over stock, which (AFAIK) is within acceptable tolerances, but it requires hours and hours of tinkering and stability testing.
Most users just set automatic overclocking, have their motherboards push voltages to insane levels, and then act surprised when their CPUs start bugging out within a couple of years.
Unfortunately, some separately purchasable hardware components seem to be optimized completely for gamers these days (overclocking mainboards, RGB on GPUs, etc.).
I'd rather run everything at 90% and get very big power savings and still have pretty stellar performance. I do this with my ThinkStation with Core Ultra 265K now - I set the P-State maximum performance percentage to 90%. Under load it runs almost 20 degrees Celsius cooler. Single core is 8% slower, multicore 4.9%. Well worth the trade-off for me.
Setting a P-State max percentage is completely reliable/stable, it will clock lower on average to hit the lower performance target. It’s kinda similar to setting a powersave governor, but more granular.
> Unfortunately, some separately purchasable hardware components seem to be optimized completely for gamers these days
It turned out during the shitcoin craze and then AI craze that hardcore gamers, aka boomers with a lot of time and retirement money on their hands and early millennials working in big tech building giant-ass man caves, are a sizeable demographic with very deep pockets.
The wide masses however, they gotta live with the scraps that remain after the AI bros and hardcore gamers have had their pick.
to;dr: they heavily customize BIOS settings, since many BIOSes run CPUs out-of-spec by default. With these customizations there was not much of a difference in failure rate between AMD and Intel at that point in time (even when including Intel 13th and 14th gen).
Since you mention EXPO/XMP, which are about RAM overclocking: RAM has the least trouble with overvoltage. Raising some of the various CPU voltages is a problem, which RAM overclocking may also do.
Yea, but unfortunately it comes attached to a Mac.
Yeah. If Asahi worked on newer Macs and Apple Silicon Macs supported eGPU (yes I know, big ifs), the choice would be simple. I had NixOS on my Mac Studio M1 Ultra for a while and it was pretty glorious.
I'd bet you don't care that it's attached to a Mac. I bet you don't want to switch OS. Which is understandable. In a couple of years, when Microsoft finally offers Windows as an ARM purchase, Linux is finally full-fledged done implementing support, and Apple resuscitates Boot Camp, I think a lot of people like you will look at Macs like the Mac Mini differently.
Just get used to the extortionate prices on things like memory and storage. Who wouldn't want to pay $200 to go from a 16GB to a 24GB configuration? Who wouldn't want to pay $600 more for the 2TB storage option? And forget about upgrading after you buy the computer.
Yea, but unfortunately it comes attached to a Mac.
An issue I've encountered often with motherboards, is that they have brain damaged default settings, that run CPU's out of spec. You really have to go through it all with a fine toothed comb and make sure everything is set to conservative stock manufacturer recommended settings. And my stupid MSI board resets everything (every single BIOS setting) to MSI defaults when you upgrade its BIOS.