Help me build my PC 2017 Catch All

You can go with the top GPU Macbook Pro, but do you want to use a bigger machine all the time? It sounds like you prefer the 12-13" form factor. What I would do is get the small Mac you want and for gaming get a $800-1,000 windows laptop with at least a Nvidia 1060 card, something like a Dell G5. This will probably end up being the same price or cheaper as getting the top 15" MBP and you get to use the smaller machine for your normal day-to-day and then use the Windows one only when gaming.

You didn't mention if you game at a desk or on your couch or something. If you can deal with a desktop then that opens more possibilities, like Guru mentioned.

*Legion* wrote:

An Iris 655 is not up to playing modern games at all.

The Radeon Pro 555 is better, but you're still looking at running modern games in 720p on low detail for the most part. I think the only MacBook Pros that are really going to fit your ask are the ones with Vega GPUs.

Welp, $2800 for a refurb is way out of my league, so Vega is out. This is pretty depressing. Those benchmarks are miserable.

Greatajax wrote:
WizKid wrote:

Have you considered a "Hackintosh"?

I have no idea what that is.

There was a time in my life, around 1998-2002 when I built my own PC's and I loved the process and had screaming machines that could play anything at all the highest levels. Now, I have no idea what "hackintosh" means. How far I have fallen.

https://hackintosh.com/

Basically a PC that you can install the Mac OS on, so you can have both Windows and Mac on the same machine.

Thanks everyone for your thoughts and suggestions. To answer Leaping Gnome, I need a laptop as I have nowhere in my house for a dedicated desktop, maybe some day. My gaming is split between a couch/comfy chair and a table, or my PS4. As I love strategy games, I think the larger screen might be okay for me, if I can convince my wife that we can splurge a bit on the cost. I think at this point, I am going to be able to pull off one new computer, and not two separate ones, as good as that sounds. So it seems this is not an ideal situation, as I would very much like to stay with a Mac.

My Steam and GOG libraries are mostly full of the Paradox suite of grand strategy games, Out of the Park Baseball, Kerbal Space Program, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, XCOM, Civilization, and a bunch of retro games. The Mac compatible games my craptastic current Macbook can't handle on the lowest settings include Kerbal, XCOM2, Torment:Tides, Pathfinder, Cities: Skylines, Imperator, Total War:Shogun. I can play games like EU4, Wasteland 2, and CK2, but they are slow even on completely stripped down graphics. And the latter is unplayable additionally because I have to use a monitor to read the tiny writing (hitting 40 is a pain), and it further slows it down.

I haven't done much if any multiplayer gaming (save a single year on Dark Age of Camelot nearly 20 years ago), mostly because I never had a gaming community; and I use the PS4 for the big RPGs I like. Is it possible to play modern strategy type games with decent performance on a Macbook Pro and keep the Fallouts and Skyrims of the world on my PS4 (though I'll miss out on the mods)? I do have the Witcher 3, which I bought on a whim on sale on Gog, but I guess I can just let that go.

Man I sound like an old guy. Twenty years ago, I knew all kinds of information about the state of gaming. Having a Mac makes you lazy and uninformed, but they sure are easy.

WizKid wrote:

https://hackintosh.com/

Basically a PC that you can install the Mac OS on, so you can have both Windows and Mac on the same machine.

Ahh, the reverse of a boot-camped Mac then. Interesting, but I don't have the time or energy with a 3 and 5 year old at home for a project right now, outside of the myriad other ones on my plate. I think I have set up some limitations that mean that I am going to have to accept that I still may not be able to play the games I want to even with a new computer.

Greatajax wrote:

I can play games like EU4, Wasteland 2, and CK2, but they are slow even on completely stripped down graphics. And the latter is unplayable additionally because I have to use a monitor to read the tiny writing (hitting 40 is a pain), and it further slows it down.

Try this: CKII UI Font Mod for 3.x
or this: Font Overhaul (requires Bigger Interface)

I use the first one, it is pretty good. I cannot recall if these are Ironman compatible, if you care about that.

Just wait til you hit 50, brother!

Rykin wrote:

The MacBook will be an ok gaming machine as long as you drop the extra money on an external GPU. I don't think that any Mac model except the Mac Pro or iMac Pro ships with a GPU worth considering for gaming though. Apple's current designs also have a bit of an issue with thermal performance so the CPU may throttle under heavy load. Apple generally gets around this by underclocking the CPU.

I wouldn't recommend getting any of the eGPU options that Apple sales. They are all very overpriced (just like the Mac's actually). You can get an AKiTiO Node enclosure for around $230 from Other World Computing and then pick up whichever macOS compatible AMD GPU you want. You can technically use Nvidia CPUs but they are not officially supported by Apple.

If you want to avoid the DIY route of picking out and installing you own GPU then Sonnet Technologies makes some small and portable all-in-one solutions based on Radeon RX 560 & 570 that probably cost about what you would spend on a separate eGPU enclosure and a GPU for it, but you are then unable to upgrade to a better GPU down the road without replacing the whole thing.

Rykin, thanks. Okay, this is interesting. If I run across a game I can't play at an acceptable level, I can buy an external GPU to boost it? This seems doable. Will the external supplement or replace the work of the internal one? And if I get one would it work with the 13" Iris card model, or do I need to go for the more powerful 15" one?

Keep in mind there are rumors of more powerful MBPs coming this year, but like anything in tech if you can wait six months there will always be something better.

If you want to go the eGPU route I strongly suggest reading a couple of reviews / primers. There can be weird compatibility problems, especially if you are going to try to use one under Bootcamp with Windows so make sure you find a review of the combination laptop + enclosure + video card you are considering before you purchase. They definitely have their uses but there can be drawbacks, especially around cost. Apple does sell one that should work out of the box (BlackMagic), but last I heard it is non-upgradeable which is a bummer.

WizKid wrote:
Greatajax wrote:
WizKid wrote:

Have you considered a "Hackintosh"?

I have no idea what that is.

There was a time in my life, around 1998-2002 when I built my own PC's and I loved the process and had screaming machines that could play anything at all the highest levels. Now, I have no idea what "hackintosh" means. How far I have fallen.

https://hackintosh.com/

Basically a PC that you can install the Mac OS on, so you can have both Windows and MAc on the same machine.

TonyMacx86 is a better Hackintosh resource in my opinion. I have been running a Hackintosh for about 8 years now as my main desktop. It can be a lot of work especially when new major macOS versions are released. For a while after first setting it up every minor update to the OS required reinstalling the Hackintosh extras that make it work well and fool the OS into thinking it is a real Mac and every major updated required starting fresh. A few years later when Clover was released things got much easier for both minor and major updates, but I have been stuck on El Capitan for years as I can't get anything newer to work. I think the issue is related to my old Nvidia 9800 GT and that a newer AMD card might solve it, but at this point I don't feel like putting anymore money into such an old system. A Hackintosh is a great way to have a Mac that is better/more customizable/more serviceable than a real one, but it does require extra work.

I think a Hackintosh would pretty much defeat the purpose of staying on Macs to make things easy. It's be easier to just run one Windows 10 machine than to maintain a Hackintosh.

Hackintosh is cool, but not for someone looking to *avoid* extra maintenance effort.

Greatajax wrote:
Rykin wrote:

The MacBook will be an ok gaming machine as long as you drop the extra money on an external GPU. I don't think that any Mac model except the Mac Pro or iMac Pro ships with a GPU worth considering for gaming though. Apple's current designs also have a bit of an issue with thermal performance so the CPU may throttle under heavy load. Apple generally gets around this by underclocking the CPU.

I wouldn't recommend getting any of the eGPU options that Apple sales. They are all very overpriced (just like the Mac's actually). You can get an AKiTiO Node enclosure for around $230 from Other World Computing and then pick up whichever macOS compatible AMD GPU you want. You can technically use Nvidia CPUs but they are not officially supported by Apple.

If you want to avoid the DIY route of picking out and installing you own GPU then Sonnet Technologies makes some small and portable all-in-one solutions based on Radeon RX 560 & 570 that probably cost about what you would spend on a separate eGPU enclosure and a GPU for it, but you are then unable to upgrade to a better GPU down the road without replacing the whole thing.

Rykin, thanks. Okay, this is interesting. If I run across a game I can't play at an acceptable level, I can buy an external GPU to boost it? This seems doable. Will the external supplement or replace the work of the internal one? And if I get one would it work with the 13" Iris card model, or do I need to go for the more powerful 15" one?

It basically replaces the internal GPU while it is connected and I believe you can use them with either the laptops built-in display or via an external display. You mentioned not having room for a desktop, but when you go the eGPU option you are basically reverting to a small form factor desktop style setup. The Sonnet ones are smaller, but still need a bit of space somewhere.

While looking at stuff for this earlier I came across a very nice external enclosure that is a little more costly than the one I mentioned earlier buy about $50, but it also has a SATA slot, a wired network port, and a bunch of extra USB ports. That SATA slot would be a great way to add a second SSD to your system to use as a game drive. It is the Mantiz Venus MZ-02.

Rykin wrote:

While looking at stuff for this earlier I came across a very nice external enclosure that is a little more costly than the one I mentioned earlier buy about $50, but it also has a SATA slot, a wired network port, and a bunch of extra USB ports. That SATA slot would be a great way to add a second SSD to your system to use as a game drive. It is the Mantiz Venus MZ-02.

Now this sounds like something I can do! I also like that I can wait on it and only get it if I find that something won’t play at a quality I want. Thank you all. Still gotta find that extra $$ for the 15”.

I realize I could do much better with a pc for gaming, but our lives are all Apples in our family and I’m not willing to have the one thing that isn’t at this point in my 45 years of life.

Keep your existing Mac, and buy a Windows PC just for gaming. You don't have to put anything you actually care about on the machine. Think of it kind of like a game console. You'll put fun stuff there, and keep all your real work on the Macs you already have.

The only Mac that could be genuinely decent for gaming would be one of the new Mac Pros, when they ship, and you might even need to add an aftermarket video card; I haven't looked to see what they offer. They do have slots and are expandable, like proper PCs, but they are obscenely expensive. Further, a normal gaming card that you put in probably wouldn't work in Mac mode, so when you rebooted, you'd have to switch inputs on your monitor to use the PC's output. (you'd probably want to configure it to use ONLY the card you added, not the Mac card.)

And doing this would cost a freaking kidney, because these machines are insanely overpriced. If early price overviews are correct, you'd have to cough up like six thousand dollars for one with 8 cores, and then you might have to add a video card too. (I'm not sure we know yet what they'll have available.)

Or you can just buy a standalone PC that will probably run faster for like, I dunno, $1200 or so, maybe $1500 or $1600 if you need a monitor. (you may need a screen, if you're all-Mac now.) You don't have to spend that much, but that would be a pretty impressive machine, one that would have real legs. It would keep up with the Mac Pro for the most part, and would quite likely beat it at some things, for like a quarter the price.

And you don't even have to spend that much; you can do a reasonable gaming PC for like $750 or so, maybe $950 with an okay monitor. That one wouldn't keep up with the Mac Pro anymore, but it would come pretty close, for a sixth the price.

My aging Alienware Alpha i3 needs to be retired. I am actually able to play most stuff I want to play on it but almost everything on my Steam wishlist needs more (and I don't even have anything all that bleeding edge.

Looking at Amzon I see this possible cheap option what say you all?

Believe me I know it isn't great but I think it would be a big enough step up for me over the Alienware. Is there something better I can find for around $300 (I really am not willing to pay much more than that - I haven't even turned on the Alieware for a few weeks because I have more than enough to play on the other systems - but occasionally there is something I only see on the PC - or is just so much cheaper on Steam like I bought Dragon's Dogma for around $10 on Steam and no other system was even close)

farley3k wrote:

My aging Alienware Alpha i3 needs to be retired. I am actually able to play most stuff I want to play on it but almost everything on my Steam wishlist needs more (and I don't even have anything all that bleeding edge.

Looking at Amzon I see this possible cheap option what say you all?

Believe me I know it isn't great but I think it would be a big enough step up for me over the Alienware.

Actually it would be a big step down from your Alienware.

I'm guessing you have the original 2014 Alienware Alpha i3, which has a GeForce 860M GPU. This HP has an integrated Intel HD 4600.

The 4600 pretty much can't run anything. It is not for gaming. The 860M wipes the floor with it.

The 4600 came out in 2013. It's even older than the 860M, on top of being an integrated GPU rather than a discrete one.

Glad I didn't order it!

And actually after looking at all the Steam games I own and the ones I have on my wish list I did some quick addition and found I can buy all them for the Xbox/PS4/Switch for less than $100. So I am backing off from buying a new PC at all.

This happens to me every few months to a year - I think "Oh I should buy a better PC" then I really look at it and I just can't bring myself to do it.

PCs are great though

They are! Don't get me wrong. I love them and I have very fond memories of packing up my pc and huge VGA monitor to take to LAN parties. I remember cutting a hole in my case and putting in plastic so because it looked cool.

But it just seems that when I look at what I actually want to play I can do without these days.

Spending $400 or so on an Xbox One X is a vastly better option for playing games.. you can't approach the power of the Xbox One X in a PC for anywhere close to $400... Nvidia is making it really interesting come Project Scarlett in terms of price/power ratio.

How come every time I watch one of those console tech hype videos I walk away with a sour taste in my mouth and the strong feeling they don't know what the f*ck they are talking about?!

In the Project Scarlett video one of the featured people said something like "with the SSD and the solid state drive, you are going to see a new experience..." And this whole idea that load times are going to go away is such BS. We know that 4x more power means developers are going to use every inch of that so the ratio of resources being used to speed of loading times is going to be more out of whack. And how is game pass going to have faster load times and make all the games accessible with the snap of your fingers?

Dont you dare underestimate The Power of The Cloud (tm).

An SSD for consoles is a great upgrade in any case. It will still be interesting to see what it does to the price however.

Shadout wrote:

An SSD for consoles is a great upgrade in any case. It will still be interesting to see what it does to the price however.

Not a lot. 1TB of spinning rust costs ~$40. 1TB of SSD can be had for ~$80 and current trends are still rapidly downward.

fangblackbone wrote:

How come every time I watch one of those console tech hype videos I walk away with a sour taste in my mouth and the strong feeling they don't know what the f*ck they are talking about?!

In the Project Scarlett video one of the featured people said something like "with the SSD and the solid state drive, you are going to see a new experience..." And this whole idea that load times are going to go away is such BS. We know that 4x more power means developers are going to use every inch of that so the ratio of resources being used to speed of loading times is going to be more out of whack. And how is game pass going to have faster load times and make all the games accessible with the snap of your fingers?

Have you seen a recent Nvidia hype video? There’s just as much BS and marketing drivel. Realistically every industry is guilty of this. We call it Marketing.

Microsoft has heavily invested in streaming and I’m certain they will use that to make games appear to load and play instantly while assets are streamed in the background to the SSD. Sure it’s smoke and mirrors to some degree but switching to different sub systems and NVME SSD’s will allow for greater write speed that will enable such technology to an even greater degree. I would be cautious writing this off before we see it in action.

Oh don't get me wrong. I am excited about Scarlett. It is just what I feel is disdain for gamers that they can get console gamers to lap this gibber-speak up!
I am excited that they are using the ssd as a ram drive too!

fangblackbone wrote:

Oh don't get me wrong. I am excited about Scarlett. It is just what I feel is disdain for gamers that they can get console gamers to lap this gibber-speak up!
I am excited that they are using the ssd as a ram drive too!

I'm confused by your last statement. A RAM drive is using a portion of RAM as filesystem storage. Do you mean they're bringing virtual memory to consoles by using the SSD as ersatz RAM?

I would be astonished if they were to do that; swap files are intended for when you can't fit a process load into the available memory, and you want to run the program(s) anyway. It is an exceedingly slow technique, and would be totally unsuited for a gaming environment. Game devs would do anything they had to, in order to avoid swapping, up to and including cutting way down on the scope of their games to make them fit.

Consoles could use SSDs as buffers for slower spinning disks, which can be a useful technique, and one that's largely invisible to the game. But with the sizes and pricing that are becoming available, I think they'd probably be better off just using an SSD as a full fixed disk replacement. That would let the games know for sure that their assets would load quickly, instead of having the uncertainty of a caching technique.

I would be surprised if there is much space lift on the SSD to use. You can figure out the math to see that they will probably be using a 1TB SSD due to cost and current AAA games take 50-80+ GB and they are completely bypassing 4k to go straight to 8k. Or you could possibly use the 4x the power of the current gen consoles to see that games could use upwards of 200-320 GB of that 1TB drive. Add on top of that, the whole gamepass instant loading of most everything you want from whatever generation going back to the original Xbox and you realize the problem...
I guess memory cards are getting bigger and cheaper. But having 64-128GB flash drives or SD cards lying around seems odd or off to me. I guess I knew the time would eventually come seeing as at one point we though nobody would ever need more than a couple or a dozen megabytes of RAM...

fangblackbone wrote:

I would be surprised if there is much space lift on the SSD to use. You can figure out the math to see that they will probably be using a 1TB SSD due to cost and current AAA games take 50-80+ GB and they are completely bypassing 4k to go straight to 8k. Or you could possibly use the 4x the power of the current gen consoles to see that games could use upwards of 200-320 GB of that 1TB drive. Add on top of that, the whole gamepass instant loading of most everything you want from whatever generation going back to the original Xbox and you realize the problem...
I guess memory cards are getting bigger and cheaper. But having 64-128GB flash drives or SD cards lying around seems odd or off to me. I guess I knew the time would eventually come seeing as at one point we though nobody would ever need more than a couple or a dozen megabytes of RAM...

Optimally the new consoles would ship with a 1TB NVMe SSD and also have an open m.2 NVMe slot that is user accessible to add another drive of whatever size the end user wants. The only external drive option that comes close to NVMe speed is Thunderbolt 3 and even just a simple enclosure for that is kind of expensive. An option to use an internal drive as cache and an external USB 3 drive as bulk storage might not be too bad.

Despite what Sony and MS are saying I doubt we see much in the way of 8K gaming from the next gen consoles.

Despite what Sony and MS are saying I doubt we see much in the way of 8K gaming from the next gen consoles.

8K is a marketing term at this point.. theres no content at all in native 8K (and dirty secret still very little in 4K native..all the 4K UHD Movies are upscaled 1080P movies). So we have a LONG time to go before 8K native scale engines are realistic. What the 8K gets you is that the HDMI port will output the OS at 8K native to support your 8K TV and that's about it.

I wouldnt hold my breath for even Netflix to jump on the 8K ship anytime soon...everything will be still in a 1080P internal render or quasi or true 4K internal render upscaled to 8K if you are one of the lucky (?) people to own an 8K TV.

Rykin wrote:
fangblackbone wrote:

I would be surprised if there is much space lift on the SSD to use. You can figure out the math to see that they will probably be using a 1TB SSD due to cost and current AAA games take 50-80+ GB and they are completely bypassing 4k to go straight to 8k. Or you could possibly use the 4x the power of the current gen consoles to see that games could use upwards of 200-320 GB of that 1TB drive. Add on top of that, the whole gamepass instant loading of most everything you want from whatever generation going back to the original Xbox and you realize the problem...
I guess memory cards are getting bigger and cheaper. But having 64-128GB flash drives or SD cards lying around seems odd or off to me. I guess I knew the time would eventually come seeing as at one point we though nobody would ever need more than a couple or a dozen megabytes of RAM...

Optimally the new consoles would ship with a 1TB NVMe SSD and also have an open m.2 NVMe slot that is user accessible to add another drive of whatever size the end user wants. The only external drive option that comes close to NVMe speed is Thunderbolt 3 and even just a simple enclosure for that is kind of expensive. An option to use an internal drive as cache and an external USB 3 drive as bulk storage might not be too bad.

Despite what Sony and MS are saying I doubt we see much in the way of 8K gaming from the next gen consoles.

I would love the OS on the next gen console to intelligently shift games from internal 1TB SSD storage to external USB storage as the games were more frequently used/not used. That would go a long way in optimizing people with download caps.