Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

Re:Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBoo... by ComputerGuru on Friday December 29, 2023 @10:55PM (#38812706)

I guess I should clarify: I am a rust and C++ developer blocked on compilation time, but even then, I am not able to justify the cost of upgrading from a 1950X/128GB DDR4 (good guess!) to the 7950X or 3D. It would be faster, but not in a way that would translate to $$$ directly. (Not to mention the inflation in TRx costs since AMD stopped playing catch-up.) performance-per-watt isn’t interesting to me (except for thermals but Noctua has me covered) because I pay real-time costs and it’s not a build farm.

If I had 100% CPU consumption around the clock, I would upgrade in a heart beat. But I’m working interactively in spurts between hitting CPU walls and the spurts don’t justify the upgrade.

If I were to upgrade it would be for the sake of non-work CPU video encoding or to get PCIe 5.0 for faster model loading to GPU VRAM.

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Re:Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBoo... by washadjeffmad on Saturday December 30, 2023 @09:11PM (#38821146)

sTR4 workstations are hard to put down! I'll replace mine one day, probably with whatever ASRock Rack Epyc succeeds the ROMED8-2T with PCIe 5.0.

In the meantime, I wanted something more portable, so I put a 13700K and RTX 3090 in a Lian Li A4-H2O case with an eDP side panel for a nice mITX build. It only needs one cable for power, and it's as great for VR as it is a headless host.

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