Should I upgrade what I have or buy a whole new PC?

I got a new ASUS computer in December from their business line, has the AMD FX-6300 3.50GHz that comes in at #108 on that list. It works just fine but maybe having an Add-in video card instead of onboard adapter helps.

Radical suggestion: Should I go APPLE?!

So I went into PC World/Curries today to see what a real 4K screen looks like in Windows and they didn't have and couldn't get a single one running at 4K. [GRRR!]

The salesman said instead of blowing say £1000 on a PC plus say £550 on a screen, why not get a 27inch Apple iMac which like-for-like would actually run Window10 a full "30 to 40% faster" than the equivalent Windows-only PC (or so says the PC World salesman)

Details:
- I would run Windows 10 in virtual machine
- For about £1839 I would get a "3.2GHz quad‑core Intel Core i5"
- Only 8GB of RAM memory
- A 1GB "fusion drive" (part SSD)
- Resolution: 5K "Retina" (5120x2880) - but is this too much for Windows 10?

For another £180 I could get a full 16GB of RAM.
The cost would now be nudging £2,020.00 though.

Personally I am biased. I have always rather despised Apple and the way that they dumb things down, charge disgusting amounts for proper amounts of memory, and seal everything up to stop us from upgrading anything and generally treat us like idiots.

It wouldn't be cheap but I would now have a faster machine at a decent screen with a decent resolution.

ship69 said:

Radical suggestion: Should I go APPLE?!

The cost would now be nudging £2,020.00 though.

Does that factor in the cost of the software? I assume you'd need a Windows 10 licence for one thing, unless that's included.

I don't know much about hardware but I am sceptical of advice from PC World/Curries folks. Sometimes you get a good one but I've seen stories of people who were poorly advised so a salesperson could get nearer to their targets.

ship69 said:

Radical suggestion: Should I go APPLE?!

So I went into PC World/Curries today to see what a real 4K screen looks like in Windows and they didn't have and couldn't get a single one running at 4K. [GRRR!]

The salesman said instead of blowing say £1000 on a PC plus say £550 on a screen, why not get a 27inch Apple iMac which like-for-like would actually run Window10 a full "30 to 40% faster" than the equivalent Windows-only PC (or so says the PC World salesman)

Details:
- I would run Windows 10 in virtual machine
- For about £1839 I would get a "3.2GHz quad‑core Intel Core i5"
- Only 8GB of RAM memory
- A 1GB "fusion drive" (part SSD)
- Resolution: 5K "Retina" (5120x2880) - but is this too much for Windows 10?

For another £180 I could get a full 16GB of RAM.
The cost would now be nudging £2,020.00 though.

Personally I am biased. I have always rather despised Apple and the way that they dumb things down, charge disgusting amounts for proper amounts of memory, and seal everything up to stop us from upgrading anything and generally treat us like idiots.

It wouldn't be cheap but I would now have a faster machine at a decent screen with a decent resolution.

30-40% faster than an "equivalent" Windows PC? With Win 10 running in a VM? Impressive. (Do I detect a certain agricultural odor?) Let's see: an Intel CPU on an Intel-based motherboard. Bog standard components. (Most PCs don't offer a Thunderbolt interface, but that's mostly irrelevant for raw performance.) Sounds like what we in the US have lately come to call "alternative facts".

The £180 to go from 8 to 16 GB of RAM is a real ripoff. The iMac offers several choices of graphics cards, none of which are user swappable. It's pretty much an appliance. Very limited as regards internal upgrades. (The RAM is supposed to be accessible; I wonder whether upgrading that yourself would void the warranty?)

On the plus side, you may not be able to get a PC/monitor combination with a monitor as good as the iMac's for less money.

You can buy 3840X2160 IPS monitors for much less, but you can also spend much more on ones intended for graphics professionals.

It's too bad that you can't get proper guidance at the high street shops.

I've had another word with Chillblast who seem to know their onions. One way to speed things up is a dramatically faster SSD. Apparently an M.2 SSD can read at 3100 MB/sec and write 1400 MB/sec, which is about 10x faster than my 7 year old 300GB, "INTEL SSDSA2CW300G3 ATA device", so that should help a bit. :)

Here is the proposed spec:

1x Intel Core i5-7600K Kaby Lake CPU, 4 Cores, 3.8 - 4.0GHz
1x Gelid Tranquillo Rev.4 CPU Cooler
1x Asus PRIME Z270-A Motherboard
2x 8 GB DDR4 2133 MHz Memory1x NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti 4GB Graphics Card
1x 512GB Samsung SM961 M.2 PCIe Solid State Drive
1x Corsair RM650X 80 PLUS Gold 650W PSU
1x Chillblast Silent Gaming PC Case - Black
1x No Operating System Required (I have my own retail copy of Windows 10 Pro)
1x 5 Year Warranty, 2 Years Collect & Return UK only

Yours for a little over 1100 quid.

[ Fwiw, I'd probably salvage my old SSD and use it as a spare disk for archiving etc, but there didn't seem to be any merit in buying two modern SSDs (one for O/S, one for data) being as I could only get one M.2 onto the motherboard. ]

With some gentle over-clocking of the Kaby Lake Intel I5 up to 4.5 to 4.8GHz, - instead of my generation one Quadcore I5 - the new CPU might run about say twice the speed of my 7 year old system??

And for RAM having new DDR4 2133 MHz instead of my old 2GB 1066MHz DDR3 RAM ought to run at twice the speed too.

So I think I'd be hoping for an overall speed improvement of about x2 to x3 (??)

J

You can do all that optimizing things guys told you( format, reinstall....). My opinion is that if you have the money it's about time to make a complete upgrade. You can keep that pc for a backup computer:)

ship69 said:

I bought my own separate ("retail", presumably) copy of Windows 8.1 which I have upgraded (for free) to Win10.

I'm not sure if/how that works. I'm no expert in activation but once you've upgraded it to Win 10, I think the digital entitlement for the upgrade is tied to that hardware. It may not be as easy as you'd hope to transfer to another machine, although I take your point that you bought a 8.1 retail/non-OEM licence.

But you'd need advice from folks who know more than me on that one.

ship69 said:

I bought my own separate ("retail", presumably) copy of Windows 8.1 which I have upgraded (for free) to Win10.
The salesman was their top techie in the shop. He claimed he owned both Window PCs and Apple. He claimed it was all down to the architecture and that Apple's was that much better!

Yes absolutely clearly the £180 to go from 8 to 16 GB of RAM is a total ripoff, and is typical of Apple, and yes emotionally speaking it does stick in the gullet. However forget upgrades because it's the wrong question. The question is where do I want get to and would it be worth the money to pay whatever it is (e.g. £2020) to get there?

[ I suspect probably not(!), but there is something seductive about having a single piece of kit that you know is very high end and which has no wires, no fuss, and looks beautiful. And even if you can't upgrade the the darned thing, you can stop worrying about it and just get on using the blighter! ]

"Apple's was that much better"? I'm not a computer engineer, but that sounds like total made-up nonsense. The hardware "architecture" of a modern Intel Mac is all Intel. There's nothing there that is proprietary to Apple. (Corrections welcome, but not expected.)

Have you heard of a "Hackintosh"? That's the Mac OS installed on non-Apple hardware. I'm not suggesting that (mostly because I expect that it's not worth the trouble), but it may suggest how different the "architecture" of a Mac is from a Windows PC. That is to say, not different at all.

You might be ecstatic to own the iMac, but I can't recommend basing your choice on what that character is telling you.