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0 pointslayoric1y ago0 comments

In same boat, I have the 5950x with 64gb memory running PopOS and there are times I'm hitting swap a lot more than I'd like. 16 or 32gb of memory is just not feasible, and even 2TB of storage would likely cause headaches, I have a 4TB and a 2TB nvme at the moment which will come with me next upgrade.

I'm leaning towards an upgrade next year to the 9950x3d if reviews pan out. Sure, it's going to be a bigger machine with louder components, but the upgrade will likely be half the cost of anything close from Apple since I can take my existing GPU, PSU and storage at the very least along with me.

And "upgrade costs" is highly misleading for most of the components. You are buying a different machine config that you can't change, up or down, later on. I get that most people don't want to bother opening up a PC to swap out components, but the easier they made it, the more people will do it, and Apple is running the other way.

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8 comments · 4 top-level

ricardobeat1y ago· 3 in thread

Memory usage is not comparable across Linux and Mac. MacOS is much better at avoiding swap, uses memory compression, shared frameworks etc. At the same time it tries to use all the memory available which makes direct system-wide comparisons not accurate. A good rule of thumb is that 8GB on Mac == 16GB on Windows/Linux.

bnolsen1y ago

Compared to Linux that's flat not true. Someone has been blowing marketing up your ...

dijit1y ago

As a person who uses both, daily, its kinda true.

MacOS does seem to “use all the ram” but never falls over itself.

I think the kernel is likely genuinely better in low memory conditions (its hard to be worse than Linux here to be honest) - and thats combined with being aggressive about using as much of the ram as there is available opportunistically. (not fully unloading applications when closing them for example).

“WindowServer” uses 2-3G of ram, and electron apps use lots too; but truthfully my macbook is able to sustain significantly more open programs than my linux laptop, despite my linux laptop actually having more memory. (32G vs 24G for the Mac).

I cant explain it and I am genuinely curious how this is the case, but at least anecdotally, parent is more correct than not.

edward281y ago

You can also compress memory on Linux with zswap or zram.

justinclift1y ago· 1 in thread

Does your existing motherboard allow for more than 64GB ram? The 5950x itself supports up to 128GB: https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/amd/ryzen_9/5950x

layoricOP1y ago

Mine doesn't but yes I could move to a mATX or bigger board to unlock that extending its life. I tend to go for the 'smaller' ITX cases and boards, so currently have a x570-i setup maxing out at 64GB.

josephg1y ago

For storage at least, you can pop your existing nvme drive into a thunderbolt enclosure and use it on a mac mini. Over TB4, it should run at the drive's full speed (so long as you get a decent enclosure).

It won't help the RAM situation, but storage at least is upgradable like that.

plasticchris1y ago

Be careful to check the support for larger ram on the motherboard as well as cpu - I’ve got an am5 setup with 128gb of ram but the it had to be down locked to even post.

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