Well...I'm back to Windows for gaming...and I bought a pre-built from Best Buy!

Good to know! My advice is, if you want a good Mac because you do a lot of Mac type stuff, and want to game, then yes get the iMac top build. But if you want a primarily gaming machine, especially FPS at maxed out settings, then save money and build your own (or buy a similar one to the one I did).

 

21" iMac I'm tempted to say no. I mean it would be really low settings and pretty low framerate, because the base version has an integrated GPU. Even the higher level 21" iMac with the Radeon 560 4GB would not be considered good for games, but will be a marked improvement over the iGPU base model.

27" iMac with base Radeon Pro 570 GPU 4GB would on the surface be better, but remember it's also pushing more pixels in the display. The Radeon Pro 580 8GB would be "decent" at low--and maybe even mid--settings depending on the game.

Remember that those are AMD GPUs and some games are optimized for AMD and some are optimized for nVidia.

 

I built PCs for myself and others in the late 90s through mid-00s, and I still found a significant price savings...but only for higher end gaming builds. If you were just trying to build a productivity/office PC, you definitely saved very little. And of course having control of the parts you put in your machine.

This was the first time that I couldn't find significant savings on what is a high end gaming machine. It's high-end for 90% of gamers, anyway. The other 10% who spring $800 for a graphics card will disagree.

 

A lot of gaming PCs don't include an optical drive, and many cases today don't even have a spot for it. That's because most games are now downloaded versus available on-disc. And also these gaming PC cases are trying to optimize airflow to keep CPUs and GPUs cool (especially if they're overclocked). If you look at the inside of my case it appears nearly empty.

You'll have to make sure either that the PC you buy still has optical bays for you to add one later, or just buy an external USB 3.0 optical drive.

 

So I've now been full-bore into my Windows 10 machine and have been growing to...dare I say...really like the experience? I even put in a new Samsung 500GB 970 EVO NVMe M.2 SSD, which I just benchmarked to have 3400 MBps read speed and 2400 MBps write speed (sequential). It reduced my bootup time from around 14-15 seconds to about 11.

The original SSD that came with the IBP was a 250GB AData SATA 3 interface, so that one peaked at around 500MBps read/write. For gaming (which hits the hard drive very little) the upgrade will make no difference. But I'm about to start subscriptions to both Pro Tools and Creative Cloud, and that added speed will be welcome.

The Samsung cloning software (free, but only works with the authorized Samsung drive) took less than 5 minutes to clone and verify the roughly 70GB of system data from the AData to the Sammy. Also, it copied my authorizations for both Windows 10, all games and Office Suite, so I didn't have to reauthorize them like I feared. It's been a while since I was on the PC side but I remember around the time of Win XP/7 MS was so DRM heavy that if you changed a certain amount on your computer you had to re-authorize everything.

 

Yes if control over parts is important, the Mac platform won’t accommodate that. It’s part of the reason I built my PCs years ago. I was willing to give up hardware control in 2006 because the MacOS was really starting to hit its stride and Windows was in a bad place then.

But with Win10 MS has really upped its game so I’m finding I’m making the reverse decision. Giving up a little bit of the MacOS experience (I really miss iMessage integration when I’m on PC) for control of my hardware.

I can’t wait until the new Nvidia 11 series GPUs come out!

 

I never put my machines to sleep if I can avoid it. I'm trying to be as eco-friendly as possible and with the super fast bootup time, I don't mind waiting the 11 seconds for my desktop at home to boot up. It's better than leaving it on sleep all day.

 

Sure. But I got confused because 1) I only have NVMe on a Windows desktop, not a laptop, and 2) my original point about Windows closing the gap was the quick way it booted up from a cold start, versus the minutes-long ordeal that my old work PC on W7 took. I really hadn't ever had experience with putting Windows to sleep and waking it up on a laptop, so I didn't really comment from there, and since I won't be getting a Windows laptop anytime soon (the workplace should replace my PC with another PC desktop), I'm not overly concerned about that for now.

 

I was in exactly the same place, Patrick! I guess we're both old farts.

For the record, this is a fantastic resource: http://techbuyersguru.com/tbg-pc-build-comparison-page

Not only for building a PC, but if you look at the some of the builds, the top option will be a pre-built with an Amazon link. Not all of them have this, but some do, if they find a pre-built that is competitive with their recommended DIY build. And to go one step further, you can use those pre-builts and look them up at your local brick and mortar to see if they're available locally (in case you don't want to order from Amazon).