Gigabyte Z690 Aero G + i5-12600K + AMD RX 6800 XT

[etorix]

Is there any reason to choose the i5-12600K CPU over the 12600KF ? We know that the 12th gen Intel iGPU will never have support from Apple so why not the KF instead ? Any dedicated AMD GPU that works with macOS Big Sur or Monterey will work with Windows 10/11 and Linux.

If the price difference between 12600K and 12600KF matters, it's best to wait for next year's "small die" Alder Lake CPU: No E-cores, no 'K' but a lot of 'F' in the lineup for pure hackintoshes builds—and expected to come cheap.

 

[Stork]

Newegg has the i5-12600K on sale today only for $300 as part of it's daily Shell Shocker sale. You may have to signup for it's daily sale newsletter to get that price.
https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16819118347?Item=N82E16819118347&cm_sp=Dailydeal_SS-_-19-118-347-_-11272021

And, lo and behold, Amazon has the 5-12600K for $300, too!
https://www.amazon.com/Intel-i5-12600K-Desktop-Processor-Unlocked/dp/B09FX4D72T

 

[trs96]

i5-12600K on sale today only for $300 as part of it's daily Shell Shocker sale.

Don't forget to apply the Coupon Code for some extra $ off as well.

promo code: SSAY2722​

I've also seen a Newegg code for 15% off when you spend over $100.
$45 off the cost of a CPU is nothing to sneeze at. No rebates to fill out and mail either.
If you are buying your Aero G, CPU and DDR4 Ram all at Newegg this option gets you $100 off the order.

BFCMPAY4 When you check out with Zip, which is an interest free installment payment option.

Goes up to $100 maximum. Promo code can be redeemed one time per account up to a total maximum discount of $100.00 USD for orders $100 or more. Excludes gift cards, downloadable software, and digital games.

Zip payments are only available to US based customers.

Zip - Newegg Knowledge Base

With Zip you can split your purchase into 4 payments.

kb.newegg.com

 

[UtterDisbelief]

Newegg has the i5-12600K on sale today only for $300 as part of it's daily Shell Shocker sale. You may have to signup for it's daily sale newsletter to get that price.
https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16819118347?Item=N82E16819118347&cm_sp=Dailydeal_SS-_-19-118-347-_-11272021

And, lo and behold, Amazon has the 5-12600K for $300, too!
https://www.amazon.com/Intel-i5-12600K-Desktop-Processor-Unlocked/dp/B09FX4D72T

No stock Amazon UK, but Newegg UK have some, today only, for £286.79.



(Discount more with code if you pay with Crypto. (Not me)).

 

[trs96]

One simple reason to choose a K over a KF is to repurpose it to another system without spending anything on a new GPU in this market. Another reason is that the K might be easier to sell.

I didn't state it clearly, but my use case would be for macOS only, longer term. I'm not a fan of or interested in multibooting Windows/Linux with macOS. I always keep a dedicated Win10 machine around for the few times a month I boot into Windows. Keep it simple is always my motto. I've also always got an older Nvidia/AMD GPU around for use in another system when necessary. iGPU wouldn't be needed. I like to build a hack running macOS and keep it going for 5-8 years or more.

 

[trs96]

No stock Amazon UK, but Newegg UK have some, today

Those Alder Lake Single Core GeekBench scores are what have gotten my attention. Close to the M1 Pro/Max numbers without having to spend 2-3 grand on a new MBP. The hackintosh is still the value proposition king. It's good to see Intel making a comeback after the 5 year long 14nm stretch.

 

[UtterDisbelief]

Those Alder Lake Single Core GeekBench scores are what have gotten my attention. Close to the M1 Pro/Max numbers without having to spend 2-3 grand on a new MBP. The hackintosh is still the value proposition king. It's good to see Intel making a comeback after the 5 year long 14nm stretch.

From reading about the new small-die versions of Alder Lake I can see this as a good way forward at more affordable prices. Even if they use only DDR4 memory I guess most of us wouldn't be bothered. I don't even run my current RAM at full speed and it's fine.

 

[CaseySJ]

Those Alder Lake Single Core GeekBench scores are what have gotten my attention. Close to the M1 Pro/Max numbers without having to spend 2-3 grand on a new MBP. The hackintosh is still the value proposition king. It's good to see Intel making a comeback after the 5 year long 14nm stretch.

Given the millions of Intel Macs in users' hands, it is not unreasonable to expect macOS updates for Intel x86 to continue for another 4 years. Beyond that is still within the realm of possibility (because Intel Macs are still being sold), but I'll stay well on the conservative side for now. Four years is a long time, which means building a new Hackintosh today still makes sense -- more so if we can reuse existing parts and sell off retired components.

Having spent over $3000 on a new 14" MacBook Pro, I expect Apple's new prosumer and pro level desktop offerings to be very expensive when upgraded to 32GB RAM or 1TB or 2TB SSD. Base models will likely use binned processors in which at least one CPU core and at least one GPU core has been disabled. And there will not be support for eGPU.

27" Apple Silicon iMac and pro-level Mac mini are most likely to be bereft of DIMM slots, making them completely un-upgradeable. Buyers will have to decide up front how much RAM and storage they will need for the entire period of ownership. To be fair, this isn't a particularly difficult decision, but it adds pressure to over-configure and over-spend.

An Alder Lake Hackintosh today with 8 P-cores handily beats the Apple M1 Max as we can see:

My 14" M1 Max on the LEFT with 8 P-cores and 2 E-cores, and @StefanAM's i9-12900K on the RIGHT with 8 P-cores (w/HT):

My non-overclocked i5-12600K with 6 P-cores (w/HT) produces 1930 and 9580, respectively, for single core and multi-core. And this is a $299 chip on a $280 motherboard with DDR4 DRAM that costs less than $200 for 32GB.

And if we look at the GPU compute score, there is no contest. The AMD RX 6800 XT wins by a landslide (my 14" M1 Max has 24 GPU cores while 6800XT has 72 of them): 55732 on M1 Max versus 176833 on 6800 XT.

Even with Apple Silicon, I do not think there will be a product from Apple that competes on Price + Performance + Modularity. Modularity is toxic to Apple's revenue model, so any modular system is likely to be priced in the stratosphere.

 

[trs96]

27" Apple Silicon iMac and pro-level Mac mini are most likely to be bereft of DIMM slots, making them completely un-upgradeable. Buyers will have to decide up front how much RAM and storage they will need for the entire period of ownership. To be fair, this isn't a particularly difficult decision, but it adds pressure to over-configure and over-spend.

I'm certain the next Mac mini refresh will not let the end user upgrade anything post purchase from Apple. We don't know how much more expensive they'll get with the new M1 Pro and Max SoCs. Will they be more Pro focused or Prosumer ? My guess is more Pro with higher prices. They'll still probably keep the $699 entry level M1 around for the budget minded Mac users. The one thing Apple could do if your Mac Mini storage or RAM should fail would be to sell you a replacement board at a reasonable price. I really doubt they'll ever do that.

 

[dehjomz]

Given the millions of Intel Macs in users' hands, it is not unreasonable to expect macOS updates for Intel x86 to continue for another 4 years. Beyond that is still within the realm of possibility (because Intel Macs are still being sold), but I'll stay well on the conservative side for now. Four years is a long time, which means building a new Hackintosh today still makes sense -- more so if we can reuse existing parts and sell off retired components.

Having spent over $3000 on a new 14" MacBook Pro, I expect Apple's new prosumer and pro level desktop offerings to be very expensive when upgraded to 32GB RAM or 1TB or 2TB SSD. Base models will likely use binned processors in which at least one CPU core and at least one GPU core has been disabled. And there will not be support for eGPU.

27" Apple Silicon iMac and pro-level Mac mini are most likely to be bereft of DIMM slots, making them completely un-upgradeable. Buyers will have to decide up front how much RAM and storage they will need for the entire period of ownership. To be fair, this isn't a particularly difficult decision, but it adds pressure to over-configure and over-spend.

An Alder Lake Hackintosh today with 8 P-cores handily beats the Apple M1 Max as we can see:

My 14" M1 Max on the LEFT with 8 P-cores and 2 E-cores, and @StefanAM's i9-12900K on the RIGHT with 8 P-cores (w/HT):

View attachment 535616View attachment 535617


My non-overclocked i5-12600K with 6 P-cores (w/HT) produces 1930 and 9580, respectively, for single core and multi-core. And this is a $299 chip on a $280 motherboard with DDR4 DRAM that costs less than $200 for 32GB.

And if we look at the GPU compute score, there is no contest. The AMD RX 6800 XT wins by a landslide (my 14" M1 Max has 24 GPU cores while 6800XT has 72 of them): 55732 on M1 Max versus 176833 on 6800 XT.

View attachment 535618View attachment 535619


Even with Apple Silicon, I do not think there will be a product from Apple that competes on Price + Performance + Modularity. Modularity is toxic to Apple's revenue model, so any modular system is likely to be priced in the stratosphere.

Apple also wins on power efficiency. My M1 Max uses 7-15 watts during normal operation with a peak of around 30 or so during a Cinebench run. While I’m out at a coffee shop or elsewhere, I can completely run my M1 Max laptop from a portable USB-c battery bank, and extend the battery life by several hours.

Intel uses much more power to achieve its performance. For a desktop system that’s not a big deal, but clearly Intel has some work to do on the power efficiency front. However, Alder Lake is more power efficient than Rocket Lake so that’s a good thing. I’m interested in seeing how much power efficient Intel’s chips will become as they shrink the node(s) and move from Intel 7 (Alder Lake / Raptor Lake) to Intel 4 (Meteor Lake).

But with Intel coming back so strong, with even stronger products on the way, Apple has to be asking the question: was this the right move? M1 Macs lack modularity but the benefit of choosing an M1 Mac over a PC was supposed to be while you give up modularity, you gain excellent performance that rival the best X86 chips in a thin form factor. But for desktops like the Mac Mini or Mac Pro or even the iMac, with Raptor Lake, Sapphire Rapids, and Meteor Lake coming, it’s not clear that Apple’s desktop offerings will rival what Intel has to offer. So what’s the point then of choosing a desktop Mac with lesser performance than Intel/AMD? What are you getting in exchange for your money, and the lack of modularity? This is something apple will have to address.

What Apple might do though is build in custom accelerators in its Silicon for artificial intelligence, matrix operations, various video codec (like H.264, H.265, H.266, pro res, etc.) encode/decode and other types of compute. This would differentiate its silicon from Intel/AMD silicon. Also, with apple recently announcing a program for users to repair their own products, perhaps apple might launch more modular products in the future… Only time will tell.