Yeah I was sad when they exited that market.

It’s more down to the On Die SOC my man, that’s the magic, has been since M1. But ultimately you can’t compare them directly. IBM’s newer big iron, makes our “desktop flagships” look like rowboats, and they should at 6ft high and 600v. Apples and oranges my dudes.

Haha, sure is.

ARM is a mobile architecture, ground up, always has been, not a desktop one, it’s being scaled and shoehorned into a Desktop Platform, which for Apple, aside from old Mac Pro’s, their desktops were mobiles in disguise anyways, so that’s just how they roll and the products are generally great but probably best described as “desktop class”, not true desktop workstations.

As far as grunt, yes Intel can keep up in “horsepower”, albeit with vastly higher power consumption and massively higher heat production and needing a large dedicated GPU in the mix as well to keep up benchmark and rendering wise.

However, and I own both an M2 notebook and custom Intel Desktop PC, and have used an M3 for a few days, and the absolutely savage overall responsiveness of the M series SOCs are in a league of their own, and it’s been that way since M1 and keeps getting better with each update.

Having essentially your entire system on die brings a usability experience to the table that you have to daily drive to really understand. I love my PC, and I love my M2, but for very different reasons, and they truly don’t compare well in my opinion. They have generally entirely different use cases and markets that they are both well suited for.

No. Unequivocally no.

Undervolting, is more of a temperature thing than something that truly makes a financial difference on the power bill, we are talking pocket change differences or less per month, or even per year. You have to decide on what your main priority is, if power consumption is priority 1, then get yourself a notebook, that’s exactly what they are tailor made for, if smooth gaming is your highest priority, then power consumption will have to be higher to attain that and think about how many hours out of those 12 per day you will be gaming on average. The reality is, any modern desktop CPU, and its accompanying hardware has terrific abilities to be ultra low power, you just have to know how to configure it, so learn as much as you can about your UEFI settings and how a modern Windows 11 installation handles power, read about how notebooks do it and emulate that, it’s all really the same shit anyways.

Try it out first, see how you like the performance, if you do, which you probably will, stick with what you’ve got, save your money and upgrade when you hit an eventual wall down the road, like you “can’t play a game that you want to”, then do a decent generational upgrade, the longer you hold out, the better the stuff you will end up with. By the time that happens you will probably want a new GPU too, and on and on it goes. Don’t get all bent out of shape about words like “bottleneck”, unless something isn’t performing anywhere near like you expected it to.

What’s important to know my friend is that XMP IS overclocking, not stock, and is generally a fairly user friendly one, provided you’re not filling all of your slots. As far as 7200mhz as a minimum, that would depend on what your memory is rated for, if it said 6400 on the box, then getting it to 7200 or beyond without a lot of knowledge of how to tweak those sorts of things will likely be a huge bag of hurt to your sanity and computer’s stability.