I’ve been running a (very) outdated iMac i7 Retina and have finally decided to pull the trigger on a new system. Was just curious if anyone is running one of the following systems and can give me some feedback on performance, etc. (thanks in-advance):
Until recently I had a M1 MacBook Air, now I have a MacBook Air M3 and a 2017 MacBook Pro.
In a very unscientific test, I autopiloted from Amarr to Jita and the MacBook Air was 1 system ahead of the MacBook Pro by the end. No idea why, but w/e. The M1 will run EVE for literal hours, though there has been a bug where if high quality shaders are on the damn thing crashes.
The M3 has been a solid performer, I am very happy with it and in many ways the cut off for windows 10 support in October was a catalyst for this investment. The 2017 MacBook Pro will run 3 clients, though it does struggle whereas the M1 and M3 do not.
At some point the 2017 MacBook Pro will stop working ( battery is not in good condition ) but for now it is doing what I need when I need it.
Probably my biggest gripe in the OSX space is EVE’s UI is really terrible where you want to right click, as the two finger activation movement on the trackpad has a habit of moving and the ‘right click’ will often activate on an unintended item.
Thanks - greatly appreciated! I’ve narrowed it down between a iMac M3 (-$300 off), new iMac M4 (+$400 more but ~25% faster) or a Mac Mini M4 (+$1000 more but ~10% faster) with a 27” Retina. Plus side with the Mini is more expansion, the larger display and better sound.
Right now I can (barely) run 3 clients with the older iMac i7 (this wasn’t an issue pre-Equinox), but I can really only run 1 client at reduced graphics settings (no anti aliasing, environments, etc.)
My only advice would be to look at the difference in cost between M4 and M3 variations in terms of ‘future investment’ I am very surprised that my 2017 MacBook pro is almost 8 years old and still works reasonably well.
In the same time I have bought two windows laptops, one back in 2020 that had a RTX2080 and another in 2022 that had a RTX3050. The RTX2080 had to go back to the manufacturer due to a GPU defect, when it came back it would no longer charge the battery if it was switched on ( but would charge if left off ) but forever after refused to run Rust and EVE without crashing. ARMA3 was fine, memtest, CPU burn, Furmark, no problems, but the two games I liked most were a no go because a DC in both is pretty much death. The RTX3050 works fine, but since I did not get the TI version its very under powered and it spends most of its time not with the fans at %100 because everything seems to just demand more power for no good reason.
I will probably never buy another windows laptop again and I doubt I will run windows anymore outside of a virtual container. Despite Jobs passing, the M1 series are doing quite well now that crap like the touchbar is gone and magsafe is a thing again.
Only other problem is the get rid of the damn notch.
It’s great advice - thanks! I decided to pull the trigger on the base Mac Mini M4 (16/256). The biggest cost of the new system was the Mac 27" 5k Retina display, so I figure when they eventually roll out a Mac Studio with an M4 Ultra setup (similar to the current M3 Ultra offering) I can always give that a serious look. The Mac mini is easy enough to expand with external SSD storage anyway should I need it.
Geek Benchmarks indicates I should easily see a 4x-6x performance gain over my current iMac i7, so I’ll post updates after EVE finishes downloading and I get everything setup again. I’'m cautiously optimistic that I’ll be able to run my 3x clients without any hiccups.
My ISP also offered me 25% off and twice the bandwidth (300gbps) on upgrading my fiberoptic plan so I couldn’t really pass that up, either (since what I’ll save over the next 2 years basically paid for the new Mac Mini).