Comment by stuxnet79
2 days ago
Well that locked-down appliance is way under-specced compared to an equivalent build at the same price.
2 days ago
Well that locked-down appliance is way under-specced compared to an equivalent build at the same price.
Does that remain true in the RAMpocalypse?
A PS5 is $600. This random mini PC with the same amount of RAM is $385. https://www.bee-link.com/products/beelink-eq14-n150
I'm sure someone will point out some spec that's better on the PS5, but the extra $200 will make up the difference if you spend more time looking than the 15 seconds I just did.
(or if you just build a PC from parts yourself)
>I'm sure someone will point out some spec that's better on the PS5
They're not even in the same ballpark - the PS5 is more than an order of magnitude better in GPU performance.
Despite how much it does matter, RAM is not the only thing you need for running LLMs - that N150 is not going to run anything but really tiny models at any sort of reasonable speed - certainly nothing that approaches using all of its ram. The GPU in the PS5 is ~25x faster. And if you're running games the RAM doesn't really affect performance at all once you have "enough" for a given game.
You're right that you probably could build something quite a bit faster than a PS5 for the same price though - if you can build/find everything but the GPU for ~250 USD and slap a 16gb 9060xt (~25tflops @32bit compared to the PS5 gpus ~10tflops @32bit) in it for another ~350 USD it should theoretically do a better job - the GPU in the PS5 was on par with mid-high end PC GPUs on launch, but that was like 5 years ago.
3 replies →
N150 isn't really what you'd want to use for a gaming machine. At a budget of mid $300s - the best (new) Mini PC you're going to find right now is probably this unit[1] with a Ryzen 7 7735U (680M iGPU) and 16GB RAM. Not the most powerful device - but I have a similar one I use to play emulator games, indie games on steam - throw Steam OS on it and it's a great living room device. Expand that budget to $530 and you can get this guy[2] with a Ryzen 7 255 (780M iGPU) - which will play modern games (on low settings for many).
[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GGM6BKN9 [2] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FX2TV3HX
Shameless plug - I methodically rank the best possible Mini PC deals on https://MiniPCs.zip for this exact purpose.
1 reply →
These prices are from last year. A new N150 without RAM costs €350. and performance-wise, a N150 is far behind to a PS5, which costs €799.
An N150 for $385 is a joke.
your miniPC doesn't have GDDR RAM. PS5 does!
A second hand PS5 with about 12GiB of usable RAM is cheaper than the equivalent amount of RAM if bought new.
Ever since RAM prices grew 6x, these old appliances suddenly became a lot better value for money.
Tools like these will probably just spike the prices of second hand PS5s though.
Even at the current increased prices - you can build a PC with a better spec and with a 4K Blu ray drive for £569? I'd be curious how.