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Myself buying a $2000 niche PC - yay or nay?

PoetPhilosopher

PoetPhilosopher

Veteran Member
Hi everyone, I'm thinking about buying a new computer for the purpose of programming and graphics programming and I wanted to share my thoughts. It's a $2000 mini PC that has great machine learning capabilities, 32GB RAM, and a moderate graphics chip, called the NVIDIA Orin. It sounds amazing, right?

Well, there's a catch. I did some research and I found out that the hardware inside this machine is not worth $2000. In fact, it's probably worth around $1200 or less. The processor and the graphics chip are not really better than the ones you can find in a $1000-$1200 desktop PC. The only thing that makes this machine special is its small size and its good compatibility with machine learning applications.

I also learned that the company that makes this machine has increased the price of their previous model from $700 to $1500 without any explanation. That seems very unfair to me and I don't want to support such a practice.

So why do I still want this machine? Well, there are two reasons:

1. It's very compact and it would fit perfectly on my desk. I also like the fact that it works well with the software that I want to use.

2. I have an older, lesser version of this machine and it served me well for a long time. I feel like I have a connection with this product line and I trust its quality for that reason.

But I'm still not sure if it's worth spending $2000 on this machine. That's a lot of money and I could buy a much faster desktop tower PC with that amount or less. What do you think? Should I buy it or not?

My main concerns are that I do not want to support greed (a greedy company), and I want to be absolutely sure before spending $2000 on such a product. It's $2000 for a creative, niche device that is barely larger than my hand.

I still think that if I bought the PC, it might eventually "pay for itself", but I might still be shuffling bills around for awhile in order to balance my finances to support such a purchase.

If I took the $2000, and built a workstation instead, I think I could actually do better, but I'm not sure I want to put that much time and thought into preparing, building, and configuring a system. It's kind of easy to invest a portion of your life into building that "perfect" PC if you're not careful.

By the way, you can suggest other alternatives in this thread, but I'm not sure I'm even looking for many other alternatives much right now, I'm still stuck on the question of "Should I get the Orin?" and until I answer that for myself, it's like I can't move on and look at other products and better deals.

And I've been pondering this question for 11-12 days. I didn't want to make a thread on it, but once you've thought about something for 11-12 days without making a decision for yourself, maybe it is time to ask other perspectives.

Also, since there's a moral aspect to this question, and it's not completely a tech question in and of itself, I'm extending this thread for anyone to answer. You don't even have to be a tech expert. I feel being a tech expert isn't required for someone to understand something they want, but the company that's selling it is charging a large premium for no apparent reason (other than maybe greed). That's mainly what this thread is about.

I have also heard that the company selling the product has turned a very, very, very large profit from this product.
 
Twilight Hue

Twilight Hue

Twilight, not bright nor dark, good nor bad.
PoetPhilosopher said:
Hi everyone, I'm thinking about buying a new computer for the purpose of programming and graphics programming and I wanted to share my thoughts. It's a $2000 mini PC that has great machine learning capabilities, 32GB RAM, and a moderate graphics chip, called the NVIDIA Orin. It sounds amazing, right?

Well, there's a catch. I did some research and I found out that the hardware inside this machine is not worth $2000. In fact, it's probably worth around $1200 or less. The processor and the graphics chip are not really better than the ones you can find in a $1000-$1200 desktop PC. The only thing that makes this machine special is its small size and its good compatibility with machine learning applications.

I also learned that the company that makes this machine has increased the price of their previous model from $700 to $1500 without any explanation. That seems very unfair to me and I don't want to support such a practice.

So why do I still want this machine? Well, there are two reasons:

1. It's very compact and it would fit perfectly on my desk. I also like the fact that it works well with the software that I want to use.

2. I have an older, lesser version of this machine and it served me well for a long time. I feel like I have a connection with this product line and I trust its quality for that reason.

But I'm still not sure if it's worth spending $2000 on this machine. That's a lot of money and I could buy a much faster desktop tower PC with that amount or less. What do you think? Should I buy it or not?

My main concerns are that I do not want to support greed (a greedy company), and I want to be absolutely sure before spending $2000 on such a product. It's $2000 for a creative, niche device that is barely larger than my hand.

I still think that if I bought the PC, it might eventually "pay for itself", but I might still be shuffling bills around for awhile in order to balance my finances to support such a purchase.

If I took the $2000, and built a workstation instead, I think I could actually do better, but I'm not sure I want to put that much time and thought into preparing, building, and configuring a system. It's kind of easy to invest a portion of your life into building that "perfect" PC if you're not careful.

By the way, you can suggest other alternatives in this thread, but I'm not sure I'm even looking for many other alternatives much right now, I'm still stuck on the question of "Should I get the Orin?" and until I answer that for myself, it's like I can't move on and look at other products and better deals.

And I've been pondering this question for 11-12 days. I didn't want to make a thread on it, but once you've thought about something for 11-12 days without making a decision for yourself, maybe it is time to ask other perspectives.

Also, since there's a moral aspect to this question, and it's not completely a tech question in and of itself, I'm extending this thread for anyone to answer. You don't even have to be a tech expert. I feel being a tech expert isn't required for someone to understand something they want, but the company that's selling it is charging a large premium for no apparent reason (other than maybe greed). That's mainly what this thread is about.

I have also heard that the company selling the product has turned a very, very, very large profit from this product.
Click to expand...
Get one built to specs. More cost effective and you get exactly what you want.
 
Revoltingest

Revoltingest

Pragmatic Libertarian
Premium Member
Twilight Hue said:
Get one built to specs. More cost effective and you get exactly what you want.
Click to expand...
I had that done in 1999.
I'm still using it, although the Zip & optical drives
died long ago. USB does the job.
I even have a spare motherboard, procured by a
serial killer I knew. (He's in prison for life now.)
 
Brickjectivity

Brickjectivity

wind and rain touch not this brain
Staff member
Premium Member
With those specs shoot for 700$. It will be tricky to get 32 gigs of ram but you just might if you can go with a 3 year old cpu type. Try searching for mini computers on Amazon/Walmart/TMU/Newegg/etc. The mini architecture is not good for repairs or for upgrades, but you get a lot of bang for your buck. A reisen V architecture is only 3 years old and often comes with a graphics chipset either radion or nvidia. Get the warranty, too; because most likely the fan will break in a year or two.
 
PoetPhilosopher

PoetPhilosopher

Veteran Member
Brickjectivity said:
With those specs shoot for 700$. It will be tricky to get 32 gigs of ram but you just might if you can go with a 3 year old cpu type. Try searching for mini computers on Amazon/Walmart/TMU/Newegg/etc. The mini architecture is not good for repairs or for upgrades, but you get a lot of bang for your buck. A reisen V architecture is only 3 years old and often comes with a graphics chipset either radion or nvidia. Get the warranty, too; because most likely the fan will break in a year or two.
Click to expand...

So I've been looking at various computers. One thing I wanted was about the shader performance of a laptop RTX 3050. The NVIDIA Orin AGX has that. A lot of Ryzen chips with Radeon integrated graphics don't, they fall just a little short.

So here's what I've seen lately. There's a brand of computer called Minisforum and they have a mini PC with a Radeon 6600M, which would be more than enough graphics performance, and for under 800 for the whole mini PC. The problem? I don't really have much trust for the Minisforum brand, really. Googling them didn't help that trust assessment.

Then another option is I could change my approach, and the screen would be a bit small and it would be Windows, but I could get an Asus ROG Ally handheld gaming computer for 700, which surprisingly, actually meets most of my specs otherwise. This is a bit of an unconventional approach, but I might have to make sacrifices if I want the latest technology for a good price.
 
PoetPhilosopher

PoetPhilosopher

Veteran Member
Revoltingest said:
Don't worry about fairness, obscene profits, or other
distractions. Get what you need at the best price.
Click to expand...
Twilight Hue said:
Get one built to specs. More cost effective and you get exactly what you want.
Click to expand...
ChristineM said:
^^^ THIS ^^^
Click to expand...
Brickjectivity said:
With those specs shoot for 700$. It will be tricky to get 32 gigs of ram but you just might if you can go with a 3 year old cpu type. Try searching for mini computers on Amazon/Walmart/TMU/Newegg/etc. The mini architecture is not good for repairs or for upgrades, but you get a lot of bang for your buck. A reisen V architecture is only 3 years old and often comes with a graphics chipset either radion or nvidia. Get the warranty, too; because most likely the fan will break in a year or two.
Click to expand...

Thanks everyone for the advice. I think I know what I'm going to do now. I had this at the back of my mind before. But I have decided to discard the idea about the expensive Orin. And just get a Lenovo Legion Go when it comes out, which is going to run me about 750-800. The reason why I want the Legion Go is that, like the ROG Ally handheld, it has the very latest AMD APU, and these new AMD APUs have largely increased shader/arithmetic performance. This may not matter to most people, but it kind of does to me as a graphics programmer.

Again, this may not be the perfect solution, but since these new APUs aren't really in desktops yet, and since the Orin costs $2000.... it seems my best option, in my opinion.
 
Heyo

Heyo

Veteran Member
Twilight Hue said:
Get one built to specs. More cost effective and you get exactly what you want.
Click to expand...
I second that opinion.
Most likely you have a small professional shop in your vicinity that assembles your preferred machine, does repairs and can provide advise on hardware components. What you need will cost around $1200 to $1500 which you can deduce from taxes as a business expense - if you use it strictly for business. Get a console or cheap PC for gaming.
 
PoetPhilosopher

PoetPhilosopher

Veteran Member
Heyo said:
I second that opinion.
Most likely you have a small professional shop in your vicinity that assembles your preferred machine, does repairs and can provide advise on hardware components.
Click to expand...

I'm thinking about it. But I'd have to spend a few days preparing a hardware list myself, if I went that direction, so I could negotiate prices clearly with the local computer shop.

I've gone into local computer shops before and said "Build me something good in the $X range that can do Y", and they come back with something underpowered or something overbudget as a prepared list. Then when I ask for an itemized bill of the expenses there would be, I find out that they tried to tack "junk" charges on. They once attempted to charge me $50 for thermal paste.
 
Last edited:
icehorse

icehorse

......unaffiliated...... anti-dogmatist
Premium Member
PoetPhilosopher said:
It's a $2000 mini PC that has great machine learning capabilities, 32GB RAM, and a moderate graphics chip, called the NVIDIA Orin. It sounds amazing, right?
Click to expand...

I'm confused about the claim that a piece of hardware has great machine learning capabilities? Machine learning happens in software. Of course machine learning is often compute intensive but... can you say more about that?

I mean a lot of computers have been making use of GPUs for a while now, is there something else?
 
PoetPhilosopher

PoetPhilosopher

Veteran Member
icehorse said:
I'm confused about the claim that a piece of hardware has great machine learning capabilities? Machine learning happens in software. Of course machine learning is often compute intensive but... can you say more about that?

I mean a lot of computers have been making use of GPUs for a while now, is there something else?
Click to expand...

The system in question has both pretty decent compute abilities via the GPU, but also has a special AI accelerator chip. I think something like this AI accelerator chip will also be rolled into CPUs over time, but that most current CPUs don't have a special chip for it yet.
 
PoetPhilosopher

PoetPhilosopher

Veteran Member
PoetPhilosopher said:
The system in question has both pretty decent compute abilities via the GPU, but also has a special AI accelerator chip. I think something like this AI accelerator chip will also be rolled into CPUs over time, but that most current CPUs don't have a special chip for it yet.
Click to expand...

(Generally such a chip doesn't really do much for the average consumer much, outside of specialized software, but the need for a special chip apart from the CPU and GPU for AI type stuff is growing, so over time, there may be dedicated chips for it.)
 
PoetPhilosopher

PoetPhilosopher

Veteran Member
PoetPhilosopher said:
The system in question has both pretty decent compute abilities via the GPU, but also has a special AI accelerator chip. I think something like this AI accelerator chip will also be rolled into CPUs over time, but that most current CPUs don't have a special chip for it yet.
Click to expand...
PoetPhilosopher said:
(Generally such a chip doesn't really do much for the average consumer much, outside of specialized software, but the need for a special chip apart from the CPU and GPU for AI type stuff is growing, so over time, there may be dedicated chips for it.)
Click to expand...

@icehorse : Neural Processor - WikiChip
 
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