So today I bought a 9070 XT and reassembled my amd64 PC, which I retired a couple of years ago, because I really, _really_ want to play video games again without worrying about FEX or Rosetta.
So far, I have had 3 kernel oopses of various provenance. Haven't had one kernel oops on any of my Macs unless I was hacking on stuff.
The graphics card by itself sucks down over 30 W just sitting at the desktop. My entire Mac Studio idles at less than 5 W.
The fans will not shut the fuck up no matter what I do. The Mac Studio fans are never audible, even at full system utilisation.
The motherboard's DMI information is straight up just wrong, and the SuperIO chip has no hwmon driver. The Mac Studio's Devicetree is (obviously) correct, and the SMC hwmon driver works well.
The CPU pulls about 50% more power than my Mac Studio while being noticeably slower.
The motherboard's builtin audio interface is unusably bad compared even to my MacBook Air's headphone jack.
The only parts of this experience that are objectively better than using a Mac with Asahi are gaming performance (no shit, there's no emulation of history's worst instruction set involved), monitor support, which is something we're actively working on anyway, and boot time although it's close.
The whole PC ecosystem is, unbelievably, even more totally ratfucked than it was when I last abandoned it. For the money I've spent today to get back into the PC, I could've bought two whole Mac minis with change left over, or a new audio interface and calibration mic to retune some of Mac speakers that need it.
#asahi #asahilinux #PC
Ariadne Conill 🐰
Asahi Linux