Your new operating system: Linux
Time to install Windows? Maybe. But with Microsoft reportedly considering a switch to a subscription format for Windows 12, increasing numbers of creatives are jumping ship to Linux. I believe we’re in what will be seen as the golden age for Linux and open source, including all the creative professional software that runs on it. From cloud-based web development such as Wordpress to graphics tools like Inkscape, Blender and Davinci Resolve, plus major game engines Unity and Unreal Engine, they all run on Linux, are all pro-level tools, and have versions available free or open-source.
Ubuntu Studio is just one of many Linux Ubuntu flavours. It comes with many creative software packages pre-installed, which makes getting started much easier. We downloaded the latest stable version, burned it to our external SSD, and our new PC was running 30 minutes later.
The results
The total cost of our components comes in at an affordable £2,120 ($2,100), excluding the creative extras. We could easily bring that down if we swap the liquid cooling for a heatsink. In terms of price, we easily beat both the Mac Studio, and even our target budget! This leaves plenty of room for any desired upgrades like a more powerful GPU, NAS storage, and so on. Performance-wise we also beat the Mac with a bit more media storage and faster graphics.
We also compared our build to two prefab PCS with similar specs. On the low-end we looked at boxes from Lenovo’s Legion line for around $3,500. They sport a faster RTX 4080 GPU, which is a good alternative to our 4060 Ti. While it’s twice the speed, it’s also around three-times the cost. If we spec-matched our build to the Legion, ours would still come in significantly cheaper. On the high end, we looked at a similar rig from Puget Systems. With Ubuntu and liquid cooling installed, the total for a matching setup was significantly more expensive than our own build here.