Ask Lemmy

People mix up duty cycle with build quality and functionality when talking about business vs. high end enthusiast gear.

Take a (random) example of an espresso machine or coffee grinder made for a coffee shop that can do 1000s of shots day in, day out, they tend to cost a small fortune. Compare that to a similarly priced home machine and the home machine cannot do that number of shots, just a hundred or so day in, day out, but will have way more functionality that an enthusiast will get value out of. Does a home espresso machine need to be able to do 1000s of shots per day over a 5 to 10 year period? Does it fuck.

Another example would be the duty cycle on a high end NAS or SAN drive that is designed for 1000x more reads and writes, never being turned off, etc. vs. a high performance enthusiast drive.

Buy the duty cycle you actually need.

Depends what you mean by better.

Motherboards, Enterprise grade, tend to have a longer guaranteed longevity, better components with a lower failure rate, and more feature complete for Enterprise requirements.

Enthusiast grade motherboards tend to try to get everything to go as fast as possible without worrying about stability, lots of RGB

Different requirements, so better is subjective

I think the holy Grail is cheap, last forever, good dor all use cases, and that's where restaurant supply store is really win. A lot of the restaurant equipment is cheap, will never fail, great for everything.

And then there's military grade, versus commercial grade, versus retail. A lot of military grades just barely good enough to work.

So I think the key here, is to join a community where people care about the thing, and see what the community uses for their day-to-day. And that's the best.

The keyboards you get with business-grade desktop computers are ridiculous crap compared to hobbyist keyboards; not only in hardware build quality, but in features too.

These days, a high-end hobbyist keyboard is probably running VIA and you can remap the keys from a user-friendly web interface. (No, you don't need a C compiler and to figure out how to flash firmware anymore. That was a few years ago.)

I always try to buy more enterprise hardware such as SSDs and HDDs.

They're usually cheaper used because of their lifecycle.

I just bought 2 x 3.83TB nvme drives for $160 a pop.

They have 5.4PB of endurance and I received them with only 60TB written.

Same goes for hard drives. I have some Seagate exos that is just about $10/TB.

They have a MTBF of 2.5 million hours.

Absolutely enthusiast grade is higher. Business grade is just enough to do the job.

Bonus round:

Military grade is from the lowest bidder.

Industrial grade is durable with absolutely no extras (and also expensive).

Laboratory grade is usually extremely high end, high cost, and precise.

I'd much rather a business grade laptop than a gamer laptop.

Gamer laptop will break in 2 years, business thinkpad will be still going after 10, minimum.

Enthusiast grade = Most powerful, most features

Professional grade = Most durable

Executive grade = Schmucks think it makes you look important

think of keyboards. business grade is a 10$ POS memrane keyboard. enthusiast/hobby grade would be a 200$ keychron q6. same with pretty much everything else. business grade is cheap and easily replaceable.

edit: i copied @fubo on accident

enthusiast: Yesn't.
Depends on product range, price, price vs. conpetition and price/performance ratio

Business: Usually yes but they come with a "business tax" attached. Meaning they are made to make more money. So the manufacturer could in turn ask for more $$$.
Suddenly a 1000€ VR headset might cost 3000€ and could require a mo thly fee for the software.
Also have features you wouldn't need at home like kensington locks.

Business model or commercial model?

Business computing such as word processing and spreadsheets, database software, requires very little processing power. So you're making an apples to oranges comparison.

For apples to apples, check the specs on pro stuff for yourself: https://www.amd.com/en/graphics/workstations

The pro stuff is essentially double the processing power, and double the price. The difference is in process threading and number of cores. Rendering huge video and CAD projects, for example, would take forever on a gaming rig, because that kind of rendering software is optimized for threading, game processes are not usually optimized or not as optimized. For example, there are some games that will only use one core of even a dual core processor.

I'm sure someone that knows much more about this stuff will correct any errors in terminology. Anyway, that's my take on the question.

Initially I thought, well, what graphics processors do they have inside commercial gaming systems, such as a high-end training, flight simulator, or racing simulator. They use the RTX 30 and 40 series.

Generally, hobbyist and consumer grade products are not meant to be used 40 hours a week, such as commercial products are. It's easy to see huge differences in these sort of products on things like lawn mowers, refrigeration. Even in televisions. Your television in your home is likely not meant to operate 365 days a year like the ones you find in a hotel lobby or airport. They just have higher quality components and engineering, designed to withstand long-term, high volume use. They use better glue.

No question when it comes to factory production. Design it right and maintain it that system will be producing widgets long after you and your children have died of old age. I have worked on retrofits and repairs of machines from pre-ww2. Have coworkers who have worked on machines from the 19th century.

You can't compare one of those beasts to something for the home hobbyists.