Home built PC but not really quite equivalent to new Mac Pro

[Steve Connor]

[Gary Huff] “I mean, I hope it is, but you just never know!”

Perhaps he’s been drinking the “secret sauce”?

Steve Connor

There’s nothing we can’t argue about on the FCPX COW Forum

[Shawn Miller]

[Frank Gothmann] “There’s nothing out there that will be faster or equal to a Mac, don’t you know that?
Because it lacks the magic sauce from Cupertino. Remember, the one that made Photoshop run so much faster on PPC compared to the suckers from Intel. Or the amazing iDVD MPEG2 encodes in realtime while the loosers running other, much more expensive encoders still had to cope with old-fashined stuff like 2-pass encoding and quantization settings.
It’s the magic formula that’s in all of Apple’s products. The shrinkage in size which is directly proportional to the features and add-ons they simply dropped which in turn is propotional to the hidden increase in pricing, the reduced longevity and the super-duper lightning speed of it all. It’s all pure magic.”

Ha ha, I had forgotten about some of these claims. 🙂

[Gary Huff]
Is this sarcasm?

Yes, but it’s also (if I’m not mistaken) a jab at some of Apple’s past marketing claims. That Macs were faster than PCs… twice as fast in fact. I think there are people who still believe this, no matter what evidence you present to the contrary. And I think this is what Frank is making fun of. Frank, please correct me if I’m wrong.

https://showyou.com/v/y-Yc5Xws9TKlQ/classic-apple-commercial-the-intel-snail

Shawn

[Oliver Peters]

If you look at the pricing for HP’s best machine, the Z820, and compare equivalent specs to the Mac Pro, the Z820 is more expensive. Yes, it is more expandable, but otherwise is actually a less capable machine based on the internal parts.

The advantage the Mac Pro will have is optimization and performance tuning for a vertical market – Apple software running on Apple hardware – specifically THAT hardware. The configuration can be optimized in ways that simply adding more GPU cards into a PC cannot. It no longer has to adhere to the one-size-fits-all approach used in PCs and the previous generations of Mac towers.

Whether this translates into advantages for non-Apple software (Adobe, Avid, BMD/DaVinci, Assimilate, etc.) is an unknown, because those companies can’t stray too far from cross-platform compatibility.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Herb Sevush]

[Frank Gothmann] ” The shrinkage in size which is directly proportional to the features and add-ons they simply dropped which in turn is propotional to the hidden increase in pricing, the reduced longevity and the super-duper lightning speed of it all. It’s all pure magic.”

It’s hard for the technically limited like myself to do a straight MacPro to PC comparison, but this is what I came up with after going to the website of a very well known and respected workstation integrator.

System –

MacPro: 6 core, 32 Meg ram, 500 gig SSD, 2 X Firepro500 (3GB each)GPU = $4699

PC: 6 core, 32 Meg ram, 500 gig SSD, GTX Titan GPU (6GB) = $5032

If you then switch to the 8 core Xeon, the PC comes out better

MacPro = $6199
PC=$5872

On the other hand when you go to the Firepro 700’s which only add $600 on the MacPro side, but $1000 on the PC side to add a second Titan.

MacPro = $6799
PC = $6872

It’s obvious the prices are close, the MacPro charges a very high premium to go up to 8 cores, but offers a great deal to increase GPU. I don’t know how equivalent the Titan is to the Firepros, so I could be way off on that side of the calculation.

Other things to note:

The MacPro PCIe flash storage is faster than the PC SSD I quoted, although I believe you can get the equivalent on the PC side from OWC for another $400. The MacPro offers 6 Thunderbolt ports and zero PCIe ports, the PC is almost exactly the opposite. If you have an existing PCIe infrastructure the cost of moving to Thunderbolt can be in the range of $500 to $1000. The PC workstation is hugely expandable in terms of additional CPU’s and GPU’s, the MacPro is not – what that’s worth is in the eye of the beholder. The PC includes DVD recorder, card readers, keyboard and mouse, the MacPro does not.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Gary Huff]

[Herb Sevush] “The MacPro PCIe flash storage is faster than the PC SSD I quoted, although I believe you can get the equivalent on the PC side from OWC for another $400.”

Yeah, I think people don’t realize you can actually get this, and it does require a premium, but you CAN build a Hackintosh/Windows box with PCIe internal storage. Just have to know where to get it.

[Herb Sevush] “The MacPro offers 6 Thunderbolt ports and zero PCIe ports, the PC is almost exactly the opposite.”

You can get an ASUS board that has dual Thunderbolt 2 ports but I would wonder how much you’d be giving up speed-wise, especially with a Quad-core Xeon from the base model. I would imagine the difference is very little.

Of course, once you get up to 6 cores and above, you don’t get this option, but I would imagine there will be more boards coming this next year.

[Gary Huff]

[Shawn Miller] “Yes, but it’s also (if I’m not mistaken) a jab at some of Apple’s past marketing claims. That Macs were faster than PCs… twice as fast in fact. I think there are people who still believe this, no matter what evidence you present to the contrary.”

Or that Macs don’t “bog down” after extended use like Windows machines do. Also another myth, and my experience having to wipe slow Macs to revitalize them is proof enough for me.

[Frank Gothmann]

[Shawn Miller] ” And I think this is what Frank is making fun of. Frank, please correct me if I’m wrong.”

Spot on.

——
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iTunes End User Licence Agreement

[Shawn Miller]

[Gary Huff] “You can get an ASUS board that has dual Thunderbolt 2 ports but I would wonder how much you’d be giving up speed-wise, especially with a Quad-core Xeon from the base model. I would imagine the difference is very little.”

Speed wise, you’re not giving up anything. The i7 and the Xeon are about the same in performance. The real advantage of the Xeon processors is that they can be used on multi socket boards.

EDIT: Now I’m sort of wondering why Apple opted to put a Xeon processor in the Mac pro instead of an i7… why go with the more expensive Xeon if you can only put one in the machine?

Shawn

[Gary Huff]

[Shawn Miller] “Now I’m sort of wondering why Apple opted to put a Xeon processor in the Mac pro instead of an i7… why go with the more expensive Xeon if you can only put one in the machine?”

The 1150 socket maxes out with i7s at 4-cores…you have to go socket 2011 for the 6-core varieties, and there aren’t any boards with that socket that have TB2 ports that I am aware of.

[Frank Gothmann]

Let’s look at something I would consider if I had to get a high-end workstation today, and I wouldn’t even go the Haswell route because performance wise there is very little reason to do so:

ASUS Z9PE-D8 WS motherboard
Dual CPU board for Xeons, 2 x Intel Gig Ethernet, 7 PCIe 3x slots, USB3, USB2, Firewire, 14 Sata Ports – approx 500 $
2x Intel® Xeon® Prozessor E5-2697V2 at 2.7Ghz – 3.100$ each = 6.200 $
32 GB ECC ram – 400 $
2 x Gefore GTX 780 Ti – 750 $ each = 1.500
PCIe Storage Mushkin Scorpion Deluxe 1TB (2.000Mbit read/write) – 1.300 $
Power supply – 300 $
Case – 150 $

= 10.350 $
Almost the same cost, substantially higher performance and expansion potential.

——
“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
iTunes End User Licence Agreement