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Maxed out MacPro Pricing
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Yeah I agree on the conversion, it is not a straight currency conversion which makes a lot of sense because the mac pro’s are going to be 3049 euro’s for the 4 core and 4049 euro’s for the 6 core. In dollars that is quite a bit more than what US residents are paying although I don’t know if the 2999 dollar mark is including or excluding taxes.
I think I disagree on the SSD prices though. On the iMac you pay about $300 to go from 256GB to 512GB, and another $500 to go all the way to 1TB. Because the base models already have 256GB standard you’ll “only” have to pay about $750-$800 to get 1TB.
But I’ve done some more calculations and I think I’m not too far off this time. In any case it fits the maxed out model, the 8 core config of marcus moore(it comes at 7700 so $200 off), and it fits the jump from the 4 core base model to the 6 core base model. I’ve also taken the upgrade prices for iMacs to fill in the blanks 🙂
To the base model you can configure your own model and add the prices below.
Flash Storage upgrade prices
(On the imac you pay $250 extra to go from 256GB to 512GB and $500 more to go to 1 TB)
250GB ssd + 0
500GB ssd + 250
1tb ssd. +750RAM upgrade prices
(On the iMac you go from 0 to +200 to +600 so i’m using the same “apple-scaling” here)
16GB +0
32GB +400
64GB +1200GPU upgrade prices
D300 +0
D500 +750
D700 +2000CPU upgrade prices
4 core +0. ($294 on intel.com)
6 core. +250. (583 on intel.com)
8 core +1250 (1723 on intel.com)
12 core. +2500. (2950 on intel.com) -
Just had some pretty definitive business prices – indeed it seems that the 12 core machine, with top spec GPU and 64GB RAM will be less than £7500.
For a 6 core machine with dual 3GB GPU and 32Gb RAM it will be around £4600.
Very impressive.
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See?! I’m not crazy (on this point)!
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The only thing to add to this, is that the hard drive was the 250Gb SSD.
Still, very aggressive pricing for what could be a very fast mac. I’d love to see some benchmarks at some point soon, but they will no doubt arrive. I don’t think they will stop us purchasing, but might affect how much extra we spend on top of a minimum 6 core spec….
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[Tom Sefton] ” I’d love to see some benchmarks at some point soon, but they will no doubt arrive.”
Understandably due to limited resources, I think a lot of benchmarks will only show two or three comparisons. It’s the brave early adopters who will provide most of the valuable feedback.
I like the concept of Geekbench where the data is gathered from everyone posting to their site. Just too bad it is limited to evaluating CPU and memory performance (although those results will be interesting too). Would be great to have Geekbench’s concept expanded to include all the optional components in the Mac Pro as people reported their own results with their individual configurations. Of course the difficulty there would be the variety of external storage setups that would have a bearing I wonder if Barefeats handles crowd-sourced results.
Oh, well. Life’s a gamble, no way around it. Let the games begin.
Rick Lang
iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB
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[Rick Lang] ” like the concept of Geekbench where the data is gathered from everyone posting to their site. Just too bad it is limited to evaluating CPU and memory performance (although those results will be interesting too). Would be great to have Geekbench’s concept expanded to include all the optional components in the Mac Pro as people reported their own results with their individual configurations. Of course the difficulty there would be the variety of external storage setups that would have a bearing I wonder if Barefeats handles crowd-sourced results. “
I really like CINEBENCH, because it’s a real-world test: how long does it take the C4D engine to render a scene on a given computer. This means you get performance metrics you can actually use to compare machines (if you’re a C4D user).
There’s the opportunity for community-sourced application benchmarks. Resolve has the Standard Candle test, and Premiere has PPBM5. Alex Gollner has published published BruceX [link], a generative FCPX rendering benchmark.
Perhaps someone could devise and publish a more real-world, footage-based test could supplement BruceX? What would you want to see tested in such a benchmark?
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
As we’ve been discussing, in a Program like X- I don’t think there is ONE benchmark that would be applicable. Different parts of the hardware seemingly affect different tasks.
There’s Realtime playback performance. Rendering. Exporting. Encoding.
Even if you bought the bullet and picked up a Maxed out machine- would you know whether you were getting the best performance in everything? In most things, probably. But it will most definitely be interesting to see how the different CPUs handle different tasks, depending on how efficiently FCPX handles multi-core processing vs single-core speed.
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Walter Soyka:
“Perhaps someone could devise and publish a more real-world, footage-based test could supplement BruceX? What would you want to see tested in such a benchmark?”That is such a difficult question to answer. Benchmarks normally use specific subsets of the computers being tested and (thanks to Samsung’s ingenuity and total lack of ethics) we know machines can be tuned to perform a given benchmark better than they will perform under real world use. Forgetting that issue, benchmark configurations are always very limited and you are still left wondering, “Well what if I doubled this capacity or selected that option or used this device?” So relying on a few differently configured machines with a few predictable fixed benchmarks does limit the usefulness of the benchmark. They are better than nothing but not a perfect answer to “What should I buy?”
I’d like to see benchmarks that exercise more of the components in a Mac Pro. Specific tests to do that are certainly difficult to design in ways that will really exercise the components. For instance if you had the default 256 GB flash drive, current benchmarks I suspect would happily run using a small fraction of that, but when you design a test to use more than the defaults, you might get interesting results. Still you want the test to be reasonably accurate and representative of real world workload. So do you exercise a video file that fits easily within the default system flash drive or work on file sizes that you know will have to reside on external storage? Another example, your test may exercise all cores available or exercise only one or four cores. Cinebench uses all cores available I believe and that is very useful but it would be informative to have tests that are limited to four cores to see how the models compare under those constraints. As you know, not all apps do use every core available and I suspect the 6-core machine could beat a 12-core machine in those tests although the 12-core wins in Cinebench of course. So maybe I’m looking for tests in which you have options or parameters to control the nature of your benchmark.
And a way to crowd source the results by collecting a lot of information about the variously configured machines being tested. If the results were presented as a score, the way Geekbench rates your CPU and memory performance, it would be interesting to show a scatter diagram and as you hover over the results, a pop up would show you details of the machine that achieved those scores. Just from our discussions on the Cow, it is apparent more than a few people are looking at the same configurations and as people buy and then test those machines, other people should be able to find those same machines they too are now considering. I expect I shall look at a variety of different benchmark sites to come to some conclusions as well as read what early adopters have to say. Honestly, it is the anecdotal evidence that can be the most convincing.
Sorry, Walter, I don’t have a succinct and satisfying answer to your question. Benchmark testing is challenging and relying on benchmark results can be dangerous. When I used to benchmark mainframe computers in the 70s, we actually did that by taking our core applications and data and seeing how the machines ran our real world stuff. That was trustworthy. The vendors had generally never encountered such a laborious approach, but it worked (and I got to see a lot of the United States going to those test sites). The best test is the one that does your work and so far with workstations that means you buy first and test when you get it. It would be interesting to be able to tune a benchmark to be like your projected workload and then have it run on a remote benchmark site. Of course no other site is going to be able to duplicate some of the fabulous things you personaly do Walter! How about we just wait for your results?
Rick Lang
iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB
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