Apple's new Mac Pro a better value than the sum of its parts
The first indication that Apple's sleek, cylindrical Mac Pro is meant for professionals --?other than its name --?is its high cost. AppleInsider assembled a comparable Windows-based system to see just how much value Apple squeezed into its new desktop.
For the purposes of this exercise, we used current prices at a large, nationwide internet retailer well respected by do-it-yourself PC builders. We targeted the new Mac Pro's most tricked-out arrangement, a $9,599 configuration:
To house the machine, we chose one of the highest-rated ATX-compatible cases available, Lian Li's stalwart PC-7B for $89.99. Lian Li's minimalist brushed aluminum towers have been staples of the build-it-yourself community for years and are about as close as the PC aftermarket gets to Apple's design aesthetic.
The PC-7B is a barebones chassis and does not come bundled with a power supply, so we added Corsair's CMPSU-650TX 650-watt CrossFire-ready unit for another $89.99. The 650TX provides enough juice to run both of the power-hungry GPUs as well as Intel's latest and greatest.
Driving the displays in our hypothetical rig are two AMD FirePro W9000 GPUs at $3,399.99 each. They match the Mac Pro's cards on spec with 6GB of GDDR5 memory and 264Gbps memory bandwidth, though it is difficult to say exactly how well they mimic Apple's heavily customized units.
Storage is one area where Apple has a leg up on the do-it-yourself crowd, as the handful of PCI Express-based drives on the market command astronomical prices. OCZ's soon-to-be-discontinued RevoDrive 3 X2 series is the current king of the hill and a 960 gigabyte model would set us back approximately $3,000 --?if we could actually find one for sale.
We turned to Kingston Technology for their 16-gigabyte, ECC-registered DDR3 1866 RAM modules. At $209.99 each, the 64 gigabytes required to reach parity with the Mac Pro's configuration costs us $839.96.
To tie the beast together, our motherboard needs to sport a Xeon-compatible LGA 2011 socket, support for 1866MHz DDR3 RAM, and enough PCI Express slots for the two video cards and our solid state storage. We went with Asus's Z9PE-D8 board, which also brings USB 3.0 and FireWire connectivity for $539.99. We would have chosen one of Asus's Thunderbolt-equipped offerings, but the company does not make Xeon-compatible versions of those boards.
Since a computer is just a toaster without its operating system, we added a Windows 8.1 Pro license that set us back $199.99.
Without considering shipping costs, assembly time, or additional complications that may arise from cooling the machine, it would cost just over $14,300 to replicate Apple's new Mac Pro spec-for-spec.
For that substantial premium, we lose several of the Mac Pro's tentpole features?--?notably Thunderbolt connectivity --?and increase the computer's size by nearly 300 percent. We would also forfeit the significant intangible addition of Apple's AppleCare warranty service.
All in all, it appears that the new Mac Pro's startling sticker price belies the exceptional value underneath.
For the purposes of this exercise, we used current prices at a large, nationwide internet retailer well respected by do-it-yourself PC builders. We targeted the new Mac Pro's most tricked-out arrangement, a $9,599 configuration:
- 2.7GHz 12-core Intel Xeon E5 with 30MB of L3 cache
- 64GB (4x16GB) of 1866MHz DDR3 ECC
- 1TB PCIe-based flash storage
- Dual AMD FirePro D700 GPUs with 6GB of GDDR5 VRAM each
To house the machine, we chose one of the highest-rated ATX-compatible cases available, Lian Li's stalwart PC-7B for $89.99. Lian Li's minimalist brushed aluminum towers have been staples of the build-it-yourself community for years and are about as close as the PC aftermarket gets to Apple's design aesthetic.
The PC-7B is a barebones chassis and does not come bundled with a power supply, so we added Corsair's CMPSU-650TX 650-watt CrossFire-ready unit for another $89.99. The 650TX provides enough juice to run both of the power-hungry GPUs as well as Intel's latest and greatest.
Driving the displays in our hypothetical rig are two AMD FirePro W9000 GPUs at $3,399.99 each. They match the Mac Pro's cards on spec with 6GB of GDDR5 memory and 264Gbps memory bandwidth, though it is difficult to say exactly how well they mimic Apple's heavily customized units.
The two AMD FirePro cards alone cost nearly $7,000 when purchased at retailWhen it comes to the CPU, we can duplicate the Mac Pro precisely. Intel's Xeon E5-2697 Ivy Bridge chip is at the heart of Apple's new professional desktop, and the processor's 12 22-nanometer processing cores hit our shopping cart at $2,749.99.
Storage is one area where Apple has a leg up on the do-it-yourself crowd, as the handful of PCI Express-based drives on the market command astronomical prices. OCZ's soon-to-be-discontinued RevoDrive 3 X2 series is the current king of the hill and a 960 gigabyte model would set us back approximately $3,000 --?if we could actually find one for sale.
We turned to Kingston Technology for their 16-gigabyte, ECC-registered DDR3 1866 RAM modules. At $209.99 each, the 64 gigabytes required to reach parity with the Mac Pro's configuration costs us $839.96.
To tie the beast together, our motherboard needs to sport a Xeon-compatible LGA 2011 socket, support for 1866MHz DDR3 RAM, and enough PCI Express slots for the two video cards and our solid state storage. We went with Asus's Z9PE-D8 board, which also brings USB 3.0 and FireWire connectivity for $539.99. We would have chosen one of Asus's Thunderbolt-equipped offerings, but the company does not make Xeon-compatible versions of those boards.
Since a computer is just a toaster without its operating system, we added a Windows 8.1 Pro license that set us back $199.99.
Without considering shipping costs, assembly time, or additional complications that may arise from cooling the machine, it would cost just over $14,300 to replicate Apple's new Mac Pro spec-for-spec.
For that substantial premium, we lose several of the Mac Pro's tentpole features?--?notably Thunderbolt connectivity --?and increase the computer's size by nearly 300 percent. We would also forfeit the significant intangible addition of Apple's AppleCare warranty service.
All in all, it appears that the new Mac Pro's startling sticker price belies the exceptional value underneath.
Comments
edit to look up the case (strange AI didn't include it):
[IMG ALT=""]http://forums.appleinsider.com/content/type/61/id/36501/width/350/height/500[/IMG]
If this is the closest in Windows-land to a Mac I now understand why there are so many switchers.
As soon as that guy is finished callousing his right hand, he'll tell us his "secret".
"It's all in the software" (Steve Jobs at AllThingsD)
True, but having some specialized hardware doesn't hurt!
Congratulations: now you have a broken toaster.
OWC sells a 960Gb PCIe SSD for $1,199
And I'm sure this $14k machine price will drop considerably if they could also just order the GPU chips instead of the whole card. Never mind configuring the bare bone $2,999 model.
We thank them for their service. For every pro workstation user there must be 10 White Knights ready to save the world one forum at a time
Sure. Just use Intel's integrated video. Just as good as dual FirePros. Also, use slower SATA SSDs. Also, use an unlocked Core i7 and overclock the snot out of it, that should make up for the lack of cores. Besides, Call of Duty can't use that many cores anyway, so you don't need the extra cores to win the benchmark. And it's all about the benchmarks. Add a custom water cooling system, some red neon lights from an old Honda Civic, a "Got NOS?" decal on the case, and your mad gamer box is ready to beat the Mac Pro!
1. While Apple is certainly charging a reasonable price for the Mac Pro, given what they owe the OEMs for the GPUs and the CPU, choosing that particular OCZ drive is a little strange. Besides it's intangible actual cost and low availability, there are other SSDs with a similar capacity and speed to the Apple SSD for $1000-1200 from NewEgg, which is obviously the retailer you are using.
2. The Windows (and Hackintosh) crowd could build a system that is theoretically close in spec to this machine for thousands less if they forego the workstation graphics cards, which are sold with enormous margins to business users to support them, and so they can make a profit after the razor thin margins of their gaming GPU lineups - many of which have just has much horsepower as the FirePro/Quadro cards, but without the proprietary OpenGL firmware that locks those cards out of using AutoCAD and other such programs.
3. OK, three things. I did an apples-to-apples comparison using the baseline (4-core) system, again getting FirePro GPUs, and when it was all put together, the cost was 200-400 shy of the Mac Pro, depending on how fancy a case you wanted to use. Of course, this leaves out the fact that Windows comes with very little software to do anything useful, and the fact that Apple is selling their professional media creation programs at a fraction of the cost of anything comparable for the Windows platform to do the same thing.
All that being said, I agree, for the power user, Apple's new professional system is, for the most part, a clear-cut better value.
There isn't a point in arguing this... for something this small, with this much power - is just incredible. OS aside - this really is a work of engineering art. It's about time Apple turned their brains to the Pro market... it is what kept Apple alive and still is the grassroots of the brand.
2. The Windows (and Hackintosh) crowd could build a system that is theoretically close in spec to this machine for thousands less if they forego the workstation graphics cards
If you do an Apples-to-oranges comparison, the oranges always win.
[B][SIZE=4]JL:[/SIZE][/B] I worked on the Mac Pro as an editor. We shot some test footage on a RED Epic at 4096 x 2160, copied the contents of the card to the Mac Pro's local storage, and imported that directly into both Final Cut Pro 10.1 and Premiere Pro CC without transcoding.
The Verge is a Premiere house. (Once Final Cut Pro 7 was discontinued, FCP X didn't look like it was going to satisfy our needs.) [B][I][COLOR=blue]However, since FCP X was specifically optimized for the new Mac Pro, we tested our RED footage with the app and it handled native footage from the Epic shockingly well.[/COLOR][/I][/B] For this test, I turned off auto-render and set the playback quality to "better performance." [B][I][COLOR=blue]I was able to layer four streams, resized and composed on top of each other with color correction on each clip, and FCP X played the composite back without stuttering or dropping frames.[/COLOR][/I][/B]
Final Cut may have been adjusting the quality of the playback to something less than native 4K, but the frame rate stayed solid, and in the resized preview window I wasn't distracted by any downscaling. I saw the same smooth performance on other clips with more intensive filtering and transitions. [B][I][COLOR=blue]If you enjoy using FCP X (which I truly, truly don't), the Mac Pro is a fantastically responsive machine to edit on[/COLOR][/I][/B].[/QUOTE]
http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/23/5234574/apple-mac-pro-review-2013
It appears that Final Cut Pro X was built to exploit the capabilities of hardware like the new Mac Pro... and vice versa.
Hi nathaminal, Todd couple of points (3?) but apart from that Mis specification
Your entire point 2 is based on fallacious argument, since you say... If they forego the workstation graphics cards..... What if we forego mutilcore, and just fit an 8088? You can't compare apples with apples, by saying well, if they were both bananas they would be the same.
1. It's not just reasonable, it's great value
2. Bs argument see above
3. You are still missing thunderbolt, and a myriad of other items.
Finally your last statement makes no sense, "for the most part, a clear cut". Nonsense, are you not one of thos people whol does not like to not admit there may not be a cheaper build it yourself system, comparing apples to apples?
Yes, in my calculation, a windows machine similar to the 3000$ model costs at least 2200$. The price difference for having a beautiful, small, extremely quiet machine running a better OS is justified. It's much more justified than for MacBooks IMO.
Three points:
- The Mac Pro does include two full graphics cards, not just GPU chips.
- Any Hackintosh you build will also be at least twice as loud (given that it will need at least two additional much smaller fans)
- A Hackintosh is not a good choice for a professional user since using an unlicensed operating system is not a sound business practice
One other, somewhat meaningless point. The OWC unit is a card with two PCIe SSDs in it and even the RevoDrive is nowhere near the form factor of the Apple Drive. The early Mac Pro tests also show the Mac Pro transfer rates to the internal drive are about 100MB/s faster than either of those options are claiming.
You have to show your work for credit....