madan

StrangeDays said:

madan said:

At its 6000 USD base price tag, the computer is a joke. [...]

You could build a DIY computer with pretty much identical performance for less than 1500 dollars.  No, I'm not kidding.  .

Not kidding, just ignorant. Please post your $1500 DIY version of equal performance. Then add additional cost for assembly, and support, which your DIY model doesn't have.

First of all, you could swap the Xeon for a Core i9 and save yourself a truckload of money.  No, Core i9s aren't synonymous with Xeons and I've owned both.  But if you think that someone running an 8 core Xeon and a 580 is running mission critical apps you're either disingenuous or ignorant.  Core i9s will outperform low end Xeons on single-threaded workloads by as much as 50% and only lose to Xeons by as little as 15%.  So it's a good tradeoff and you can have a Core i9 for as low as 550 bucks.

You can buy a 580 for less than 200 bucks.  You're right.  It might not even be a 1500 dollar system.  It's probably less.  The 2017 iMac is 95% the performance of a base Mac Pro for 1/4 the price and it comes with a 5K monitor.

Ignorant indeed.

melgross said:

madan said:

I'm not trying to make it hard on anyone.  But I am trying to clear things up so people know what they're getting into.  Buyers remorse sucks.  It would be a shame to spend 8k on a computer and find out that it competes unfavorably with a 5k iMac Pro.

Except that other in your own mind, it doesn’t.

?  A base Mac Pro has a slower CPU than an iMac Pro.  Fact.  It has a slower GPU.  Also fact.  It has less storage.  Also fact.  I suppose people can delude themselves if they want.  That won't change reality.

Maurizio said:

madan said:

You know, come to think of it.  You could get an iMac Pro, with 64 GB of RAM, a base Xeon, more storage and a Vega 56, stone the base Mac Pro over the head and it STILL COMES WITH A 5K LG MONITOR BUILT IN.  How nuts is that?

Sure it doesn't come with support with 12 TB 3 lanes but srsly, you're probably not going to need that.  A base Xeon wouldn't be able to handle that throughput anyways.  So honestly, the iMac Pro is a better deal because in 5-6 years you just buy another iMac Pro and you get a whole new system, PLUS A WHOLE NEW MONITOR, to boot, for the same price.  Like I said, the Mac Pro only makes "sense" once you start cracking the 20,000 USD threshold. Once you start putting in gpus and cpu configurations that can handle the crazy bandwidth and performance than an iMac Pro just can't touch. But the base system? A Vega 56 is 30% faster than the Mac Pro's base Radeon 580.  And the system costs LESS and BRINGS  A MONITOR.

No, i do not think you get what a new Mac Pro is.
I have a Mac Pro 2009 running in my home studio; in 2009, i paid 3000 euros for it; it had Sata 2, USB 2, a few hard disk, and a GT120 graphic card, and an 8 core double cpu running at 2.16 Ghz. The lowest possible end.
Today, it run with nvme SSD, has USB3, an RX580, and two 6 core 3.4Ghz CPU, and it still current.

All this was massively less expensive than buying the 3 iMac that has become obsolete in the same timeframe.

The Mac Pro is a PCI machine; it is evolutive, that is the whole point; of course, the stellar point is when you spend more than 20K$, but it fully make sense in
a context where needs and gains evolve.

But as of today, if i had the kind of needs and money, i wouldn't buy an iMac Pro, i would buy a new Mac Pro, low end, and let it evolve in base of my needs; it would
be massively less expensive, and upgradable to technologies that today not yet exists, like USB4. In ten years from now it would be still useful.
An iMac Pro bought today, before a refresh, will be obsolete in about 3 years, and not upgradable.

Anyway, the point about the Mac Pro, as many poster said here, it is not a machine for gamers, it is not a machine for the masses; it is a machine for those that need it; they will reconise it.

Maurizio

Oh? I don't get what a Mac Pro is? Fill me in.

In 2009, for one of my studios, I bought an iMac 27" with a quad core Core i5 (faster in single-threaded ops than your cpu but slower in parallelized), a 4850 (4.5 times faster than your 120) and 1 TB of storage.

It cost me 1800 without AppleCare.  For an extra 1800 TODAY, I could go out and buy a 2017  27" iMac with a Core i7 8 core, 16 GB of RAM and a 580x...and I'd have spend only a hair more than you and have TWO monitors to show for it.  Actually, I could've sold the first iMac (I never sold it, it's a baseclient now) and applied money towards the purchase of the new system and walked away with...a monitor for free for the same performance.

You don't have to buy a Mac Pro to be "pro" or to have lots of expandability options.

My current computer Is a Mac Mini with M.2 storage, 32 GB of RAM and a Core i7 married to a Radeon VII via a Razer Core X.  It has 10 Gig Ether that I have connected to 10 TB of work storage.  That is separate from my own Ryzen home media build with another Radeon VII that has 25 TB of dedicated personal storage.  

I can assure you that I understand just fine what expandability and nice machines are.  The issue isn't expandability because 10 gig ether and TB 3 render that moot.  And the point isn't gpu upgrades because egpus also render that moot.  The point is that for 8k, you're getting a 1500 dollar system.  That's it. The end.  Beyond that, you can do whatever you want. Go buy the Pro.  But I was just warning people of what to expect when they bought their new Mac Pros and ran into a brick wall when they realized that they had 0-15% performance improvement over a 5 year old computer.  That's because the Pro is basically a 2-3 year old computer.  And it was MIDRANGE when it was initially conceived.

Now if you plan on buying 2 Vega Pro Duos.  Congrats.  You're spending 15k and you're probably running weather simulations or advanced financial modeling and you need that kind of teraflop performance.  The Mac Pro makes perfect sense.

But then you shouldn't be offended by someone like me warning base-entry purchasers from avoiding the system anyways.

foregoneconclusion said:

madan said: I think the camp that benefits from the Mac Pro is probably smaller than the camps positively and negatively affected by it. 

That's the reality of personal computing today vs. ten years ago. In 2009, Photoshop was viewed as software that needed high-end desktop hardware. In 2019, your new smartphone could run Photoshop. Software hasn't really kept up with the advances in hardware. Applications that used to need top of the line machines have slid down comfortably into the mass consumer area. It's only the heaviest of lifters that need the brute force of a 2019 Mac Pro. Personally, that's worked out quite well for me. I don't have to spend close to $3,000 on a desktop anymore. A low-end standard 5K iMac from 2017 blows past my old 2009 Mac Pro for my own professional work, takes up less space, costs 1/2 as much, and is far quieter and energy efficient.   

The Mac Pro, when upgraded accordingly is great for super developers working with Davinci Resolve, Premiere or for massive rendering endeavors.  It would also be great for compute farms that can take advantage of the Vega platform's affinity to FP.  But for the AVERAGE professional, even affluent ones, the unupgraded <8K Mac Pro is not only a horrible, horrible deal but one that is easily outperformed by a 2019 iMac 27" (with gpu upgrade, natch)...for less WITH A MONITOR.

Luckily I live in a free country and I'm going to give advice anyways.  Judging from the replies from several posters in this thread, they may have the money to spend on this device but they certainly don't know what they're getting by buying it.