1. You can't build a Mac Pro equivalent with off the shelf parts (yet). 2. You can get kinda close, but you're not saving that much money. 3. The less close you're willing to get, the less money you'll spend, which is absolutely not interesting, surprising or relevant.
In summary, the new Mac Pro is pretty awesomely priced and I'm going to order one for my lead dev.
Personally, I just make the websites (python and go) so the performance matters way less to me.
But I still want one.
The article is just about the Mac Pro price. Conclusion: it's a fair price.
You can certainly spec a PC with the same amount of processing power for much less than $3000
Personally I'm not excited about a Mac Pro with not much more CPU power than an iMac, other thant it is quite nifty. It's also nice to see workstations a little less dead than I'm used to, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed for the competitors.
I think it's some sort of new class. A high-power compact desktop or something.
I'm not sure what the take-away is here.
Without thunderbolt.
Without dual ethernet.
Without ECC ram.
Without bluetooth.
Without wifi.
Building another high-end PC (i7-based) to out perform the Mac Pro is a whole different excercise, and I'm fairly sure it would be quite a bit cheaper.
I'd like to see this replicated based on benchmarks when the Pro gets here, and compare it to a real Hackintosh.
Apples to oranges...it's more like apples to mailboxes.
Those GPUs specifically were chosen because they seem the closest match - while there is apparently a 2GB version of the card, it doesn't seem to be widely available.
I'm sure someone with a lot more disposable income than me will see what it takes to out benchmark the new Mac Pro when it ships. My guess is it will be quite a bit cheaper (around $2k) and i7-based.
