$2,000 Custom PC vs $4,000 Mac Pro

[ChunkyPastaSauce]

Yeah it doesnt make sense. Most people buy a workstation for functionality. Apples response is "look at all the thunderbolt ports!". Who is going to be doing serious work with a bunch of equipment loosely connected cable connections, each needing their own power supply sources? That's the opposite of reliable, and only needed because the computer itself doesn't provide the functionality to begin with. Not to mention it destroys the compactness and efficiency they used to justify the design. Makes no sense to me. They had the design mostly right with the first gen intel MacPros imo.

It makes sense only within the context I stated in an earlier post: They've designed the "new" Mac Pro as a dedicated pro video editing system. These days, film and TV production studios don't mess around with local storage. They use high-performance multi-user storage arrays (some Ethernet, some Thunderbolt) designed specifically for video use. For them, a high-performance graphics* node (which is essentially what the new Mac Pro is) makes sense. Everyone else is like "WTF??"

Indeed, one of the things I love about my 2008 Mac Pro is the bunch of drive bays, so I can have my boot SSD, my media hard disk, another with Windows 7 on it, and one big hard disk for automatic backup. And I do worry about what my next system will be, given that at 8 years old, it's entirely possible for this one to just up and die**. I guess I will be buying some sort of multi-bay external drive enclosure. :/ I've also considered biting the bullet with money I don't have, and upgrading to a final-model "old" Mac Pro that at least is a few years younger.


* But Apple hasn't updated the Mac Pro GPUs in ages, has it? Are the ones in it even that great any more??
** To this machine's credit, at 8 years old, with just some extra RAM, an upgraded GPU, and an SSD, it performs just as well as a modern midrange Mac. It's been an incredibly good value in the long run, and I've never had a computer as stable as this one. (The only true crash, as in kernel panic, I've ever had was when a RAM module died while the machine was running.)

Still doesn't make sense because the gpus dont have a SDI port = no genlock. So for video editing, it's only good for offline tasks as a render box and editing. But the cards are under-powered too it's not even good for that. The gpus dont even have ECC (the pc version of the cards do). Also when the macpro was released, it didn't support 10bit color (it might now not sure). And the gpus are basically non upgradeable under osx. For windows you can use a eGPU but not really. And if it was a render box, youd probably select a different cpu than offered too.

Really makes no sense unless you HAVE to have osx. The GPUs were maybe attractive at release, but not anymore.

Im tearing it to shreds, there might be some uses out there but for most it doesn't work out I think. 

To give an idea how ridiculously under-powered it is for the price, consider one could have a fully loaded pc with quad titan-x gpus (not workstation cards, but the macpro really isnt either) with 18-24 core cpus and still come out ahead

[tooki]

Still doesn't make sense because the gpus dont have a SDI port = no genlock. So for video editing, it's only good for offline tasks as a render box and editing. But the cards are under-powered too it's not even good for that. The gpus dont even have ECC (the pc version of the cards do). Also when the macpro was released, it didn't support 10bit color (it might now not sure). And the gpus are basically non upgradeable under osx. For windows you can use a eGPU but not really. And if it was a render box, youd probably select a different cpu than offered too.

Really makes no sense unless you HAVE to have osx. The GPUs were maybe attractive at release, but not anymore.

Im tearing it to shreds, there might be some uses out there but for most it doesn't work out I think. 

To give an idea how ridiculously under-powered it is for the price, consider one could have a fully loaded pc with quad titan-x gpus (not workstation cards, but the macpro really isnt either) with 18-24 core cpus and still come out ahead

Some comments:

1. Yes, some Windows pro graphics cards include SDI, but it's far more common for a separate interface to be used. These are typically PCIe these days, so these also exist as Thunderbolt devices (since Thunderbolt is just PCIe protocol over the DisplayPort physical interface). So if a Mac is to be used with Final Cut Pro for broadcast, it's common to add a Thunderbolt SDI interface. But I'm pretty sure most video editing is done offline, without SDI. Broadcast is a very specific subset of video editing.

2. The 10.11.1 update to OS X added deep color support if the hardware is capable of it (finally). (Many people installed the update and found their setup to suddenly be running in deep color mode, since any halfway recent GPU supports it. It's now usually the displays that don't support deep color.)

3. The GPUs in the Mac Pro are essentially not upgradeable, but that's because they're a weird form factor. It has nothing to do with OS X, which has supported off the shelf GPUs since the 10.8.5 update. You don't get the nifty Apple logo on startup when you use a PC graphics card, but once the OS has loaded the graphics drivers, they spring to life and work using native drivers. (I use an unmodified PC AMD HD7970 in my 2008 Mac Pro, and it works perfectly.)

4. The primary difference between "pro" and "gaming" graphics cards on Windows is — other than the presence of additional ports sometimes — the drivers. The GPU chips themselves are identical, but on Windows, there's a huge difference between the gaming drivers that have had the living daylights optimized out of them for speed, at the expense of stability and mathematical accuracy. The pro drivers on the other hand are optimized for stability and accuracy, but dispense with the speed optimizations. On the Mac, we don't have gaming drivers at all — we're always running the pro drivers, in essence. That's why on the Mac, many pro 3D apps like Maya run on consumer GPUs, while the same app demands a pro GPU on Windows. ECC VRAM is certainly desirable (especially for non-graphics compute tasks), but I can only surmise it's not essential for video rendering.

In essence, Apple built a box optimized for Final Cut Pro, which is (as far as I can tell) much more efficient than other editing suites (regardless of platform), insofar as it's so good at leveraging hardware acceleration that it usually ends up doing in real-time what other programs have to render after the fact.

For any task other than video editing, the new Mac Pro simply makes no sense whatsoever.

[karoru]

Yup, and now Apple sadly doesn't have any general-purpose workstation computer (which first generation of Mac Pros were). So sadly I stay with combination of homebrew Hackintosh workstation (pretty easy to get if you just stay with Intel & NVIDIA, hasn't got any compatibility issues yet and I started using it with Mountail Lion) and cheapest Mac Mini there's available if I have to use developer account. I just can't get into modern cool & hip Ruby or whatever developer lifestyle that works on Macbook Pro on life support drinking vegan drinks & sitting on beanie bag. Get us old chaps proper beige boxes, clicky keyboards and workplaces where at least one people has a suit!

[ChunkyPastaSauce]

Still doesn't make sense because the gpus dont have a SDI port = no genlock. So for video editing, it's only good for offline tasks as a render box and editing. But the cards are under-powered too it's not even good for that. The gpus dont even have ECC (the pc version of the cards do). Also when the macpro was released, it didn't support 10bit color (it might now not sure). And the gpus are basically non upgradeable under osx. For windows you can use a eGPU but not really. And if it was a render box, youd probably select a different cpu than offered too.

Really makes no sense unless you HAVE to have osx. The GPUs were maybe attractive at release, but not anymore.

Im tearing it to shreds, there might be some uses out there but for most it doesn't work out I think. 

To give an idea how ridiculously under-powered it is for the price, consider one could have a fully loaded pc with quad titan-x gpus (not workstation cards, but the macpro really isnt either) with 18-24 core cpus and still come out ahead

Some comments:

1. Yes, some Windows pro graphics cards include SDI, but it's far more common for a separate interface to be used. These are typically PCIe these days, so these also exist as Thunderbolt devices (since Thunderbolt is just PCIe protocol over the DisplayPort physical interface). So if a Mac is to be used with Final Cut Pro for broadcast, it's common to add a Thunderbolt SDI interface. But I'm pretty sure most video editing is done offline, without SDI. Broadcast is a very specific subset of video editing.

2. The 10.11.1 update to OS X added deep color support if the hardware is capable of it (finally). (Many people installed the update and found their setup to suddenly be running in deep color mode, since any halfway recent GPU supports it. It's now usually the displays that don't support deep color.)

3. The GPUs in the Mac Pro are essentially not upgradeable, but that's because they're a weird form factor. It has nothing to do with OS X, which has supported off the shelf GPUs since the 10.8.5 update. You don't get the nifty Apple logo on startup when you use a PC graphics card, but once the OS has loaded the graphics drivers, they spring to life and work using native drivers. (I use an unmodified PC AMD HD7970 in my 2008 Mac Pro, and it works perfectly.)

4. The primary difference between "pro" and "gaming" graphics cards on Windows is — other than the presence of additional ports sometimes — the drivers. The GPU chips themselves are identical, but on Windows, there's a huge difference between the gaming drivers that have had the living daylights optimized out of them for speed, at the expense of stability and mathematical accuracy. The pro drivers on the other hand are optimized for stability and accuracy, but dispense with the speed optimizations. On the Mac, we don't have gaming drivers at all — we're always running the pro drivers, in essence. That's why on the Mac, many pro 3D apps like Maya run on consumer GPUs, while the same app demands a pro GPU on Windows. ECC VRAM is certainly desirable (especially for non-graphics compute tasks), but I can only surmise it's not essential for video rendering.

For any task other than video editing, the new Mac Pro simply makes no sense whatsoever.

1. Genlocking an external box is not the same as genlocking the gpu(s) and you don't get framelocking. External SDI solution is usually also not the same.
2. Yep I see they finally enabled last october. windows has had it since 2009
3. Not really. You can only do that if there are drivers for it in osx. Neither Nvidia or Amd provide official osx drivers for their modern cards outside of apple cards. Since apple doesn't either outside of the cards they use...you dont get native support.  Some cards partially work with experimental drivers, but they are littered with problems (partially because non of the software devs expect to have to check for compatibility with the cards). This wasn't the case back in the day when the 1st gen mac pros dominated because native drivers were available and developers expected to see the cards. You might be able to do if you boot into windows and use a egpu, but already mention it and what's the point.
4. Yes and no. Some of the functions on a pro card will be slowed down compared to a gaming card for the reasons you said (but also because they want$unfortunately] BUT the pro cards also contain many speedups the consumer cards dont have ( games typically don't need them, so most never see it). Maya run fine on consumer cards in Windows, but it is hit or miss for many applications like you say. Also, the apple drivers are not operating in full 'pro driver' modes btw. If you get an apple with a consumer graphics card, you don't get things like fast double precision calcs like the pro hardware. I don't doubt apple opts for stable drivers over iffy drivers though.

In essence, Apple built a box optimized for Final Cut Pro, which is (as far as I can tell) much more efficient than other editing suites (regardless of platform), insofar as it's so good at leveraging hardware acceleration that it usually ends up doing in real-time what other programs have to render after the fact.

I don't disagree with this at all. Developers have serious problems trying to support all the available hardware for PCs, even for professional applications (in fact many provide support for only nvidia or amd  or specific cards.... which is really annoying). You're much less likely to run into that on an apple.

Fact is though, if you drop 10k on an apple mac pro (current gen) hardware, and 10k on a pc hardware, you're almost always better off in terms of hardware on the pc. And the better hardware usually more than makes up for any optimization differences. You only come out ahead on the apple if you need the uniformity of apple.....definitely a lot more screwing around on windows machines. Also I don't dislike apple, I own several (macbook pros, 1 gen macpro)....but the trashcan macpro sucks imo.

[tooki]

1. Genlocking an external box is not the same as genlocking the gpu(s) and you don't get framelocking. External SDI solution is usually also not the same.
2. Yep I see they finally enabled last october. windows has had it since 2009
3. Not really. You can only do that if there are drivers for it in osx. Neither Nvidia or Amd provide official osx drivers for their modern cards outside of apple cards. Since apple doesn't either outside of the cards they use...you dont get native support.  Some cards partially work with experimental drivers, but they are littered with problems (partially because non of the software devs expect to have to check for compatibility with the cards). This wasn't the case back in the day when the 1st gen mac pros dominated because native drivers were available and developers expected to see the cards. You might be able to do if you boot into windows and use a egpu, but already mention it and what's the point.
4. Yes and no. Some of the functions on a pro card will be slowed down compared to a gaming card for the reasons you said (but also because they want$unfortunately] BUT the pro cards also contain many speedups the consumer cards dont have ( games typically don't need them, so most never see it). Maya run fine on consumer cards in Windows, but it is hit or miss for many applications like you say. Also, the apple drivers are not operating in full 'pro driver' modes btw. If you get an apple with a consumer graphics card, you don't get things like fast double precision calcs like the pro hardware. I don't doubt apple opts for stable drivers over iffy drivers though.

2. Yeah I know. Didn't you notice I wrote "finally" on that? It was long overdue.

3. Are we talking about different things? Cuz as I just told you, that's not true. With the exception of a some very new GPUs, you absolutely can just take any old Windows graphics card with an AMD or NVIDIA GPU, plunk it in your (non-cylindrical) Mac Pro, and it will just work. It is native support, because Apple simply changed its AMD and NVIDIA drivers to allow them to work on non-Apple cards. This has been the case for years now!! For example, my HD7970 shows up in "About This Mac" as "AMD Radeon HD 7xxx 3072MB". It works perfectly, showing full support in an OpenGL tester, and even supporting Metal (using a test app that has only Metal support, no OpenGL) in El Capitan.

Which devs are you referring to, who need to check for compatibility?

4. Hm, you're right about Maya, now at least. Years ago it was different, it did not support gaming cards at all.

In essence, Apple built a box optimized for Final Cut Pro, which is (as far as I can tell) much more efficient than other editing suites (regardless of platform), insofar as it's so good at leveraging hardware acceleration that it usually ends up doing in real-time what other programs have to render after the fact.

I don't disagree with this at all. Developers have serious problems trying to support all the available hardware for PCs, even for professional applications (in fact many provide support for only nvidia or amd  or specific cards.... which is really annoying). You're much less likely to run into that on an apple.

You only come out ahead on the apple if you need the uniformity of apple.....definitely a lot more screwing around on windows machines.

That's exactly why people choose them, both for home and for business: they want to do work using the computer, not working on the computer's own issues!

[ChunkyPastaSauce]

1. Genlocking an external box is not the same as genlocking the gpu(s) and you don't get framelocking. External SDI solution is usually also not the same.
2. Yep I see they finally enabled last october. windows has had it since 2009
3. Not really. You can only do that if there are drivers for it in osx. Neither Nvidia or Amd provide official osx drivers for their modern cards outside of apple cards. Since apple doesn't either outside of the cards they use...you dont get native support.  Some cards partially work with experimental drivers, but they are littered with problems (partially because non of the software devs expect to have to check for compatibility with the cards). This wasn't the case back in the day when the 1st gen mac pros dominated because native drivers were available and developers expected to see the cards. You might be able to do if you boot into windows and use a egpu, but already mention it and what's the point.
4. Yes and no. Some of the functions on a pro card will be slowed down compared to a gaming card for the reasons you said (but also because they want$unfortunately] BUT the pro cards also contain many speedups the consumer cards dont have ( games typically don't need them, so most never see it). Maya run fine on consumer cards in Windows, but it is hit or miss for many applications like you say. Also, the apple drivers are not operating in full 'pro driver' modes btw. If you get an apple with a consumer graphics card, you don't get things like fast double precision calcs like the pro hardware. I don't doubt apple opts for stable drivers over iffy drivers though.

2. Yeah I know. Didn't you notice I wrote "finally" on that? It was long overdue.

3. Are we talking about different things? Cuz as I just told you, that's not true. With the exception of a some very new GPUs, you absolutely can just take any old Windows graphics card with an AMD or NVIDIA GPU, plunk it in your (non-cylindrical) Mac Pro, and it will just work. It is native support, because Apple simply changed its AMD and NVIDIA drivers to allow them to work on non-Apple cards. This has been the case for years now!! For example, my HD7970 shows up in "About This Mac" as "AMD Radeon HD 7xxx 3072MB". It works perfectly, showing full support in an OpenGL tester, and even supporting Metal (using a test app that has only Metal support, no OpenGL) in El Capitan.

Which devs are you referring to, who need to check for compatibility?

4. Hm, you're right about Maya, now at least. Years ago it was different, it did not support gaming cards at all.

In essence, Apple built a box optimized for Final Cut Pro, which is (as far as I can tell) much more efficient than other editing suites (regardless of platform), insofar as it's so good at leveraging hardware acceleration that it usually ends up doing in real-time what other programs have to render after the fact.

I don't disagree with this at all. Developers have serious problems trying to support all the available hardware for PCs, even for professional applications (in fact many provide support for only nvidia or amd  or specific cards.... which is really annoying). You're much less likely to run into that on an apple.

You only come out ahead on the apple if you need the uniformity of apple.....definitely a lot more screwing around on windows machines.

That's exactly why people choose them, both for home and for business: they want to do work using the computer, not working on the computer's own issues!

Sorry, I didnt mean to sound rude (I read it and it sounds rude ), Ive been up for over 24 hrs 

2. My point about 10 bit color was that if Apples are to be comparable to PCs workstations, then they need to support basic workstation features at the time of adoption by the industry. Otherwise they're behind relative to PC hardware. For 10bit color, they are still behind because they just got 10 bit color, most professional mac programs havent caught up yet except for a select few such as photoshop.

3. I think we are talking about different things. The thread was started on modern macpros vs pc equivalents. The first gen intel macpro stopped being sold in 2012 and is not up to date. As I mentioned, the 1st gen macpros didn't have the issue with compatibility with older graphics cards (and I liked the macpro 1st gen). However, the second gen macpros do have major issues...you cant put one in. If one goes the egpu route, then you have to use experimental unsupported drivers for modern graphics cards, usually with major issues. That's not comparable to a workstation PC (except for maybe between early major windows releases).

For hardware, the current macpro offerings do not compare to current workstation PCs (what the thread is about).

That's exactly why people choose them, both for home and for business: they want to do work using the computer, not working on the computer's own issues!

And I don't disagree.

[Someone]

Fact is though, if you drop 10k on an apple mac pro (current gen) hardware, and 10k on a pc hardware, you're almost always better off in terms of hardware on the pc. And the better hardware usually more than makes up for any optimization differences. You only come out ahead on the apple if you need the uniformity of apple.....definitely a lot more screwing around on windows machines. Also I don't dislike apple, I own several (macbook pros, 1 gen macpro)....but the trashcan macpro sucks imo.

Perhaps at the top end if you're building with off the shelf parts sourced from the lowest price suppliers, but the $3000 and $4000 (USD) price points of the preconfigured mac pros are very comparable with the Dell and HP workstations using Xeon E5 processors with ECC ram. Remembering here that the mac pro was released and priced at the end of 2013, there has been no change in the price since then, which makes it rather amazing that Dell and HP aren't able to offer something now at a big discount.

[tooki]

3. Not really. You can only do that if there are drivers for it in osx. Neither Nvidia or Amd provide official osx drivers for their modern cards outside of apple cards. Since apple doesn't either outside of the cards they use...you dont get native support.  Some cards partially work with experimental drivers, but they are littered with problems (partially because non of the software devs expect to have to check for compatibility with the cards). This wasn't the case back in the day when the 1st gen mac pros dominated because native drivers were available and developers expected to see the cards. You might be able to do if you boot into windows and use a egpu, but already mention it and what's the point.

3. Are we talking about different things? Cuz as I just told you, that's not true. With the exception of a some very new GPUs, you absolutely can just take any old Windows graphics card with an AMD or NVIDIA GPU, plunk it in your (non-cylindrical) Mac Pro, and it will just work. It is native support, because Apple simply changed its AMD and NVIDIA drivers to allow them to work on non-Apple cards. This has been the case for years now!! For example, my HD7970 shows up in "About This Mac" as "AMD Radeon HD 7xxx 3072MB". It works perfectly, showing full support in an OpenGL tester, and even supporting Metal (using a test app that has only Metal support, no OpenGL) in El Capitan.

Which devs are you referring to, who need to check for compatibility?

2. My point about 10 bit color was that if Apples are to be comparable to PCs workstations, then they need to support basic workstation features at the time of adoption by the industry. Otherwise they're behind relative to PC hardware. For 10bit color, they are still behind because they just got 10 bit color, most professional mac programs havent caught up yet except for a select few such as photoshop.

3. I think we are talking about different things. The thread was started on modern macpros vs pc equivalents. The first gen intel macpro stopped being sold in 2012 and is not up to date. As I mentioned, the 1st gen macpros didn't have the issue with compatibility with older graphics cards (and I liked the macpro 1st gen). However, the second gen macpros do have major issues...you cant put one in. If one goes the egpu route, then you have to use experimental unsupported drivers for modern graphics cards, usually with major issues. That's not comparable to a workstation PC (except for maybe between early major windows releases).

I don't mean to be rude, but it seems there's no pleasing you. 

2. So the fact that Apple added it late makes it meaningless that they added it at all? (AFAIK, it's taken but a mere few months for many pro applications to add support, but I don't think Photoshop is among them quite yet, it's been promised for "the next update".) Even Apple doesn't have a time machine with which to go back and add support earlier.

3. First you said it's an OS issue. I replied "nope, drivers work, in the new Mac Pro it's a physical incompatibility". Second you say it's drivers, I repeat that the drivers work, and now third, you agree that the drivers work but that it's a physical incompatibility. I'm pretty sure that's what I said all along. 


As a little aside, what you're calling the 2nd gen Mac Pro is actually the 6th generation. I can understand why you might lump all the tower form-factor Mac Pros together, but convention in the Mac world is that there were 5 generations of tower Mac Pros, making the cylindrical one 6th gen. The "model identifier" in the firmware follows this convention as well, calling the cylindrical one "MacPro6,1". (Most commonly, they're referred to by their year of release, e.g. my 3rd gen MacPro3,1 is a "2008 Mac Pro".)

[Philfreeze]

Not posting to start an Apple PC flame war but interesting to watch.

About 2 years ago I considered switching from a i7 PC to a Pro but even then the math did not add up.

And I don't want to protect Apple from a flame war because frankly, I don't care as long as I can buy whatever I want and nobody comes to my house and steals my Macbook.

But still, compare any PC from early 2013 with a current one and it will be slower. That is just how technology works. At the time it was a superb product but now it isn't anymore, it is outdated.
The thing is, even when it is slower and costs more it is absolutely reasonable to say it costs so much because of its size and because it so so silent with this size.
Try to build a computer with the same size and the same power and you will see that it isn't that easy. (granted MSI has its Vortex which is similar but again, it is newer (release 2016) and still bigger).


And guys please don't just hate on a company because you think it isn't worth it. Some people just like that it just works out of the box without a problem and that the product usually work pretty long (and they regularly update even old devices). Some people are okay with paying more for this reason, that doesn't mean they are right or wrong they just value things differently.

[Philfreeze]

Perhaps at the top end if you're building with off the shelf parts sourced from the lowest price suppliers, but the $3000 and $4000 (USD) price points of the preconfigured mac pros are very comparable with the Dell and HP workstations using Xeon E5 processors with ECC ram. Remembering here that the mac pro was released and priced at the end of 2013, there has been no change in the price since then, which makes it rather amazing that Dell and HP aren't able to offer something now at a big discount.

That is actually quite a good point to show how some people seem to just hate apple because they hate apple and not because they did something bad...

[ChunkyPastaSauce]

Perhaps at the top end if you're building with off the shelf parts sourced from the lowest price suppliers, but the $3000 and $4000 (USD) price points of the preconfigured mac pros are very comparable with the Dell and HP workstations using Xeon E5 processors with ECC ram. Remembering here that the mac pro was released and priced at the end of 2013, there has been no change in the price since then, which makes it rather amazing that Dell and HP aren't able to offer something now at a big discount.

That is actually quite a good point to show how some people seem to just hate apple because they hate apple and not because they did something bad...

Not really, the bottom end macpros have d300 cards which are crippled w5000 workstation cards. You can't even order machines from dell or hp with those cards anymore and you would want to because they dont support opengl 4.4 or 2.0 opencl apis plus a whole host of other things anyway.

For $3000 from Dell, I can configure a 6 core E5 (macpro 4 core), 16gb ram DDR4 (macpro 12gb DDR3), dual w5100 gpus (macpro dual crippled w5000), pcie 256gb drive (mac pro same). 

Compared to current macpros, you get a much better hardware for the same price going PC, even on the bottom end (and sky rockets as you go up)

And I don't want to protect Apple from a flame war because frankly, I don't care as long as I can buy whatever I want and nobody comes to my house and steals my Macbook.

But still, compare any PC from early 2013 with a current one and it will be slower. That is just how technology works. At the time it was a superb product but now it isn't anymore, it is outdated.
The thing is, even when it is slower and costs more it is absolutely reasonable to say it costs so much because of its size and because it so so silent with this size.
Try to build a computer with the same size and the same power and you will see that it isn't that easy. (granted MSI has its Vortex which is similar but again, it is newer (release 2016) and still bigger).

And guys please don't just hate on a company because you think it isn't worth it. Some people just like that it just works out of the box without a problem and that the product usually work pretty long (and they regularly update even old devices). Some people are okay with paying more for this reason, that doesn't mean they are right or wrong they just value things differently.

Just to be clear, the thread was about the current macpro vs pc equivalents price/performance. They don't stand up to pc offerings and the formfactor doesn't make sense for majority of workstation setups.  It wasn't meant to be a flame war against apples (I like Apples, own several. The Apple uniformity was already mentioned as definitely a plus).

I don't mean to be rude, but it seems there's no pleasing you. 

I firmly believe the current macpro hardware offerings are behind relative to other offerings on the market.

2. So the fact that Apple added it late makes it meaningless that they added it at all? (AFAIK, it's taken but a mere few months for many pro applications to add support, but I don't think Photoshop is among them quite yet, it's been promised for "the next update".) Even Apple doesn't have a time machine with which to go back and add support earlier.

It's not meaningless. But the point, and ive already stated this, is that the recent addition of 10bit is 1. way behind 2. not currently useful outside of like two applications because osx based software has caught up for it yet. That's not the case on the PC.

3. First you said it's an OS issue. I replied "nope, drivers work, in the new Mac Pro it's a physical incompatibility". Second you say it's drivers, I repeat that the drivers work, and now third, you agree that the drivers work but that it's a physical incompatibility. I'm pretty sure that's what I said all along. 

That's not what I said. I don't agree with you that one can get a reasonable setup on current gen macpros. I said you can partially do it thru an eGPU but why would you want to.  You'll be paying up the nose to do it. You're limited to thunderbolt 2.0, so multigpuconfig is out. You be stuck with unsupported or experimental drivers (if they're available). You'll be stuck with software that doesn't support the cards because they don't expect to see them. Ive already looked into this and it's littered with problems. It wasn't as much a problem for the 1st gen macs, but the 2nd gen (what the thread is on) it is a problems and very few people do it because of that. For workstations, it's not a reasonable option.

As a little aside, what you're calling the 2nd gen Mac Pro is actually the 6th generation. I can understand why you might lump all the tower form-factor Mac Pros together, but convention in the Mac world is that there were 5 generations of tower Mac Pros, making the cylindrical one 6th gen. The "model identifier" in the firmware follows this convention as well, calling the cylindrical one "MacPro6,1". (Most commonly, they're referred to by their year of release, e.g. my 3rd gen MacPro3,1 is a "2008 Mac Pro".)

The model identifier is not != the generation. The model identifier is used by apple to differentiate small hardware differences within a generation "1st generation macpro" includes all model identifiers from "1.1 to 5.1"  "2nd generation macpro" is "6.1" model identifier plus possibly more in the future. This is standard nomenclature across apple products.

[Philfreeze]

Not really, the bottom end macpros have d300 cards which are crippled w5000 workstation cards. You can't even order machines from dell or hp with those cards anymore and you would want to because they dont support opengl 4.4 or 2.0 opencl apis plus a whole host of other things anyway.

For $3000 from Dell, I can configure a 6 core E5 (macpro 4 core), 16gb ram DDR4 (macpro 12gb DDR3), dual w5100 gpus (macpro dual crippled w5000), pcie 256gb drive (mac pro same). 
Compared to current macpros, you get a much better hardware for the same price going PC, even on the bottom end (and sky rockets as you go up)


Just to be clear, the thread was about the current macpro vs pc equivalents price/performance. They don't stand up to pc offerings and the formfactor doesn't make sense for majority of workstation setups.  It wasn't meant to be a flame war against apples (I like Apples, own several. The Apple uniformity was already mentioned as definitely a plus).

I didn't check the prices and just assumed Someone knew what he was saying.

Yeah by now the MacPro is way too expensive and I would definetly buy a pc but at the start it was somewhat competitive (if you exclude the usual Apple premium tax)
The formfactor of a normal PC isn't a problem but if you are a designer you probably appreciate the nice design and the small size. Also, I wouldn't say the Macpro was build for companies but more for semi professional/ professional use at home.
And I didn't mean to say you just stupidely hated against Apple but some people in this thread this but I should have wrote this a bit clearer, my fault.

[poorchava]

I don't see what people see in Apple stuff. Ok, ale the product design is nice. The innards of Mac desktops are beautifully designed and fit together nicely. It sure feels like a premium product... Same as $5k audio cables.

Nobody in the industry where faster rendering = more money gives a shit about how the machine looks on the inside. It has to be fast.

That's probably why Apple doesn't go into really pro segment of the market. Nice product design and premium brand mumbo-jumbo don't matter. Performance matters and that's it.

Sent from my HTC One M8s using Tapatalk.

[Someone]

Not really, the bottom end macpros have d300 cards which are crippled w5000 workstation cards. You can't even order machines from dell or hp with those cards anymore and you would want to because they dont support opengl 4.4 or 2.0 opencl apis plus a whole host of other things anyway.

For $3000 from Dell, I can configure a 6 core E5 (macpro 4 core), 16gb ram DDR4 (macpro 12gb DDR3), dual w5100 gpus (macpro dual crippled w5000), pcie 256gb drive (mac pro same). 
Compared to current macpros, you get a much better hardware for the same price going PC, even on the bottom end (and sky rockets as you go up)


Just to be clear, the thread was about the current macpro vs pc equivalents price/performance. They don't stand up to pc offerings and the formfactor doesn't make sense for majority of workstation setups.  It wasn't meant to be a flame war against apples (I like Apples, own several. The Apple uniformity was already mentioned as definitely a plus).

I didn't check the prices and just assumed Someone knew what he was saying.

Yeah by now the MacPro is way too expensive and I would definetly buy a pc but at the start it was somewhat competitive (if you exclude the usual Apple premium tax)
The formfactor of a normal PC isn't a problem but if you are a designer you probably appreciate the nice design and the small size. Also, I wouldn't say the Macpro was build for companies but more for semi professional/ professional use at home.
And I didn't mean to say you just stupidely hated against Apple but some people in this thread this but I should have wrote this a bit clearer, my fault.

I did check the pricing, and again based on the above statement, still there aren't greatly cheaper options from Dell or HP. I cant configure a Dell 5000 series for dual GPUs but they still price similar, and the 7000 series with comparable speed processors (3.7x4C and 3.5x6C) price in around the same as a mac pro. Dell offer some discount processor options below 3GHz (and below 2GHz!) which can greatly reduce the price as the CPU is a very large component of the final cost, but the 16xx series in the 5000 line are simple comparisons.

[ChunkyPastaSauce]

Not really, the bottom end macpros have d300 cards which are crippled w5000 workstation cards. You can't even order machines from dell or hp with those cards anymore and you would want to because they dont support opengl 4.4 or 2.0 opencl apis plus a whole host of other things anyway.

For $3000 from Dell, I can configure a 6 core E5 (macpro 4 core), 16gb ram DDR4 (macpro 12gb DDR3), dual w5100 gpus (macpro dual crippled w5000), pcie 256gb drive (mac pro same). 
Compared to current macpros, you get a much better hardware for the same price going PC, even on the bottom end (and sky rockets as you go up)


Just to be clear, the thread was about the current macpro vs pc equivalents price/performance. They don't stand up to pc offerings and the formfactor doesn't make sense for majority of workstation setups.  It wasn't meant to be a flame war against apples (I like Apples, own several. The Apple uniformity was already mentioned as definitely a plus).

I didn't check the prices and just assumed Someone knew what he was saying.

Yeah by now the MacPro is way too expensive and I would definetly buy a pc but at the start it was somewhat competitive (if you exclude the usual Apple premium tax)
The formfactor of a normal PC isn't a problem but if you are a designer you probably appreciate the nice design and the small size. Also, I wouldn't say the Macpro was build for companies but more for semi professional/ professional use at home.
And I didn't mean to say you just stupidely hated against Apple but some people in this thread this but I should have wrote this a bit clearer, my fault.

I did check the pricing, and again based on the above statement, still there aren't greatly cheaper options from Dell or HP. I cant configure a Dell 5000 series for dual GPUs but they still price similar, and the 7000 series with comparable speed processors (3.7x4C and 3.5x6C) price in around the same as a mac pro. Dell offer some discount processor options below 3GHz (and below 2GHz!) which can greatly reduce the price as the CPU is a very large component of the final cost, but the 16xx series in the 5000 line are simple comparisons.

I think you may not be understanding the hardware differences.
6 core V3 vs 4 V2 cpu is a big difference. If you want you can go 4 cores V3 on dell... it's even cheaper....but why?
The dual video cards from dell are w5100, not the crippled dual w5000 on macpro. That's a huge difference (4gb ram vs 2gb ram, much faster rendering, faster opencl compute, opengl 4.4 vs 4.2, opencl 2.0 vs 1.2,etc...) The w5000 are old enough that they are not sold by dell anymore
You get 16 gb of ram vs 12 gb ram. The ram is dd4 instead vs ddr3. And it's faster 2133mhz vs 1866mhz

For $100 less than the macpro, you get much better hardware

[Someone]

Not really, the bottom end macpros have d300 cards which are crippled w5000 workstation cards. You can't even order machines from dell or hp with those cards anymore and you would want to because they dont support opengl 4.4 or 2.0 opencl apis plus a whole host of other things anyway.

For $3000 from Dell, I can configure a 6 core E5 (macpro 4 core), 16gb ram DDR4 (macpro 12gb DDR3), dual w5100 gpus (macpro dual crippled w5000), pcie 256gb drive (mac pro same). 
Compared to current macpros, you get a much better hardware for the same price going PC, even on the bottom end (and sky rockets as you go up)


Just to be clear, the thread was about the current macpro vs pc equivalents price/performance. They don't stand up to pc offerings and the formfactor doesn't make sense for majority of workstation setups.  It wasn't meant to be a flame war against apples (I like Apples, own several. The Apple uniformity was already mentioned as definitely a plus).

I didn't check the prices and just assumed Someone knew what he was saying.

Yeah by now the MacPro is way too expensive and I would definetly buy a pc but at the start it was somewhat competitive (if you exclude the usual Apple premium tax)
The formfactor of a normal PC isn't a problem but if you are a designer you probably appreciate the nice design and the small size. Also, I wouldn't say the Macpro was build for companies but more for semi professional/ professional use at home.
And I didn't mean to say you just stupidely hated against Apple but some people in this thread this but I should have wrote this a bit clearer, my fault.

I did check the pricing, and again based on the above statement, still there aren't greatly cheaper options from Dell or HP. I cant configure a Dell 5000 series for dual GPUs but they still price similar, and the 7000 series with comparable speed processors (3.7x4C and 3.5x6C) price in around the same as a mac pro. Dell offer some discount processor options below 3GHz (and below 2GHz!) which can greatly reduce the price as the CPU is a very large component of the final cost, but the 16xx series in the 5000 line are simple comparisons.

I think you may not be understanding the hardware differences.
6 core V3 vs 4 V2 cpu is a big difference. If you want you can go 4 cores V3 on dell... it's even cheaper....but why?
The dual video cards from dell are w5100, not the crippled dual w5000 on macpro. That's a huge difference (4gb ram vs 2gb ram, much faster rendering, faster opencl compute, opengl 4.4 vs 4.2, opencl 2.0 vs 1.2,etc...) The w5000 are old enough that they are not sold by dell anymore
You get 16 gb of ram vs 12 gb ram. The ram is dd4 instead vs ddr3. And it's faster 2133mhz vs 1866mhz

For $100 less than the macpro, you get much better hardware

You dont show whats associated with that pricing, I cannot find any 5000 series dells with the option for dual video cards (if thats important to the buyer). Dell offer more choice but they price out similar to the mac pro's for the same configurations.

The benchmarks dont show any great advancements going from a 1620 V2 to a V3, and a budget priced 6 core E5-2620 @ 2.4GHz still comes in similar benchmarks to the 4 core 1620's.

So you've yet to find any massive savings compared to a computer thats more than 2 years old!

[ChunkyPastaSauce]

You dont show whats associated with that pricing, I cannot find any 5000 series dells with the option for dual video cards (if thats important to the buyer). Dell offer more choice but they price out similar to the mac pro's for the same configurations.

The benchmarks dont show any great advancements going from a 1620 V2 to a V3, and a budget priced 6 core E5-2620 @ 2.4GHz still comes in similar benchmarks to the 4 core 1620's.

So you've yet to find any massive savings compared to a computer thats more than 2 years old!

Dell 4core config, cpu 1630 not 1620:


Dell 6core config cpu 1650 @ 3.5Ghz not 2.4Ghz:


Passmark

[Someone]

Now you've included all the details, I think people can make up their own minds.

[Philfreeze]

Okay I did it myself.
Apple MacPro:
3.7GHz 4xCore CPU (Xeon E5-1620 v2?)
16GB DDR3 1866MHz EEC RAM
512GB PCIe SSD
2x AMD FirePro D300 (2GB VRAM)
GB Ethernet
Magic Mouse 2
Apple Keyboard

Price: 3983 CHF (swiss franks) / 4147USD


Dell Precision Tower 5000:
3.5GHz 4xCore CPU (Xeon E5-1620 v3)
16GB DDR4 2133MHz EEC RAM
400GB PCIe SSD (Intel® DC P3700)
2x AMD Firepro W5100 (4GB VRAM)
GB Ethernet
Dell Keyboard
Dell USB Mouse

Price: 3954 CHF (swiss franks) / 4117 USD


So they cost pretty much the same and I think I managed to configure them relatively comparable.
The Dell GPUs have more VRAM but they are slower (according to CompuBench).
The Dell PC has a lower clocked but newer CPU which should balance itself out.
The Dell PC has DDR4 RAM but that doesn't really make any difference (higher clockrate on RAM is most of the time not that important).
The Apple MacPro has WLAN and the Dell PC probably not (?)
And finally the biggest difference, the Dell PC has 400GB SSD storage instead of 512GB BUT it would be possible to use a 512GB M.2 SSD (x8) which would drop the price by about 700USD and it shouldn't really matter.

Conclusion:
They are priced about the same. The big difference is what you want. Do you want a small and minimalistic trashcan or do you want a modding friendly ATX tower.
I would probably still go for the Dell Tower but the Apple PC isn't priced that badly at all.

Edit: fixed typos

[ChunkyPastaSauce]

Okay I did it myself.
Apple MacPro:
3.7GHz 4xCore CPU (Xeon E5-1620 v2?)
16GB DDR3 1866MHz EEC RAM
512GB PCIe SSD
2x AMD FirePro D300 (2GB VRAM)
GB Ethernet
Magic Mouse 2
Apple Keyboard

Price: 3983 CHF (swiss franks) / 4147USD


Dell Precision Tower 5000:
3.5GHz 3xCore CPU (Xeon E5-1620 v3)
16GB DDR4 2133MHz EEC RAM
400GB PCIe SSD (Intel® DC P3700)
2x AMD Firepro W5100 (4GB VRAM)
GB Ethernet
Dell Keyboard
Dell USB Mouse

Price: 3954 CHF (swiss franks) / 4117 USD

Please explain something for the dell, the only difference between your configuration and mine is the PCIe drive and nic (mine had 500gb regular selected)...... but somehow you got a $1,500 increase in price...?
I think something maybe wrong in your config
Also the cpu you selected "3.5GHz 3xCore CPU (Xeon E5-1620 v3)"... doesn't exist , the comparable cpus dell offers - the 3.7 4 core E5-1630 or V3 or the 3.5 6 core 1650 V3  So take a look there

[edit  I see the difference, your config has a DCP3700 which is an enterprise SSD rated for 50+ petabyte wear rating and costs $1000-$1500, the MacPro doesn't have that. You can just throw in a 512GB PCIe card is ~$310 from newegg.... so going the dell is significantly cheaper... and you get an additional backup drive).

So they cost pretty much the same and I think I managed to configure them relatively comparable.
The Dell GPUs have more VRAM but they are slower (according to CompuBench).

Youve compared a single w5100 to dual d300s... (the site doesn't list w5100 in dual config).

Also the benchmark site....  If you click to see number of users who actually benchmarked the d300 card on the site... you find two. You don't get a good survey with that. You'll find the tests performed by 50+ users with the results set to the median (rather than the top single point) by clicking here https://compubench.com/compare.jsp?benchmark=compu15d&did1=22279290&os1=OS+X&api1=cl&hwtype1=dGPU&hwname1=AMD+Radeon+HD+-+FirePro+D300+Compute+Engine&D2=AMD+FirePro+W5100....and because it's a single w5100 vs dual d300, you have to correct by 80-100%.... the dual w5100s are faster than d300s (which is what one would expect since the d300s are toned down w5000s instead of the next gen sequels - W5100s) .

Also the apis they are using for benchmarking...they're years old.

The Dell PC has DDR4 RAM but that doesn't really make any difference (higher clockrate on RAM is most of the time not that important).

Likely does if you're doing certain types of compute work (Im my case it almost certainly does, since large matrices manipulations in FEA).

[elgonzo]

Also the cpu you selected "3.5GHz 3xCore CPU (Xeon E5-1620 v3)"... doesn't exist , the comparable cpus dell offers - the 3.7 4 core E5-1630 or V3 or the 3.5 6 core 1650 V3  So take a look there

Don't be stupid. Of course the Xeon E5-1620 v3 does exist, and Dell offers it for the Precision 5000 (there might be differences in regional offers, though). It is of course a 4 core CPU and it should be rather obvious that Philfreeze made a typo when writing "3xCore" (since Intel never produced any tri-core Xeon, afaik...)

[ChunkyPastaSauce]

Also the cpu you selected "3.5GHz 3xCore CPU (Xeon E5-1620 v3)"... doesn't exist , the comparable cpus dell offers - the 3.7 4 core E5-1630 or V3 or the 3.5 6 core 1650 V3  So take a look there

Don't be stupid. Of course the Xeon E5-1620 v3 does exist, and Dell offers it for the Precision 5000 (there might be differences in regional offers, though). It is of course a 4 core CPU and it should be rather obvious that Philfreeze made a typo when writing "3xCore" (since Intel never produced any tri-core Xeon, afaik...)

Ok.... I dont get why youre being rude.

Im wrong, the point was there is a possible configuration error. Especially since he configured for a 3.5ghz for the Dell, while the MacPro has a 3.7Ghz.. even though a 3.7 is available from dell. The 3c typo makes it really confusing since he could have configure for a 6 core 3.5 or a 4c 3.7 or a 4c 3.5

[Someone]

Please explain something for the dell, the only difference between your configuration and mine is the PCIe drive and nic (mine had 500gb regular selected)...... but somehow you got a $1,500 increase in price...?

Dell offer wildly different pricing worldwide, and the systems you priced included deep discounts in their price. Even with the discounts the difference in price/performance between them isnt that much, the apple products are amazingly priced to the market quite well (usually this late into a refresh they are poor value).

[ChunkyPastaSauce]

Please explain something for the dell, the only difference between your configuration and mine is the PCIe drive and nic (mine had 500gb regular selected)...... but somehow you got a $1,500 increase in price...?

Dell offer wildly different pricing worldwide, and the systems you priced included deep discounts in their price. Even with the discounts the difference in price/performance between them isnt that much, the apple products are amazingly priced to the market quite well (usually this late into a refresh they are poor value).

I could toltally see different pricing in different regions, but I think that's not what's happened here. He configured for a DCP3700 which is an enterprise SSD rated for 50+ petabyte wear rating and costs $1000-$1500, the MacPro doesn't have that. You can just throw in a 512GB PCIe card ~$310 from newegg. Youd have that plus a 512gb backup drive (and still cheaper)

I just tried configuring the dell on UK site... and it's actually cheaper by a few hundred $.    But I think you're right in certain places the price could jump.

[elgonzo]

Also the cpu you selected "3.5GHz 3xCore CPU (Xeon E5-1620 v3)"... doesn't exist , the comparable cpus dell offers - the 3.7 4 core E5-1630 or V3 or the 3.5 6 core 1650 V3  So take a look there

Don't be stupid. Of course the Xeon E5-1620 v3 does exist, and Dell offers it for the Precision 5000 (there might be differences in regional offers, though). It is of course a 4 core CPU and it should be rather obvious that Philfreeze made a typo when writing "3xCore" (since Intel never produced any tri-core Xeon, afaik...)

Ok.... I dont get why youre being rude.

Im wrong, the point was there is a possible configuration error. Especially since he configured for a 3.5ghz for the Dell, while the MacPro has a 3.7Ghz... even though a 3.7 is available from dell

Sorry for being so stupid

I did not mean to be rude and offend you. I am sorry. 

Anway, the Dell is rather expensive. This has not so much to do with the cost of the technology per se, but rather the way how their workstations are being customized. Most additional components that can be added to the base configuration come with a healthy mark-up. Add a PCIe SSD to your configuration (the Mac Pro uses an PCIe SSD), and see the price rise. Theoretically, due to the mark-up on add-on components a comparable Dell workstation will roughly cost the same as a Mac Pro. In reality, however, there will always be some difference in price and performance because it is not possible to choose components for the Dell which are exactly the same as found in the Mac Pro....

That said, the ability to adjust the Dell (or HP, Fujitsu, etc...) workstation configuration for particular application scenarios (which is not really possible with the Mac Pro) makes it possible to spend the money exactly on those components you benefit most from. This means that a configurable Dell workstation will in most cases offer more bang for the buck (with regard to your needs) than an uncustomizable Mac Pro (with the obvious exception being those application scenarios the Mac Pro is specifically designed for).
Which essentially also means that comparing the two by price only is a misleading comparison...