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

[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

Sorry for being so stupid

I did not mean to be rude and offend you. I am sorry. But how would you call what you did there?

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 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.

I don't think it's being stupid not correctly seeing every processor available out of many. It was a mistake, but that's not being stupid. Sorry I took it as being rude though if it wasn't meant to be.

If you read the thread, you can configure the Dell to be nearly exactly with small improvements over the same MacPro except the video cards (Apples are based on w5000 cards, the dell is based on w5100s which are the successor to the w5000s (better hardware)). The pcie ssd you might have to pickup from newegg, but you get and additional backup drive with it. You come out cheaper with much better hardware.

[elgonzo]

I don't think it's being stupid not correctly seeing every processor available out of many. It was a mistake, but that's not being stupid. Sorry I took it as being rude though if it wasn't meant to be.

Ahh... i should get some fresh air.
After i wrote my last post but unfortunately not before you were able to reply, i realized that my "But how would you call what you did there?" was a rather snide remark that was uncalled for. Well, i deleted it, but too late    I have to apologize for this. I am truly sorry about it. If our paths ever cross, i owe you a beer or two. And now i will let the internet be the internet, get outside and grab some early lunch...

[ChunkyPastaSauce]

I don't think it's being stupid not correctly seeing every processor available out of many. It was a mistake, but that's not being stupid. Sorry I took it as being rude though if it wasn't meant to be.

Ahh... i should get some fresh air.
After i wrote my last post but unfortunately not before you were able to reply, i realized that my "But how would you call what you did there?" was a rather snide remark that was uncalled for. Well, i deleted it, but too late    I have to apologize for this. I am truly sorry about it. If our paths ever cross, i owe you a beer or two. And now i will let the internet be the internet, get outside and grab some early lunch...

lol, the part I wrote "Sorry for being so stupid" I actually took out right before you posted back because I thought it sounded rude too or whatever. So kinda funny, cheers 

[tooki]

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.

Nobody's disputing that. My comment referred to the fact that even when Apple addresses a complaint, you're still unhappy, as in the following example.

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.

OK, so what should Apple do to please you? Because obviously what they've done so far has not. (I've also since learned that the Photoshop update with 30-bit display support came out a few months ago already. It's actually proving to be really hard to find info on which apps have and haven't been updated. :/ )

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.

I was disputing your claim that OS X doesn't support any graphics cards other than ones Apple shipped. That just isn't true. I don't know how much clearer I can be than I have been on this point, given that I've laid it out in excruciating detail for you in prior posts. We are clearly discussing two unrelated issues. 

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.

My apologies, I should have been clearer that I was talking about the Mac Pro line specifically, where indeed the major number in the machine ID does match up neatly to its generation. Now, I do see that the wiki article on the Mac Pro follows your nomenclature, but as a long-time Mac professional, I can assure you that in Mac tech forums and the like, that's not how we refer to them. (The most common way, as I said, is by their year.) It's non-Mac publications that deemed the 2013 model to be second-generation, but in the Mac world, we'd been calling prior tower Mac Pros "second generation" for years (mostly to refer to the 2007 refresh, sometimes to refer to the 2008 model that was a major architectural upgrade).
 

The model identifier is used by apple to differentiate small hardware differences within a generation […] This is standard nomenclature across apple products.

That's just not true as any kind of blanket statement.

To give you an idea of how the model identifiers do and don't correlate to particular products, take a look at this comprehensive list: http://www.everymac.com/systems/by_capability/mac-specs-by-machine-model-machine-id.html

The difference between, for example, a PowerMac2,1 (late 1999 15" CRT iMac G3) and PowerMac8,2 (mid-2005 17 or 20" LCD iMac G5) is not a "small hardware difference" as you suggest.

It's a sort of major-minor numbering system, where the number after the comma can indicate either a variant within the same family (such as screen size) or a refresh to the product model — Apple's usage is not particularly consistent. The major number tends to change when there's an update to the system architecture, completely irrespective of whether it gets a new external design or not (for example, the Power Mac G4's PowerMac1,1 to PowerMac3,1 switch (remember, PowerMac2,1 was the iMac) which was a massive architectural change but identical housing). Similarly, if the external design changes, but the architecture doesn't, the major number may stay the same (for example, PowerMac3,5 to PowerMac3,6).

[ChunkyPastaSauce]

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.

Nobody's disputing that. My comment referred to the fact that even when Apple addresses a complaint, you're still

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.

OK, so what should Apple do to please you? Because obviously what they've done so far has not. (I've also since learned that the Photoshop update with 30-bit display support came out a few months ago already. It's actually proving to be really hard to find info on which apps have and haven't been updated. :/ )

I feel like you're unhappy lol. I pretty clearly stated "It's not meaningless" that Apple added 10 bit support.... but it's late and, as a result for now, only 2 programs I am aware of actually support it on mac (pohotoshop is one of the two programs I was referring to about supporting 10 bit btw). This is not the case on the PC hardware, as windows has supported 10bit for near a decade. Saying MacPro has equivalent 10bit support to a PC, when almost no applications support 10bit on the Mac, is not a fair comparison; applications still have catching up to do on the mac (and Im sure they will at some point).

(Also as I mentioned, I own several macs (and 10bit monitors + TV)... I want 10bit to be supported by applications on apple)

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.

I was disputing your claim that OS X doesn't support any graphics cards other than ones Apple shipped. That just isn't true. I don't know how much clearer I can be than I have been on this point, given that I've laid it out in excruciating detail for you in prior posts. We are clearly discussing two unrelated issues. 

I didnt say you can't, but it's generally riddled with problems except for select cards on the 2nd gen mac pro. Want to drop in a Titan X? Welcome to hell. Want to add a high end mutlicard installation... you can't reasonably because thunderbolt 2.0 can't handle it. Quadro, welcome to beta level drivers. Even if it works, it's still totally unsupported by most professional applications because they don't expect to see non apple configured hardware. Doing weird stuff like that defeats the purpose of purchasing a workstation in the first place. Even if you got around all of that, you're paying tons of cash to do it.

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.

My apologies, I should have been clearer that I was talking about the Mac Pro line specifically, where indeed the major number in the machine ID does match up neatly to its generation. Now, I do see that the wiki article on the Mac Pro follows your nomenclature, but as a long-time Mac professional, I can assure you that in Mac tech forums and the like, that's not how we refer to them. (The most common way, as I said, is by their year.) It's non-Mac publications that deemed the 2013 model to be second-generation, but in the Mac world, we'd been calling prior tower Mac Pros "second generation" for years (mostly to refer to the 2007 refresh, sometimes to refer to the 2008 model that was a major architectural upgrade).

It's what the rest of the internet uses. And it was pretty clear what we were talking about.

The model identifier is used by apple to differentiate small hardware differences within a generation […] This is standard nomenclature across apple products.

That's just not true as any kind of blanket statement.

To give you an idea of how the model identifiers do and don't correlate to particular products, take a look at this comprehensive list: http://www.everymac.com/systems/by_capability/mac-specs-by-machine-model-machine-id.html

The difference between, for example, a PowerMac2,1 (late 1999 15" CRT iMac G3) and PowerMac8,2 (mid-2005 17 or 20" LCD iMac G5) is not a "small hardware difference" as you suggest.

It's a sort of major-minor numbering system, where the number after the comma can indicate either a variant within the same family (such as screen size) or a refresh to the product model — Apple's usage is not particularly consistent. The major number tends to change when there's an update to the system architecture, completely irrespective of whether it gets a new external design or not (for example, the Power Mac G4's PowerMac1,1 to PowerMac3,1 switch (remember, PowerMac2,1 was the iMac) which was a massive architectural change but identical housing). Similarly, if the external design changes, but the architecture doesn't, the major number may stay the same (for example, PowerMac3,5 to PowerMac3,6).

I didn't say it before, but I thought you were possibly being unnecessarily difficult in your former post on naming conventions... Don't care about naming systems for 10-20 year old computers computers and I think it was pretty clear what were were walking about.


Im done putting time into the discussion though   Have our own conclusions.  Lets agree to disagree, and let it be that. 

[Philfreeze]

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

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

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).

I tried to simulate someone who doesn't want to change any parts and they want (for some reason) a PCIe drive. Below the specs I wrote that it would cost about 700$ less if you choose an M.2 drive and it wouldn't make a difference (at least I tried to write that; I wrote accidently should instead of shouldn't).

The 3x3.5GHz was just a typo. It should be 4x3.5GHz, the partnumber is right though.

That is right I compared a singe GPU to a dual one on the benchmark. That was stupid from me, sorry.

Everything matters if you do "certain" things but generally speaking as in "for most applications" it doesn't matter when the RAM has a higher clk.


So in the end the Dell workstation offers the same performance for about 1000$-1500$ less. Which makes it clearly superior which means that Apple should drop the price of  the Macbook by around 500$-1000$. Then I could see it being somewhat competitive. Like I previous said, you pay also for the form factor and the design and not only for the components (see smarthphones to prove my point). This means the MacPro will always cost more than a comparable tower.