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Building The Mac Pro

dylanreeve.com

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Re: Building The Mac Pro

#21

Post by etchalon »

kayoone wrote: post #17
etchalon wrote: post #8

After reading the article, my takeaway was: 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.

just curious, what do you develop with it? I think the new Mac Pro is pretty awesome, but i dont really need that kind of power to work.

We develop mobile applications, games, and some pretty hefty/complex server applications. In all cases, compilation time, rendering time and multi-tasking are of pretty significant importance to the developers.

Personally, I just make the websites (python and go) so the performance matters way less to me.

But I still want one.

Re: Building The Mac Pro

#22

Post by JimmaDaRustla »

kayoone wrote: post #19
JimmaDaRustla wrote: post #15

The guy is using 4GB GPUs when comparing to the Pro's 2GB. Stating the obvious, but price is a big extrapolation of multiple apples to oranges comparisons. I'd like to see this replicated based on benchmarks when the Pro gets here, and compare it to a real Hackintosh.

If you are just looking for numbers, you can spec a pc for a much lower price to match those numbers. Just use a consumer CPU, non-ECC Ram and a Radeon GPU and you will probably match the processing power for half the price. Imo that comparison doesnt make alot of sense though, its apples vs oranges.

Exactly. If anything, this kind of favors the Pro pricing.

Apples to oranges...it's more like apples to mailboxes.

Re: Building The Mac Pro

#23

Post by kayoone »

etchalon wrote: post #21
kayoone wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just curious, what do you develop with it? I think the new Mac Pro is pretty awesome, but i dont really need that kind of power to work.

We develop mobile applications, games, and some pretty hefty/complex server applications. In all cases, compilation time, rendering time and multi-tasking are of pretty significant importance to the developers. Personally, I just make the websites (python and go) so the performance matters way less to me. But I still want one.

the CPU performance of the MP isnt particularly strong though, its more of a GPU powerhouse. But well, i want one too ;)

Re: Building The Mac Pro

#25

Post by dylanreeve »

JimmaDaRustla wrote: post #15

The guy is using 4GB GPUs when comparing to the Pro's 2GB. Stating the obvious, but price is a big extrapolation of multiple apples to oranges comparisons. I'd like to see this replicated based on benchmarks when the Pro gets here, and compare it to a real Hackintosh.

The whole post was really just a mental exercise. Clearly it's not possible to build something that matches the Mac Pro exactly - even if you could perfectly match all the advertised specs, the Mac is on a custom board, with customised hardware and included hardware-specific OS optimizations.

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.

Re: Building The Mac Pro

#26

Post by dylanreeve »

rdl wrote: post #3

I don't get why he speced the E5 CPU vs. the i7 but then also didn't use ECC RAM.

I was trying to match the marketed spec as closely as possible. At this stage there seems to only be one board (that I could find) that supports the E5-1620v2 with ECC. It lacks USB3, has only three PCIe slots and generally isn't up to spec.

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.

Re: Building The Mac Pro

#27

Post by dylanreeve »

hengheng wrote: post #16

Let's see what price Apple can negotiate for the 8 and 12 core options. This is where intel usually charges big. Those CPUs may be useful for high density computing in a datacenter, but not so much for a desktop where the user could have gotten two hexa cores for less money. 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 works…

It's hard to say if the new Mac Pro signifies some sort of revival of "workstation" computers because, by many standards, it doesn't stack up as one. Expandability, often one of the cornerstones of a workstation, isn't really a strong feature of the Mac Pro.

I think it's some sort of new class. A high-power compact desktop or something.

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