Apple's powerful, cylindrical Mac Pro will start at $2,999

[ajoy39]

Ok I was actually interested in seeing the Mac Pro develop, but I looked at the power they were listing in their Tech Specs and I am really unimpressed.  The "D700" they advertise has the same specs as a 7970 (see link).  I couldn't find exactly which CPUs they were referring to, but I linked to the product lineup.  I find it interesting that they advertise 16GB dims, as those haven't really come out yet (If I am wrong let me know), so that is cool.  As for the cooling and case design, time will tell.  Xeon E5s can be expensive on Amazon, but I can't really directly compare.  Either way, I am disappointed by the MacPro.  Basically CrossFire 7970s with double the VRAM and a super expensive Xeon Processor are all you would be getting at even the Ultimate config.  Xeons are nothing new in workstations, neither is 64GB of ECC RAM, it is however, the first time I have seen 16GB dims and 1866MHz ECC RAM.  The GPUs are weak, especially in a software environment that utilizes GPU processing more and more every day.  You would be better off making an LGA2011 build with dual Titans (or 780s if you don't need the VRAM).  That way you could also upgrade in the future.

 

http://www.apple.com/mac-pro/specs/

http://www.amd.com/us/products/desktop/graphics/7000/7970/Pages/radeon-7970.aspx#3

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processor-comparison/compare-intel-processors.html?select=server

No not basically crossfire 7970s, they've firepros. Consumer graphics cards are not professional graphics cards. The GPUs are in no way weak. 

[NeoZeon]

Also... for those of you who don't have macbook pros... don't knock it till you try it. Not having to take my power adapter with me is a big plus, especially since i bike everywhere. the thing is so thing i can barley feel it on my back.... and you would be hard pressed to find a notebook as thin, powerful, and have as much battery life as a macbook pro. I think the only thing comparable is the razer laptop which doesn't have haswell.  I get a good 6 hours battery on my sandy bridge macbook pro 15 inch speced with an i7 16 gb of ram radeon 6750 and 512ssd.  It cost me 2500 bucks back in 2011 when 512 ssds were 800 bucks. 

[martinrox1568]

No they do not. On the base model it has 12GB DDR3 ECC RAM, and the GPUs have 2GB GDDR5 VRAM each.

The gpu's can have up to 12gb vram combined. Look at their website

[mr moose]

Also... for those of you who don't have macbook pros... don't knock it till you try it. Not having to take my power adapter with me is a big plus, especially since i bike everywhere. the thing is so thing i can barley feel it on my back.... and you would be hard pressed to find a notebook as thin, powerful, and have as much battery life as a macbook pro. I think the only thing comparable is the razer laptop which doesn't have haswell.  I get a good 6 hours battery on my sandy bridge macbook pro 15 inch speced with an i7 16 gb of ram radeon 6750 and 512ssd.  It cost me 2500 bucks back in 2011 when 512 ssds were 800 bucks. 

 

they're not that special, most laptops these days have good battery life, apple are even behind lenovo on that score.

 

It really depends on how you use them, even just minecraft will kill any laptop in an hour or 2. 

 

http://www.lptps.com/best-battery-life-laptops/

[Yoinkerman]

Retail 12gb of ecc is like $140.  It's probably a lot less for apple.  workstation cards are also marked up huge for retail, though at this point we don't even know which cards they are, they could just as easily be the $200 card and not the $600 card.  Apple is very very good at selling things for huge profits.  I doubt they're making fewer than 40 points on these things.

 

The 4 core Xeon in this series is $300, plus 12 GB of ECC Ram is at least $400, The fire pros would probably be at leas $600 each at retail, $1900 before we add in the motherboard, which is completely custom, the PCIe SSD, which is the first of it's form factor, the case and cooling unit, and then the markup because they need to turn a profit, subtract some because of discounts they get for buying in bulk. I'd say they're making no more than $500 per unit on these things on the low end which isn't much more than a standard boutique builder on this level of a system. 

[ajoy39]

Retail 12gb of ecc is like $140.  It's probably a lot less for apple.  workstation cards are also marked up huge for retail, though at this point we don't even know which cards they are, they could just as easily be the $200 card and not the $600 card.  Apple is very very good at selling things for huge profits.  I doubt they're making fewer than 40 points on these things.

12gb of *1866* ECC ram is not $140. ECC ram is harder to make at higher speeds, much harder than normal ram, the only price I could find on a quick google search was $560 for a single stick of 16 GB 1866 ECC ram. 

[D3MON]

Front view

[kuddlesworth9419]

It can support up to 64GB of RAM I think that 12 is just the base model.  Storage is all going to HAVE to be dealt with by Thunderbolt 2, so I hope there are some good solutions available.  I think this Xeon is also just the base model.  I agree about the D300, I couldn't find any info about them.

They are probably made up. The D300 that is.

[kuddlesworth9419]

I did some serious research as i wanted to compare to to a quadro k2000 based build i was going to make for someone a while back(most expensive build i did was £2200 felt great after that and now it pays for my school travel).

From my research( a lot of research) i found that the d300s have 476 stream processors(50 less then a 7750) and are passive cooled always due to lower heat output, they run at 750mhz and have a 256bit bus(4500mhz mem clock but im not certain). long story short the quadro k2000 completely shit on it (bout 40% even in opencl based programs). however it lost vs crossfire. the cpus in the Ibin can be upgraded to 4,6,8,12. You probably have to pay £1000 per extra core. That blower fan is going to struggle badly, they boast about the pci-e ssd which si 256gb. I saw a 2minute 4k video being rendering before(my uncle works for an advertisment company, they have made adverts for football and the wingleys extra and walkers crisp). A 2minute 4k video was around 200gb and it was compressed and it was before editing. Apple offer up to a 1tb ssd or use the thunderbolt to a external hdd. 

Where did you find info on the D300's. I could not find a single piece of evidence that they even exist. Give me a link please I would just like to see them. All Nvidia parts are generally more expensive then AMD's but if you do get a Quadro you also get the best support you can find anywhere and better performance if you pay the price. FirePro's kind of stop getting anymore high end at soem point and Quadros go from the ow end to the extream where you can pay above £4000 for GPU. Plus who wouldn't want a custom driver made by Nvidia.

[Glenwing]

Where did you find info on the D300's. I could not find a single piece of evidence that they even exist. Give me a link please I would just like to see them. All Nvidia parts are generally more expensive then AMD's but if you do get a Quadro you also get the best support you can find anywhere and better performance if you pay the price. FirePro's kind of stop getting anymore high end at soem point and Quadros go from the ow end to the extream where you can pay above £4000 for GPU. Plus who wouldn't want a custom driver made by Nvidia.

 

Pretty much all you have to do is look at the Apple website... it's a 1280-core GPU with 2GB 25-bit GDDR5 at 1.25GHz (5.0GHz).  And with FirePros you will get the ECC VRAM and the special drivers.  I'd value the D300 at ~$600, since it appears to be an embedded version of the FirePro W7000...

[brownninja97]

Where did you find info on the D300's. I could not find a single piece of evidence that they even exist. Give me a link please I would just like to see them. All Nvidia parts are generally more expensive then AMD's but if you do get a Quadro you also get the best support you can find anywhere and better performance if you pay the price. FirePro's kind of stop getting anymore high end at soem point and Quadros go from the ow end to the extream where you can pay above £4000 for GPU. Plus who wouldn't want a custom driver made by Nvidia.

there was a leaks site a while ago but they got shut down by apple, im basicallly writing down what i remember so its probably wrong.

[jrfox87]

The gpu's can have up to 12gb vram combined. Look at their website

Oh I misunderstood what you meant, not the Apple website.

[cliodude1]

Looks like a trash can

That's because it is trash ;D kidding. Definitely NOT worth the money.

[Andrew0472]

too much ignorance in this post 

[LAwLz]

Your comparison really does not fit the specs of the mac pro. It still won't total to $2,999 but you're a few hundred off.

OK, how does it not match the specs? Overall I'd say they are very similar. Sure you can nitpick like "it doesn't have thunderbolt, the case is bigger" and stuff like that but overall they are very similar.

Since I know you're going to bring up Xeon and ECC RAM:

 

The Xeon and the i7 I used are very, very similar. The i7 I picked even supports all the server grade features like VT-d the Xeon does. The only difference is that the Xeon supports ECC RAM.

And about ECC RAM, how many people do you think will benefit from it? Wanna know when ECC RAM is good to have? In scientific experiments, that's pretty much it. Do you need it for rendering? No. Do you need it for servers? Not really.

 

So, what difference does the computer I quickly scraped together have which makes it 1140 dollars worse than the Mac Pro?

 

 

 

Pretty much all you have to do is look at the Apple website... it's a 1280-core GPU with 2GB 25-bit GDDR5 at 1.25GHz (5.0GHz).  And with FirePros you will get the ECC VRAM and the special drivers.  I'd value the D300 at ~$600, since it appears to be an embedded version of the FirePro W7000...

Couldn't find that much info about the W7000 but it has twice the VRAM as the one in the Mac Pro so yeah, 600 dollars tops.

 

 

 

The 4 core Xeon in this series is $300, plus 12 GB of ECC Ram is at least $400, The fire pros would probably be at leas $600 each at retail, $1900 before we add in the motherboard, which is completely custom, the PCIe SSD, which is the first of it's form factor, the case and cooling unit, and then the markup because they need to turn a profit, subtract some because of discounts they get for buying in bulk. I'd say they're making no more than $500 per unit on these things on the low end which isn't much more than a standard boutique builder on this level of a system. 

You don't know what you're talking about. 12GB of ECC RAM does NOT cost 400 dollars. Wanna know how much 16GB of ECC RAM at 1600MHz cost? 170 dollars, from newegg... Shop around a bit and you might be able to get it for 150 dollars. That's for 16GB by the way, so go ahead and go "ohh but that RAM is slightly slower". I'd say the 4GB more is worth the ~250MHz difference. So yeah, you're overestimating the price of the RAM by about 250%.

 

The FirePros? Well like we established above the W700 is probably fairly similar but with much more VRAM and that's a 650 dollar card if you buy it from a regular retailer like Newegg. So I'd say 600 dollars is TOPS what it will cost, not the least it will cost.

 

The motherboard on these computers are usually crap. They strip away everything they don't need to keep the cost down. Saying it is custom is not a good thing in this situation, and the only reason it is custom is so that they can save money. An equivalent motherboard would probably cost ~200 dollars.

 

The Mac Pro does not have the first PCIe SSD. Even if you ignore the many PCIe SSDs we've had for years in regular desktops you still got the PCIe SSD in the MacBook Pro for example, which is most likely the same as they use in the Mac Pro.

 

Looking at the build I posted earlier in the thread, and taking the rebate they get from buying in bulk into consideration I'd say they are making more than 1000 dollars profit on each low end Mac Pro, and even more with the higher end ones. 50% profit is pretty damn good.

[Commander_Z]

It looks like the bastard child of vadar and r2d2

[Stonep11]

No not basically crossfire 7970s, they've firepros. Consumer graphics cards are not professional graphics cards. The GPUs are in no way weak. 

I understand they have workstation GPU features like redundant memory checks and 24/7 full load optimization, but POWER wise, they are nothing special at all.

[kuddlesworth9419]

Pretty much all you have to do is look at the Apple website... it's a 1280-core GPU with 2GB 25-bit GDDR5 at 1.25GHz (5.0GHz).  And with FirePros you will get the ECC VRAM and the special drivers.  I'd value the D300 at ~$600, since it appears to be an embedded version of the FirePro W7000...

FirePro W7000 are terrible. GTX 570 is better. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-workstation-graphics-card,3493-5.html. There are other benchmarks but these GPU's are really bad especially for their price.

[Gunzkewl]

It looks like the bastard child of vadar and r2d2

Next year Apple will release a R2-D2 and C-3PO love child.  (Gold version, for the people who don't know what I'm talking about)

[MJSBLUES]

Probably not top of the line.

Most of them have the newest macbook air and the iphone 4.

[Glenwing]

FirePro W7000 are terrible. GTX 570 is better. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-workstation-graphics-card,3493-5.html. There are other benchmarks but these GPU's are really bad especially for their price.

 

I wasn't recommending them

[jrfox87]

I don't get why people in this post are comparing workstation cards to gaming cards the same way they would compare two gaming cards. Do you not understand what the real difference and value is of a workstation card over a gaming card to professionals?

[s3ns3]

12gb of *1866* ECC ram is not $140. ECC ram is harder to make at higher speeds, much harder than normal ram, the only price I could find on a quick google search was $560 for a single stick of 16 GB 1866 ECC ram. 

more like 177$ and thats retail. go on and choose http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/search?atclk=Speed_PC3-14900+%281866MHz%29&ci=13341&N=4041996717+4294948679+4118910959

[Youbetternot]

[ltguy]

Yawn. Thats all I have to say about the $2999 mac pro.  And why do people keep saying its a hexa-core... its quad core. That chips is worth about $300 bucks. Lets face it. The mac pro isnt for professionals. Its for semi professional home users. Real professionals need additional internal storage and internal add on cards, as well as a beefy power supply. No one is gonna want to have a bunch of lightning external drives in an additional bulky enclosure. I dont see linus replacing the ghetto video editing rig with this thing anytime soon, or mb for that matter. The only thing even remotely exciting in this machine is fast flash storage.