Building The Mac Pro | Hacker News Reader

Building The Mac Pro

dylanreeve.com

15 pointsmrflett24 comments

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.

…and probably one for myself…

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 ;)

You can buy and modify a Toyota Supra to go faster than a Ferrari for much less money. Thats why nobody buys Ferrari's - there is just no point. And people buying Ferraris are just stupid for wasting their money when they could have a Toyota Supra instead.

I'm not sure why you are being sarcastic.

The article is just about the Mac Pro price. Conclusion: it's a fair price.

My take on the article is that its saying; you can buy a Toyota Supra and modify it but for about the same amount of money you could just get a Ferrari instead.

its more like: If you buy a toyota supra and drop a ferrari engine and other ferrari performance parts into it, you will end up with the same price but a toyota supra instead of a ferrari.

You can certainly spec a PC with the same amount of processing power for much less than $3000

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 workstations a little less dead than I'm used to, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed for the competitors.

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.

So by dropping EEC, thunderbolt, the second ethernet port, wifi & bluetooth, he managed to shave $24 off the starting price?

I'm not sure what the take-away is here.

"Building The Mac Pro"

Without thunderbolt.

Without dual ethernet.

Without ECC ram.

Without bluetooth.

Without wifi.

I stopped reading the article at the "noboy needs dual ethernet" paragraph.

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

>"The only ECC-supporting motherboard I could find compatible with the CPU has no USB3, only supports 1600MHz RAM and only offers 3 PCIe slots."

Right, but I mean he should have dropped the CPU if he wasn't going to use ECC; the big advantages of the E5 are SMP and ECC, neither of which he was using. An i7 will be clocked higher and cost less, and come on a more useful motherboard for most workstations.

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.

The graphics cards are the big piece. You pay alot of money to get that firepro label, compared to performance of similar gaming cards with very comparable specs. You could cut out ~500$ that way.

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.

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.

does mavericks phone home?

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