Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
$2999 for entry model: what do you think?
- Thread starter badlydrawnboy
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Even accounting for 20% VAT, the US to UK prices at current exchange rates add up to £2,227 rounded to the nearest £.
If Apple incorporate a 3% window for fluctations in exchange rate, which would be a fair amount given their premium pricing, that shouldn't be more than £2,299 rounded to the nearest £99 price point.
Yet again, international customers are being gouged. I don't want to hear about logistics costs, they're already very premium priced products and they could offset shipping and distribution against the far higher domestic sales they'd achieve in the states.
I can see the arguements that £200 isn't much on £2000+ system but a brief search for RAM pricing and that is money that could be spent on an additional 4Gb of third party RAM and a couple of USB 3.0 enclosures for existing drives people might want to use from their older systems.
I guess it depends what you are doing. If you are mostly rendering you'd probably be better off with a dual cpu PC that has 16-24 cores across two cpu's. Obviously some renderers are totally GPU based, and some are starting to be hybrids of CPU and GPU. The gpu's is obviously useful for the 3d viewports you are tumbling around in all day and potentially any 3d paint apps. Modelling tasks are often a single threaded task so a high clocked quad would suffice there and 12 cores does nothing for you. Your complaints are extremely specific to the applications you are using. Most 3d software I know has or is embracing the GPU more and more, the real kicker is if its cuda or opencl.
It is kinda funny to read some of the posts here, that apparently u only can call yourself a professional, if u can swallow the overpriced hardware with a smile and don't care about it. Plus making fun about / downgrade ppl who are a bit more strategic minded / bang for your bucks focus... Business is hard these days... u know. For me, beside my creative job, i need to be creative at this side to.
Workstation GPU's and Gaming GPU's have very different rendering behaviors - which is the result of the drivers they are using.
A "good" workstation GPU is generally an "avg" gaming card. W9000 is a pretty decent gaming card just because it is a very powerful card. Its able to compensate for the inefficiency of how it renders your game.
A gaming card redraws the entire screen dozens of times a second. The screen is just one big dump of pixels. Something happens in the corner of the screen, the whole screen refreshes. This is great for games which are chaotic and generally have things happening all over the screen often at once. It is not an efficient way to deal with heavy tasks. One small thing happens and the whole screen redraws/recalculates.
A workstation card works in the opposite way. It breaks the screen into many small layers/pieces and only redraws the parts that are changing. A game results in hundreds or thousands of layers that are a lot for the workstation card to manage. Things are changing all over the place. This is great for a heavy dataset. So say I have four 3d view ports, I rotate the model in one of them. Only that one viewport redraws. So all of the horsepower in my workstation card is focused on updating just a small percentage of pixels.
This is why gaming cards with their gaming drivers are good for games, and meh for CAD/3d etc. And Why workstation cards have more Vram and are not as good for games.
A "good" workstation GPU is generally an "avg" gaming card. W9000 is a pretty decent gaming card just because it is a very powerful card. Its able to compensate for the inefficiency of how it renders your game.
A gaming card redraws the entire screen dozens of times a second. The screen is just one big dump of pixels. Something happens in the corner of the screen, the whole screen refreshes. This is great for games which are chaotic and generally have things happening all over the screen often at once. It is not an efficient way to deal with heavy tasks. One small thing happens and the whole screen redraws/recalculates.
A workstation card works in the opposite way. It breaks the screen into many small layers/pieces and only redraws the parts that are changing. A game results in hundreds or thousands of layers that are a lot for the workstation card to manage. Things are changing all over the place. This is great for a heavy dataset. So say I have four 3d view ports, I rotate the model in one of them. Only that one viewport redraws. So all of the horsepower in my workstation card is focused on updating just a small percentage of pixels.
This is why gaming cards with their gaming drivers are good for games, and meh for CAD/3d etc. And Why workstation cards have more Vram and are not as good for games.
That's a dopey article, the writer cites "Moore's law", but apparently doesn't even know what it says (and it's so hard to look up).
The photo does point out how much the new MacPro Looks like R2D2, I'm sure people are preparing shrinks right now.
And by the way, the original Mac was overpriced.
I actually have to quote this "article" so that everyone on the forum can enjoy it....
deconstruction, the costs are too prohibitive to bother with your "workaround" setups. That's part of the point. And you'd be surprised at just how much bandwidth audio professionals need. It's more than you think, especially when you're getting into masters that use >96 channels (voices) that are edited and muxed into a final stream. Audio is no loner just "how much bandwidth is needed for each separate channel" when you are actually editing live streams. That's one of the reasons high disk I/O and bandwidth are important and why RAID 0/10 are very often used in such applications. And if it's RAID 10, TB2 falls flat every time.
Having a machine that is "portable" does nobody any good when it costs two arms and two legs instead of just one of each, and ends up taking just as much space for an actual regression in throughput.
Oh, and the audio folks aren't going to put those cards in the x4 slots. They're going to use the second x16 slot in the Mac Pro to make full use of the card. In the original/second gen Mac Pro they'll use the x8 slot (slot 4) in a 16/1/1/8 configuration.
Big difference in bandwidth available there.
Thunderbolt 2 has flexibility, but not the lifting power. That's why it hasn't caught on with PC users outside of those trying to either emulate a "real" Mac in a fully featured Hackie or those that have Macs with TB accessories that need to go back and forth between PCs. Hell, Intel's actually designing a PCIe TB expansion card because mobo manufacturers aren't biting when it comes to including it onboard. And that card still requires an internal DP port to connect to it if you want to use a TB display.
TB looks good on paper, but it's quickly becoming the next FireWire.
Having a machine that is "portable" does nobody any good when it costs two arms and two legs instead of just one of each, and ends up taking just as much space for an actual regression in throughput.
Oh, and the audio folks aren't going to put those cards in the x4 slots. They're going to use the second x16 slot in the Mac Pro to make full use of the card. In the original/second gen Mac Pro they'll use the x8 slot (slot 4) in a 16/1/1/8 configuration.
Big difference in bandwidth available there.
Thunderbolt 2 has flexibility, but not the lifting power. That's why it hasn't caught on with PC users outside of those trying to either emulate a "real" Mac in a fully featured Hackie or those that have Macs with TB accessories that need to go back and forth between PCs. Hell, Intel's actually designing a PCIe TB expansion card because mobo manufacturers aren't biting when it comes to including it onboard. And that card still requires an internal DP port to connect to it if you want to use a TB display.
TB looks good on paper, but it's quickly becoming the next FireWire.
If you're gonna go that route, then why bother with an extreme version. Just get the 4930k for half the price and overclock it.
Go here and spec out a Boxx workstation with components similar to new Mac Pro.
Then go here and spec out a z620 with similar specs too. HP doesn't have comparable FirePro cards, but for the sake of argument, throw in the two lesser 1GB versions.
I realize there are a ton of other pros and cons we could argue about either of these two systems vs the Mac Pro, but my point is that the nMP is priced about right for a workstation class computer.
There is no question that you could build a much cheaper system. I've done so myself. For price/performance nothing beats an LGA2011 motherboard with an overclocked 4930K. The downside is that you have to be your own IT guy, and while that's not a big deal with your home gaming system it can be a PITA when you're trying to beat a deadline. Upside to a workstation is that it is fine tuned and well tested. While these things are not that valuable to your average home user, they are when you generate a lot of income with their computer.
Then go here and spec out a z620 with similar specs too. HP doesn't have comparable FirePro cards, but for the sake of argument, throw in the two lesser 1GB versions.
I realize there are a ton of other pros and cons we could argue about either of these two systems vs the Mac Pro, but my point is that the nMP is priced about right for a workstation class computer.
There is no question that you could build a much cheaper system. I've done so myself. For price/performance nothing beats an LGA2011 motherboard with an overclocked 4930K. The downside is that you have to be your own IT guy, and while that's not a big deal with your home gaming system it can be a PITA when you're trying to beat a deadline. Upside to a workstation is that it is fine tuned and well tested. While these things are not that valuable to your average home user, they are when you generate a lot of income with their computer.
More expensive, worse specs.
No doubt, the nMP is fairly priced for what comes in the can. The real question those having a conniption about the price should ask themselves is, "why do I need 'workstation class'?" If you're gaming, this is not the best value. If you're doing small processing tasks, this is not the best value. If you're a hobbyist who likes putting together a sweet setup, this is not the best value. But if you run intensive workloads all the time as part of some endeavour that earns you money (aka, a job), this machine provides good value.
----------
Wow, that one is particularly eye opening. For the same price as the nMP, you got a pretty junky machine with few of the high end features.
would the 1GB/s read and write on the pcie ssd be a noticeable improvement over a sata2 ssd in real word performance with adobe cs6 apps? projects, media, scratch will be on another disk.
Not really if project, media and scratch are on another disk. The apps will probably launch 2 seconds faster.
I seriously doubt it.
It's perfect for huge Media files, but who in their right mind will try and use 250GB for massive media file work?
If you can get at least two 1TB SSD's in there at that speed, It would be really nice. Although I'll still not be happy running my stuff on the same drive as my OS.
The only thing im worried about is how Will the entry model run on 1 Sony 4K tv, will it run smoothly in the os without stuttering
That's a good point, the D300's look rather sub par, and never mind doing any work in 4K, such as graphical rendering. It'll be super slow.
So far im just watching 4k movies and producing 1080 full hd short films, what do ya think performance wise?
I'd stay well clear of the D300's at any rate.
Here's some very informative info for 4K, editing and FirePros
http://fireuser.com/blog/autodesk_is_/amd.com/amd.com/afds/P30/gdconf.com/
The lowest card I see really mentioned with working with 4K is the W7000/D500
With most using the W9000/D700? for real work.
The only time the W5000/D300 is mentioned is for SolidWorks, and even then it's an AMD benchmark in which the card is faster than the NVIDIA K2000. I don't like company benchmarks or tests, as they'll only ever pick what highlights the best of their cards as well.
This is also very enlightening on the performance of Workstation cards.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-workstation-graphics-card,3493.html
When it comes to OpenCL Image processing, the W5000 is nearly 3x slower than the W9000
OpenCL Image Rendering the W5000 is around 2x slower on average than the W9000.
Also remember that the D300's have less RAM than their normal Wxxx counter parts as well
Last edited:
Please consider the whole picture. $2999 is without the US sales tax
$2999 = £1854.90 . The real exchange rate that you will get at the bank will put it closer to £1900 without tax. Then you have to add the US sales tax and UK customs, unless you try to sneak it back in, which would only make sense if you're buying it from your personal funds.
£2400 with VAT is £2000 without VAT. So you're paying about £100 more. Wow. What a rip off!
If you brought a US one back you would indeed get gouged for the import tax but if you are living in the US of A you get it for $3k and don't pay import taxes.
The average state sales tax is 7.5% so your 3k Mac is now $3,299 (inc tax).
In the UK the equivalent price for exactly the same Mac is $4045 (inc VAT).
So this makes a difference of $746 or £460.
Yes that is a rip off, nearly half a grand more just for being limeys.
Well, I suppose somebody has to make up for all the UK taxes Apple avoids paying, shame it has to be their customers.
Last edited:
If you brought a US one back you would indeed get gouged for the import tax but if you are living in the US of A you get it for $3k and don't pay import taxes.
The average state sales tax is 7.5% so your 3k Mac is now $3,299 (inc tax).
In the UK the equivalent price for exactly the same Mac is $4045 (inc VAT).
So this makes a difference of $746 or £460.
Yes that is a rip off, nearly half a grand more just for being limeys.
Well, I suppose somebody has to make up for all the UK taxes Apple avoids paying, shame it has to be their customers.
Unfortunately that is macro economics. I don't know why this same discussion comes up every time there is an Apple product released. We pay more for Macdonald's, petrol, cars, all electronics and beer. We also, on average, get paid more.