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Black Friday Mac Pro Pre-orders Please!
- Thread starter fixmdude
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It would be nice because at least then I could add up what I need and get a price to work toward. We STILL don't know the prices except for base model prices.
It would be nice because at least then I could add up what I need and get a price to work toward. We STILL don't know the prices except for base model prices.
You can make an educated guess. What are you looking for, 8-core or 12-core, D500 or D700?
That would be less than a PC workstation with similar specs (Xeon, Pro video, 1250 MB/s SSD)
I tried building online and it's higher.
I think it's all about how Apple is pricing the GPUs. An off the shelf Firepro W9000 is $3000 (I believe). I don't think that's what they'll be charging for the D700s, though we should find out soon enough.
I have to say, Im disappointed with these. Smart for apple to go to flash because it really isn't upgradable, so they make a lot more money off of us. Black Friday/Cyber Monday would be a great day, and Cyber Monday could be the official release (December 2nd)
The flash is much faster than a hard drive, 5-10 times faster, and it's a slot card so it is upgradable if you start with a 256 and want the 1 TB card later. MacSales will probably come out with a 2 TB after market card later.
God I hope not
I'm thinking of a similar set up but 32 Gigs (as the ram is user replaceable)
I'm assuming you looked at CTO pricing. Saying Xeon is pretty meaningless, given that the price range with xeons and quadro or firepro graphics is immense. Some PC side stuff can be configured up to 6 core a lot lower. It's usually when you move into dual socketed machines that the price goes crazy.
Obviously I looked for the same model 8-core Xeon and comparable GPU to what's in the Mac Pro that I was discussing. For building your own, many Xeon boards that support ECC are expensive and limited in slots and ports; they are filled with a bunch of RAM slots instead of a bunch of PCI-e slots since they are meant to be used in servers which don't need much video. Since they don't come with TB or even WiFi built in, you need those slots. If you go to a desktop board with an array of PCI-e slots and support for Xeon 8-core then you lose ECC RAM. To build or to order a PC with everything I listed as ideal in the Mac Pro, the cost goes up very high. I'm writing this on a Mac Mini running Windows 7 since I sold my MBP running Win7 in preparation for the Mac Pro. As a Windows user I look for the best hardware without bias and would build a PC again if the hardware was as good, as reliable, as seamless, and as small and quiet, for less cost. That hasn't been the case for a few years now.
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I wasn't necessarily referring to a self build. The slots are arguably more useful than thunderbolt. You can do more with them. I don't know whaty ou mean about a desktop board with support for Xeon 8 core. I can't think of any Xeon boards that don't support ECC ram, and yeah I know the cost goes high. I wasn't debating whether either was expensive. I merely wanted to mention that you might get to 6 cores with a little higher clock rates quite a bit below $8k. Typically the PC vendors are significantly cheaper on base models, but they even out on higher end configurations. The comment about ram was because some of them have insane markups on something that can be done in a few minutes and tested overnight.
Example of a "desktop" board (not server board) that supports Xeon but not ECC RAM:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157456
Oh that's an E3 board. I guess it fits your criteria if we're just talking about names. I was referring to Xeon EP. These are just standard desktop cpus with Xeon branding rather than Xeon EP types. Even in doing price comparisons, I wouldn't look at anything that only takes E3 and a maximum of 4 cores, which is the case with the one linked. As you can see it specifies socket LGA1155, not LGA2011.
Example of an LGA2011 desktop motherboard that supports Xeon EP but does not support ECC:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813132053
http://support.asus.com/cpusupport/...V BLACK EDITION&os=&hashedid=8SLViD3WHG39nPPA
If that happens, that would be nice. Its fun to open up a computer like the Mac Pro and see what you can do with it, didn't think you could do anything to the new one
Seems a little cheap, Pete. Apple's so used to sticking folks for RAM, I can't imagine they won't apply the same markup to video cards, and even if they don't, you still have to buy 2.
Maybe with 32 you'd sneak in under the $8K limit, even that seems a little optimistic.
There must be some reason they haven't released more on pricing and options, after the paltry info on the low-end models we've gotten so far.
I'd love to see pricing soon, but I bumped the nMP off my Xmas list a couple of weeks ago. I may find a couple of Xeon 5960s under the tree though.
Apparently it supports them, but it's not designed for Xeon branded units.
Note the
That is probably why I wasn't familiar with it.
You can find many quality workstations cheaper than the nMP, even at the 8 core level, although the difference is much more significant at 4-6.
I didn't say it was designed for them, I was listing all possible options and why they weren't as good. Please find me an example of an 8 core, or even a 6 core, with ECC, 1250MB/s SSD, professional GPU, for less than the cost of the nMP, so I can buy it.