I understand your points, it is that value for money thing, the nMP is costly even second hand, but is such a cool design. the cMP is great value, but a beast.
I have a question, if you had a 8 or 2 core cMP, 32GB RAM, SSD etc. And I put a Nvidia 1070GTX in it, would it play games at 1440P as well as this video of the iMac Pro, and if not would they hit 60FPS, it would be interesting to have Crysis one with all those mods you can get that boost the graphics to insanely high levels:
Late join the discussion.
For gaming, forget about the nMP. Dual GPU is COMPLETELY useless in macOS gaming.
For Windows gaming, you have to do some hack to allow to use the gaming driver and Crossfire. But then, I can tell you that Crossfire itself still very broken.
eGPU for gaming, expensive, relative low performance, easier to have issues.
Anyway, you don't need to flash any GPU for that. I ran an un-flash 1080Ti on my cMP, no problem at all.
30-60 FPS gaming is very very easy on the cMP. Even the most demanding game in macOS is not a problem at all.
These are some gaming screen capture from my cMP (W3690, 1080Ti, CHG90)
These are the screen captures in macOS gaming. Windows gaming will be even better because DirectX can do much better graphics. (But I don't know how to make good quality full screen capture in Windows)
And if you play gaming in Windows, then we can easily have better gaming performance then the iMac Pro.
e.g. RoTR, 1080P. What we focus on is how much FPS the CPU can deliver, not the GPU. Because the CPU is the more limiting factor here. And with a good gaming GPU, we can have more than 100 FPS, easily. So, nothing to worry about.
Same situation on FF XV
Since you said you won't play new games. So, I post the 2013 TR for your reference as well. A cMP (with gaming orientated upgrades) is completely overkill. This is 1080P Ultimate setting, even in windows mode (usually fullscreen mode can do better, but window mode make me easier to make screen capture in Windows), min FPS is 130, average 171.
Purely for your reference, this is what a cMP can do in VR gaming. TBH, there is no need to worry about for normal gaming (especially old games).
Anyway, for your usage, do NOT go for the dual processor setup. It won't help anything (unless you really plane to do a lot of VM on this Mac). I don't know any games that can utilise more than a single 6C12T CPU anyway.
cMP is a nice machine for some simple daily use, and play old games. But only true if you can get a good condition cheap 4,1 / 5,1. IMO, anymore more than $400 I won't consider. If I have time, I will only look for $250 or below single processor 4,1. Then upgrade it accordingly.
CPU, single W3680, W3690, X5680, X5690. Just get the cheapest one. If you want to further lower the cost, go for X5677. That's a 4C 8T CPU, but enough for gaming, and normal stuff already.
For your usage, 3x8GB 1333MHz ECC RAM cost another ~$50
GPU, up to you, but GTX 1070 is definitely good enough (in fact, way overkill) for old gaming. TBH, for cMP, and old gaming. A GTX 680 4GB usually more than enough. If you run High Sierra, then a RX580 will be even better. Easier to maintain the Maxwell / Pascal GPU due to have Apple native driver support. If don't need those GPU power, why go for the trouble? In fact, for most old games, a $100 used HD7950 / 7970 can do 30-60FPS with reasonable graphics already. And this GPU has extremely good support in macOS.
A single Micron 1100 2TB SSD only cost $300. Large enough for you to throw all games in, and store all your 3D stuff, VM, etc. If you don't need this amount of capacity, but want to lower the cost as much as possible. Then there are plenty of $100 SSD options out there.
So, for a "high end" setup, it may cost you a bit more than $1000 (mainly depends on GPU and how "expansive" the cMP itself).
For "low end" setup, $500 can get your a Mac that can do reasonable gaming.
It is a bit late to job the cMP party. For cMP owner, upgrade the cMP make sense. But for new joiner, buying a cMP then upgrade it now usually not a good option due to limited CPU single thread performance. But for your own case, this doesn't really matter. The biggest concern is, are you willing to buy this 9 years old machine which has no warranty. It can fail at anytime, who knows?
