Hmmm. Good question. My guess would be that it would not boot at all with the PC video card. If you have one of the lower end video cards for the Mac (or could obtain one) you could leave it in one of the other slots and switch to it when necessary.
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Mac Pro as dedicated PC? Or is OSX+Bootcamp required?
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Hmmm. Good question. My guess would be that it would not boot at all with the PC video card. If you have one of the lower end video cards for the Mac (or could obtain one) you could leave it in one of the other slots and switch to it when necessary.
I just stopped in to say how impressed I am that it took 13 posts for the first person to go on a rant about how stupid you are, I was expecting to come in here and find a load of people blowing their tops like so many threads on this forum about people who dare to do anything unusual with their machines (I'm looking at you thread about the guy who wanted to chop off the handles).
Plus I wanted to put my 2 cents in that like another poster said, you could likely sell the pro for a ton more money than it would take to build a replacement pc that's as good for most tasks, and better for others if all you're planning to do is run windows.
Plus I wanted to put my 2 cents in that like another poster said, you could likely sell the pro for a ton more money than it would take to build a replacement pc that's as good for most tasks, and better for others if all you're planning to do is run windows.
Well, considering the OP has an 8-core Mac Pro, his logic isn't as flawed as you might think. Have you ever priced out a professional Xeon workstation with a PC manufacturer? Those aren't cheap, either. Xeon processors and dual-socket motherboards cost an arm and a leg.
My 2-year old MP 8-core 2.8 has processors in it that still cost around $700 EACH to replace without the custom Apple heatsinks. A good a dual-socket Xeon motherboard costs $500+. For these reasons, the Mac Pro is probably Apple's least profitable machine. The only exception to this would probably be the current base quad-core MP. That machine is overpriced by about $500 or so and doesn't really even need to be a Xeon.
I know that, 2 years ago, it was that way. To help me convince myself to spend the money on a Mac Pro for my personal use, I priced equivalent Dells (minus OSX), and building one myself. It came out at about the same price or even more buying the parts at retail.
Today I would probably buy a quad core iMac. But back then they were only 2 core, and maxed out at 4GB of RAM.