Maybe nMP is not that expensive?

[Einz]

Someone tried to built a version with PC equivalent parts.


http://www.electronista.com/article...some.areas.but.cant.compete.on.cost.or.specs/

 

[mrsavage1]

yeah many other comparision's have put the nmp being very cost competitive.

 

[spoonie1972]

4k is not a whack for a workstation.

heck, my 840AV cost more way back in the day. (ouch!).

 

[mpantone]

http://www.electronista.com/article...some.areas.but.cant.compete.on.cost.or.specs/

Amateur hour. Maybe those Apple engineers actually deserve those AAPL stock options.

 

[smallwonder]

did someone mention 840AV?

spoonie1972: LOL-- I bought an 840AV new when it first came out... remember speech recognition? I'd would've guessed using a keyboard wouldn't even be necessary by now

 

[spoonie1972]

spoonie1972: LOL-- I bought an 840AV new when it first came out... remember speech recognition? I'd would've guessed using a keyboard wouldn't even be necessary by now

PlainTalk. hahahah. oh dear. as bad as the 1980's Mazda's.. "your door is ajar!"

 

[slughead]

http://www.electronista.com/article...some.areas.but.cant.compete.on.cost.or.specs/

Amateur hour. Maybe those Apple engineers actually deserve those AAPL stock options.

The main downfall was their use of the W9000 - $3500 each. The D700 is not the same as the W9000.

The D700 does not have ECC (unlike the W9000), the base clock is 30% less, the boost clock of the D700 is 12% less than the base clock of the W9000, and so far a lot of the benchmarks (unique heaven, for instance) are putting it more along the lines of the W7000 ($700) or maybe even the Radeon 7970 (~$310).

I agree that if the performance is that of dual W9000, the nMP is a bargain. Current information suggests otherwise, and we really need more information before making that judgement though.

Also, we need to see what limitations the 450W limit bring, not to mention real-world "hot" benchmarks as opposed to cold benchmarks.

 

[ZnU]

The main downfall was their use of the W9000 - $3500 each. The D700 is not the same as the W9000.

The D700 does not have ECC (unlike the W9000), the base clock is 30% less, the boost clock of the D700 is 12% less than the base clock of the W9000, and so far a lot of the benchmarks (unique heaven, for instance) are putting it more along the lines of the W7000 ($700) or maybe even the Radeon 7970 (~$310).

I agree that if the performance is that of dual W9000, the nMP is a bargain. Current information suggests otherwise, and we really need more information before making that judgement though.

You're applying a rather odd standard here. Workstation GPUs aren't differentiated from consumer GPUs by performance, really, but by the fact that their drivers are tuned for pro apps, and pro app vendors test on them and qualify them for use with their software. You get those benefits with the GPUs in the new Mac Pro.

Also, we need to see what limitations the 450W limit bring, not to mention real-world "hot" benchmarks as opposed to cold benchmarks.

Based on the numbers posted here we seem to have an answer to the question of how Apple is getting the D700 to fit within this machine's power/thermal limitations. They're picking choice parts that can maintain a higher clock speed with less power, such that the D700 actually has the same TDP as the D500. (And both are actually slightly lower than the D300.)

Between that and the fact that it's going to be very hard to find actual workloads that perfectly max out both GPUs and all CPU cores, I doubt there will be many real-world issues with throttling.

 

[slughead]

You're applying a rather odd standard here. Workstation GPUs aren't differentiated from consumer GPUs by performance, really, but by the fact that their drivers are tuned for pro apps, and pro app vendors test on them and qualify them for use with their software. You get those benefits with the GPUs in the new Mac Pro.

My standard is fair comparisons. People stating that the nMP is a good deal because there exists no similarly priced PC with Two W9000 are totally off base, as the D700 is a far cry from a W9000.

How far? We don't know. We do know that it's highly underclocked and it probably doesn't have ECC (at least according to the latest EFI update).

The W9000 has many use-cases which require this speed and ECC. That's why it costs $3500 and is worth every penny to many people who buy it. Comparing it to a card which does not have the same capability is not a fair comparison.

I'm waiting to see benchmarks to decide where to place the D700 on the performance scale. If it falls to the level of a W7000 or 7970, it's still a decent workstation card, but comparing it to PC counterparts requires you know, a valid comparison.

Based on the numbers posted here we seem to have an answer to the question of how Apple is getting the D700 to fit within this machine's power/thermal limitations. They're picking choice parts that can maintain a higher clock speed with less power, such that the D700 actually has the same TDP as the D500. (And both are actually slightly lower than the D300.)

I believe the TPD in that post, as with the TPD of many AMD products, is actually the base clock (650Mhz). The base clock is 30% lower than the 275W TPD of the W9000. Binning is great, but it's not that great--the rest is the under-clock. A German review site was able to get the power usage to go up to 438W under Luxmark. I believe the GPU were consuming more than 110W each for that.

Between that and the fact that it's going to be very hard to find actual workloads that perfectly max out both GPUs and all CPU cores, I doubt there will be many real-world issues with throttling.

That's probably going to be the saving grace, in the end. Both from a heat and wattage perspective. That's also why I'd like to see a "hot" benchmark or two, since traditional W9000's are able to cool themselves over long work days.

 

[theSeb]

Using the w9000 is just plain silly.

 

[MH01]

Given the D700 are not w9000, what an epic fail comparison.

Given apple products have always carried an apple tax, people actually think apple would give them a new Mac Pro way cheaper then building one using equivalent PC parts..... Lol.

New Mac Pro is a sweet machine, it still carries the apple tax, so it should.

 

[ZnU]

My standard is fair comparisons. People stating that the nMP is a good deal because there exists no similarly priced PC with Two W9000 are totally off base, as the D700 is a far cry from a W9000.

How far? We don't know. We do know that it's highly underclocked and it probably doesn't have ECC (at least according to the latest EFI update).

You basically seem to be taking the position that if this card is even a little different from a W9000, it's entirely justifiable to go straight to comparing it to a $300 consumer card, despite the fact that the main reason most customers buy a workstation card — the fact that the drivers are written with pro apps in mind and pro application vendors test with and officially support the card — are present here.

If you want to make the case that the W9000's pricing is simply nonsense, go ahead, but this "It's not exactly a W9000 so we should treat it as a Radeon for price comparison purposes" thing just doesn't really make sense. It's no more logically defensible than the reverse would be, defaulting to treating it as a FirePro just because it doesn't exactly match up with any particular Radeon part. The truth is, the advantages of a workstation part need to be evaluated on a user-by-user basis, and are not precisely equivalent on OS X and Windows. There is not going to be any sort of objective technical determination that settles the issue of whether this card should be compared to consumer or workstation parts in the Windows world.

 

[mrsavage1]

You basically seem to be taking the position that if this card is even a little different from a W9000, it's entirely justifiable to go straight to comparing it to a $300 consumer card, despite the fact that the main reason most customers buy a workstation card — the fact that the drivers are written with pro apps in mind and pro application vendors test with and officially support the card — are present here.

If you want to make the case that the W9000's pricing is simply nonsense, go ahead, but this "It's not exactly a W9000 so we should treat it as a Radeon for price comparison purposes" thing just doesn't really make sense. It's no more logically defensible than the reverse would be, defaulting to treating it as a FirePro just because it doesn't exactly match up with any particular Radeon part. The truth is, the advantages of a workstation part need to be evaluated on a user-by-user basis, and are not precisely equivalent on OS X and Windows. There is not going to be any sort of objective technical determination that settles the issue of whether this card should be compared to consumer or workstation parts in the Windows world.

I think ppl need to realise a d700 is a d700 not some other graphic card. Its a totally custom.

 

[Umbongo]

You basically seem to be taking the position that if this card is even a little different from a W9000, it's entirely justifiable to go straight to comparing it to a $300 consumer card, despite the fact that the main reason most customers buy a workstation card — the fact that the drivers are written with pro apps in mind and pro application vendors test with and officially support the card — are present here.

What do you think they were doing with all the graphics cards they used in previous Mac Pros?

 

[ZnU]

What do you think they were doing with all the graphics cards they used in previous Mac Pros?

I'm not sure what your point is. That Mac users were previously getting the major benefits of workstation cards 'for free' so counting them as being worth something now in price comparisons with Windows machines is invalid? That doesn't quite follow. If anything it just makes the case that these benefits should have been considered all along in cross-platform price comparisons even despite the lack of workstation branding on (most of) the Mac cards.

In fact, as I've noted in other threads, because Apple is now integrating graphics cards, resulting in only a few related models per year in every pro Mac, these particular models of card will likely see more attention from developers than any specific model of graphics card you could buy for a Windows box, workstation SKU or not. In other words, the main thing that pros on the Windows side are willing to pay big bucks for, an officially supported, known-good solution, this machine will deliver to a greater extent than any option in the Windows world.

And it's not just graphics — everything else in this machine is similarly standardized. It presents a very clear baseline for developers to target, which should yield many of the reliability and consistency benefits that pro video customers have historically had to purchase extremely high-priced vendor-integrated turn-key systems to get. I've described this machine elsewhere as a "workstation appliance." To someone who has spent as much time fighting to get systems to do what they're supposed to as I have... it's hard for me to even describe how appealing this is.

 

[MH01]

I'm not sure what your point is. That Mac users were previously getting the major benefits of workstation cards 'for free' so counting them as being worth something now in price comparisons with Windows machines is invalid? That doesn't quite follow. If anything it just makes the case that these benefits should have been considered all along in cross-platform price comparisons even despite the lack of workstation branding on (most of) the Mac cards.

In fact, as I've noted in other threads, because Apple is now integrating graphics cards, resulting in only a few related models per year in every pro Mac, these particular models of card will likely see more attention from developers than any specific model of graphics card you could buy for a Windows box, workstation SKU or not. In other words, the main thing that pros on the Windows side are willing to pay big bucks for, an officially supported, known-good solution, this machine will deliver to a greater extent than any option in the Windows world.

And it's not just graphics — everything else in this machine is similarly standardized. It presents a very clear baseline for developers to target, which should yield many of the reliability and consistency benefits that pro video customers have historically had to purchase extremely high-priced vendor-integrated turn-key systems to get. I've described this machine elsewhere as a "workstation appliance." To someone who has spent as much time fighting to get systems to do what they're supposed to as I have... it's hard for me to even describe how appealing this is.

Wrong.

Apple develops the drivers, and they do not tinker with them. While on the windows side it's ATI or NVidia, and competition results in performance increases. Performance wise PC is way ahead, ask anyone that games in bootcamp

" In other words, the main thing that pros on the Windows side are willing to pay big bucks for, an officially supported, known-good solution, this machine will deliver to a greater extent than any option in the Windows world."

Wrong wrong wrong. How on earth will the Mac Pro deliver more that a supported windows workstation ? Apple is going to provide a stable workstation and it's for developers to optimise the software. I can guarantee you that windows workstations will get greater support than the mac pros. Things are very different at the enterprise level. Remember apple has left the enterprise space.

 

[ZnU]

Wrong.

Apple develops the drivers, and they do not tinker with them. While on the windows side it's ATI or NVidia, and competition results in performance increases. Performance wise PC is way ahead, ask anyone that games in bootcamp

So.. what is your point here? That we should compare the D-series graphics cards to consumer cards on the Windows side because... Windows has better drivers for games? That makes no sort of sense.

Wrong wrong wrong. How on earth will the Mac Pro deliver more that a supported windows workstation ? Apple is going to provide a stable workstation and it's for developers to optimise the software. I can guarantee you that windows workstations will get greater support than the mac pros.

I'm not talking about the Mac Pro getting more support in the sense of getting a larger selection of pro apps than exist in the Windows world or something, if that's how you're reading my post. What I'm talking about is... well, take an app like Resolve. Blackmagic is going to be able to say "Buy this model of Mac Pro, and you'll get this level of performance." They're going to be able to say that because they've tested that precise hardware, they've tweaked whatever it makes sense to tweak for that hardware, and that's the performance they see. The guy from The Foundry that Apple had demoing Mari at WWDC discussed this a bit.

It's rather like the sort of advantage a console has vs. a PC in the gaming world by presenting such a clear, unified target for developers to aim for. (Except without the console disadvantages of having to sell for a much lower cost than a respectable gaming PC and only being updated once every 6-8 years.)

Remember apple has left the enterprise space.

Not sure what this means. The Mac has never been a big enterprise player (outside of education, which does have some similar requirements). Apple as a company is more relevant than ever in the enterprise due to iOS.

With respect to the Mac Pro in particular... what sort of enterprises are we talking about here? At a typical large company, a vanishingly small fraction of employees, obviously, have any need for such a machine, but I see no change in Apple's approach in recent years that would cause such companies to not buy Mac Pros for the few who do. And if you look at, say, post production facilities, quite a few people have commented that if anything this new Mac Pro seems more oriented toward those customers (who are often using shared storage, are more likely to buy new systems on a cycle rather than perform aftermarket upgrades, etc.) and perhaps a little less oriented toward freelancers.

 

[blanka]

Trying to clone a MacPro is always a stupid idea. Apple tells Intel and AMD to deliver pro components for their consumer grade pricing. They just say: we order 6 billion transistor silicon. We want to pay 6 billion transistor silicon consumer level priced. Then they start screaming that they use pro-grade stuff. The only difference actually is some more intensive testing.

So stop trying to mimic every spec, but try to make an alternative setup that deliver much more bang for the buck. Than almost every try totally blows the MacPro away.

 

[ZnU]

There's essentially no doubt that it's possible to get (and especially to build) a Windows machine with more raw CPU/GPU than the new Mac Pro for less money. Which makes it like pretty much every other Mac ever shipped, of course.

That doesn't mean that Windows system (or Hackintosh, if you like) is actually a better choice, particularly for heavy use in critical roles.

 

[MH01]

So.. what is your point here? That we should compare the D-series graphics cards to consumer cards on the Windows side because... Windows has better drivers for games? That makes no sort of sense.



I'm not talking about the Mac Pro getting more support in the sense of getting a larger selection of pro apps than exist in the Windows world or something, if that's how you're reading my post. What I'm talking about is... well, take an app like Resolve. Blackmagic is going to be able to say "Buy this model of Mac Pro, and you'll get this level of performance." They're going to be able to say that because they've tested that precise hardware, they've tweaked whatever it makes sense to tweak for that hardware, and that's the performance they see. The guy from The Foundry that Apple had demoing Mari at WWDC discussed this a bit.

It's rather like the sort of advantage a console has vs. a PC in the gaming world by presenting such a clear, unified target for developers to aim for. (Except without the console disadvantages of having to sell for a much lower cost than a respectable gaming PC and only being updated once every 6-8 years.)



Not sure what this means. The Mac has never been a big enterprise player (outside of education, which does have some similar requirements). Apple as a company is more relevant than ever in the enterprise due to iOS.

With respect to the Mac Pro in particular... what sort of enterprises are we talking about here? At a typical large company, a vanishingly small fraction of employees, obviously, have any need for such a machine, but I see no change in Apple's approach in recent years that would cause such companies to not buy Mac Pros for the few who do. And if you look at, say, post production facilities, quite a few people have commented that if anything this new Mac Pro seems more oriented toward those customers (who are often using shared storage, are more likely to buy new systems on a cycle rather than perform aftermarket upgrades, etc.) and perhaps a little less oriented toward freelancers.

Your points are all over the place now. My point is that the Mac Pro , as in hardware and os + drivers as a workstation is not ahead of the windows side. At the enterprise level, where hardware and drivers/os are beyond that of consumer level windows machines have excellent support .

The Mac Pro is a workstation grade PC running osx and drivers written by apple. On windows side drivers are written by the manufacturer of the device. I'll let you consider which leads to better support and performance over time. Let's just say that it takes apple a lot longer to do updates to drivers. And until that happens you have to ride it out.

 

[ZnU]

Your points are all over the place now.

I provided replies to several possible interpretations of fairly vague points you seemed to be trying to make.

My point is that the Mac Pro , as in hardware and os + drivers as a workstation is not ahead of the windows side. At the enterprise level, where hardware and drivers/os are beyond that of consumer level windows machines have excellent support.

As someone who has fairly extensive experience speccing, setting up, maintaining and using both platforms in high-end post production contexts, I simply don't agree with that assessment. At all. I'm not, mind you, talking about support in the sense of vendors taking your phone calls when things go wrong here. I'm talking about support in the sense of things not going wrong in the first place because you're running on the exact hardware the vendor tested. The vastly wider range of hardware in the PC world inevitably undermines this. It's unavoidable. Sure, for some high-end products a vendor might basically tell you "Buy this exact HP workstation, install these exact PCIe cards," but that goes out the window as soon as you're not just buying machines to run a single app.

And, I should point out, people in this thread are doing things like comparing the Mac Pro's price/performance to that of self-built PCs. What we're talking about here is miles from that. "Buy this exact model of HP workstation and install these exact PCIe cards" does get you a lot closer to the sort of consistency you can get in the Mac world (not quite all the way, but closer). However, the new Mac Pro is quite a lot more competitive with HP workstation pricing than with the DIY systems built using gaming components that some folks seem to feel it can be validly compared to.

The Mac Pro is a workstation grade PC running osx and drivers written by apple. On windows side drivers are written by the manufacturer of the device. I'll let you consider which leads to better support and performance over time. Let's just say that it takes apple a lot longer to do updates to drivers. And until that happens you have to ride it out.

Frequent updates are not necessarily what one wants in critical contexts. Apple is known to have hired a bunch of AMD engineers earlier this year. It seems unlikely AMD itself is actually entirely uninvolved in the process of creating OS X drivers. And with Apple, you have a single company responsible for the computer, the graphics card, the operating system, the drivers, and even some of the apps, pulling together things done by five different parties on the Wintel side. That sort of integration counts for something.

 

[MH01]

I provided replies to several possible interpretations of fairly vague points you seemed to be trying to make.



As someone who has fairly extensive experience speccing, setting up, maintaining and using both platforms in high-end post production contexts, I simply don't agree with that assessment. At all. I'm not, mind you, talking about support in the sense of vendors taking your phone calls when things go wrong here. I'm talking about support in the sense of things not going wrong in the first place because you're running on the exact hardware the vendor tested. The vastly wider range of hardware in the PC world inevitably undermines this. It's unavoidable. Sure, for some high-end products a vendor might basically tell you "Buy this exact HP workstation, install these exact PCIe cards," but that goes out the window as soon as you're not just buying machines to run a single app.

And, I should point out, people in this thread are doing things like comparing the Mac Pro's price/performance to that of self-built PCs. What we're talking about here is miles from that. "Buy this exact model of HP workstation and install these exact PCIe cards" does get you a lot closer to the sort of consistency you can get in the Mac world (not quite all the way, but closer). However, the new Mac Pro is quite a lot more competitive with HP workstation pricing than with the DIY systems built using gaming components that some folks seem to feel it can be validly compared to.



Frequent updates are not necessarily what one wants in critical contexts. Apple is known to have hired a bunch of AMD engineers earlier this year. It seems unlikely AMD itself is actually entirely uninvolved in the process of creating OS X drivers. And with Apple, you have a single company responsible for the computer, the graphics card, the operating system, the drivers, and even some of the apps, pulling together things done by five different parties on the Wintel side. That sort of integration counts for something.

I was just comparing OS drivers and support for the hardware, be it Windows or OS X. And stating that at the workstation level they are both very well supported, windows is not lacking.

You choosing to take certain software written for OS X, and in this case post production which tends to be dedicated to Mac pros, so you get the benefits of a specialised software, written for dedicated hardware and turn that into an argument that the Mac pro is better supported. Well hell yeah, that is obvious as. You using macs for post production work...... of course your going to think they are amazing. Its like me saying my gaming PC is better at gaming than any mac, with better driver support, better software support etc.... not a relevant argument.

I was talking pro use in general, for software that runs on both windows and macs. I can also take certain software that run alot better on windows and making sweeping statements how windows are much better supported, better performance etc.

If one does a hardware v hardware comparison, the mac pro needs to be compared to Xeon based PC work stations. That gives you the closest comparison.

If you are buying a workstation for professional workflow, you are going to be paying top dollar, be it windows or Apple, cause you are paying for the support and set hardware.

If you want to buy a computer for home, and you care about rendering/video, why exactly should you limit yourself to a workstation, and that is why people compare DIY PCs. They can get higher performance than a mac pro, but at the same time they have to accept that stability will suffer.

While I understand in your specialised world exactly why Mac pros offer the best solution for you, that is exactly why all our post production at work happens on Macs. Though a very specialised world. There is a much bigger world out there, and you cannot make a broad statement that one is supported better then the other, when you choose and pick the applications.

If you smart, you buy yourself a quality Motherboard from say ASUS, purchase ram that is compatible with that motherboard (ASUS has charts), a quality PSU, Quality SSD, and a GPU based on a reference design, hence using Nvidia/AMD stock drivers. You not going to have alot of driver issues with this path. Buy the right hardware and its very well suported at the consumer level, even when you DIY.

 

[slughead]

You basically seem to be taking the position that if this card is even a little different from a W9000, it's entirely justifiable to go straight to comparing it to a $300 consumer card, despite the fact that the main reason most customers buy a workstation card — the fact that the drivers are written with pro apps in mind and pro application vendors test with and officially support the card — are present here.

I'll need to see the actual professional app benchmarks before I make that decision. You'll note in my post I also mentioned it may be more in line with a W7000--still not to shabby, definitely a workstation card, but NOT comparable to a W9000.

The D700 isn't "a little" different. The lack of ECC is effectively a Deal breaker for a lot of actual "professionals." The speed difference in actual professional Apps is not totally known as most reviews just run Geekbench and prosumer applications.

We need hot benchmarks of Professional apps to say how close this thing is to a W9000. In any case, you can call it a workstation card until your heart's content, but compare it to something of similar performance.

Edit: By the way, If indeed the 7970 performs the same or better as the D700 in professional applications, then I will damn well compare it to the D700. The line between workstation and consumer graphics is a blurry one, especially in this case.

 

[dyn]

At the enterprise level, where hardware and drivers/os are beyond that of consumer level windows machines have excellent support.

The Mac Pro is a workstation grade PC running osx and drivers written by apple. On windows side drivers are written by the manufacturer of the device.

Then clearly you have absolutely no experience with such hardware at all. Anyone who does have experience with such hardware would say you are extremely naive. Drivers on such workstations are always written with the manufacturer of the hardware as well as the OEM (now why do you think HP has this huge division that does nothing but testing?). Apple doesn't magically do it differently than all those others such as HP. And they all make mistakes. That's why we get updates for OS X and we have to go look for newer versions of drivers and BIOS on the HP website.

We actually have two different kind of users: those who use the enterprise grade hardware and those who use the consumer grade hardware. On the software side (thus drivers) we see no difference. In terms of performance we see no difference either. We do see some difference in supported features in some applications but that is only due to the fact that such applications require specific cards (plus drivers) and are certified for such cards. We changed our hardware to consumer grade now for all of our users (we need to cut costs somewhere). Our users who previously used enterprise grade hardware wanted to test the new hardware as such hardware isn't tested by the manufacturer with enterprise grade software. They tested it and didn't find any differences.

Apple hardware and OS X are no different. There is enterprise grade hardware in the Mac Pro and many application makers will certify the Mac Pro for their application(s). That's how it was in the past and that's how it will be now and in the future. Apple hardware only differs in 1 aspect from others like HP and Dell which is the support contract. With Apple you get the same as with any other Mac which is aimed at consumers. With Dell and HP you get this special business support contract where they can guarantee you a replacement within a certain amount of time (the amount will determine the price of the contract).

However, that is not what that DIY Mac Pro article is about. It is about showing the actual costs of building an enterprise grade workstation such as the Mac Pro. People complain about the Mac Pro being high priced and the article explains why. They do it by comparing ordinary PC components because that's the only way they can. That's also the problem because the Mac Pro has custom parts (both the old models as well as the new one) which is no different than what HP and Dell do. The only thing you can do than is try to mimic the components as close as you can. If you look at pricing they probably have messed it up on the gpu part. On the other hand, this might also point at Apple's D700 gpus being the most customised part in the Mac Pro.

Btw, if you read the article well you should have noticed the following:

To be fair, the site noted that if the DIY builder didn't actually require the same workstation performance level as the Mac Pro, he or she could "get by" with using a six-core Intel Core i7 processor and a more gaming-oriented card like the Nvidia GTX 780Ti at a much-reduced cost.

None of them are enterprise grade hardware, it's all consumer grade hardware. Or in other words: on the hardware side there is no difference between consumer and enterprise grade when it comes to things like performance. It's all about certification: knowing that it'll work.

 

[MH01]

Then clearly you have absolutely no experience with such hardware at all. Anyone who does have experience with such hardware would say you are extremely naive. Drivers on such workstations are always written with the manufacturer of the hardware as well as the OEM (now why do you think HP has this huge division that does nothing but testing?). Apple doesn't magically do it differently than all those others such as HP. And they all make mistakes. That's why we get updates for OS X and we have to go look for newer versions of drivers and BIOS on the HP website.

We actually have two different kind of users: those who use the enterprise grade hardware and those who use the consumer grade hardware. On the software side (thus drivers) we see no difference. In terms of performance we see no difference either. We do see some difference in supported features in some applications but that is only due to the fact that such applications require specific cards (plus drivers) and are certified for such cards. We changed our hardware to consumer grade now for all of our users (we need to cut costs somewhere). Our users who previously used enterprise grade hardware wanted to test the new hardware as such hardware isn't tested by the manufacturer with enterprise grade software. They tested it and didn't find any differences.

Apple hardware and OS X are no different. There is enterprise grade hardware in the Mac Pro and many application makers will certify the Mac Pro for their application(s). That's how it was in the past and that's how it will be now and in the future. Apple hardware only differs in 1 aspect from others like HP and Dell which is the support contract. With Apple you get the same as with any other Mac which is aimed at consumers. With Dell and HP you get this special business support contract where they can guarantee you a replacement within a certain amount of time (the amount will determine the price of the contract).

However, that is not what that DIY Mac Pro article is about. It is about showing the actual costs of building an enterprise grade workstation such as the Mac Pro. People complain about the Mac Pro being high priced and the article explains why. They do it by comparing ordinary PC components because that's the only way they can. That's also the problem because the Mac Pro has custom parts (both the old models as well as the new one) which is no different than what HP and Dell do. The only thing you can do than is try to mimic the components as close as you can. If you look at pricing they probably have messed it up on the gpu part. On the other hand, this might also point at Apple's D700 gpus being the most customised part in the Mac Pro.

Btw, if you read the article well you should have noticed the following:

None of them are enterprise grade hardware, it's all consumer grade hardware. Or in other words: on the hardware side there is no difference between consumer and enterprise grade when it comes to things like performance. It's all about certification: knowing that it'll work.

Just live in you little world where you think Apple hardware is magical or special cause of the software support.

From reading the posts I can tell you are not a hardware person.

I tried to keep this simple stating that both Windows and OS X have equal levels of support. And depending on the specific software per platform this will vary.

On the Hardware side, they are both PCs. And the difference in enterprise and consumer is not just the software. Of course you users will not tell a difference between enterprise and consumer for thier everyday tasks.

Workstation hardware = Reliable, higher binned part. You pay for that! Hence they cost more.

As an example

Take an i7 Highest binned = XEON ---> Failed Xeon = EE CPU etc
What do you think a GTX Titan is? Its not the best nvidia could achieve, they are chips that did not make the cut as Quadro K6000. So your paying top dollar for a chip that did not make the grade.

You pay the big bucks for workstation hardware, cause they are the best parts, hence reliatble and dependable.

"None of them are enterprise grade hardware, it's all consumer grade hardware. Or in other words: on the hardware side there is no difference between consumer and enterprise grade when it comes to things like performance. It's all about certification: knowing that it'll work."

This is plain incorrect. If you do not understand the difference between Xeons and their consumer counterparts, your completely missing the point. (you cannot get two consumer CPUs to run on dual setup(QPI), and huge difference in reliability.) Its all about hardware mate, not certification. The mac pro comes with enterprise grade hardware, Xeons and Firepro. You paying for a machine that is Pro grade, otherwise buy an imac!