Not if you want to build it yourself. I am going to check Dell/HP uk and so forth.
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nMP vs Workstation Price Comparisons
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Not if you want to build it yourself. I am going to check Dell/HP uk and so forth.
Hmm, I din't think you can hackintosh Supermicro motherboards either, or is it someone just hasn't tried that just yet?
Hopefully the folks will get everything sorted for Ivy-EP.
That was part of my problem too, I couldn't find a Xeon board that supported more than 1600Mhz. I'm just amazed at the technology crammed into the little nMP, and in an efficient way that lets them bring down the price.
I checked Dell uk for Precision workstations a month ago so go for HP!
With AppleCare the hardware is on a 3 year warranty so home built systems aren't really comparable if you are speccing workstations for business. AppleCare for the old Mac Pro tower is £199.
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I emailed Falcon Northwest a couple days ago, they make custom built gaming rigs, to ask them if they could build something with as fast of a PCI-e SSD as the OCZ card. They had no PCI-e SSD options listed. I just got back this reply:
"We have offered/used that OCZ PCIe Revo Drive before; failure waiting to happen so we do not offer it anymore."
The best they offer is RAID0 SATA 3 which is 750MB/s max.
An unreliable OCZ card puts another damper on the build-your-own option over the nMP.
The GPUs are totally where Apple is making up the difference. As someone who is very disappointed in the nMP, even I agree that for OpenCL, these things will do very well in terms of price/performance.
The question is for people who don't use OpenCL: Do you want to pay for an OpenCL powerhouse which doesn't have many other advantages for the money.
Apple's modus operandi is not necessarily to overcharge (except for upgrades ), but to force users to buy features they would not have purchased if given the option.
I use the example of the rMBP: Try putting a (highly desirable) 1TB drive into it. For no apparent reason, only the $1800 model (with the slightly faster processor) can do it, and at an upgrade cost of $500--that's $2300.
The question is for people who don't use OpenCL: Do you want to pay for an OpenCL powerhouse which doesn't have many other advantages for the money.
Apple's modus operandi is not necessarily to overcharge (except for upgrades
), but to force users to buy features they would not have purchased if given the option. I use the example of the rMBP: Try putting a (highly desirable) 1TB drive into it. For no apparent reason, only the $1800 model (with the slightly faster processor) can do it, and at an upgrade cost of $500--that's $2300.
Apple's modus operandi is not necessarily to overcharge (except for upgrades
Also allows them to keep their products different from the competition. Up until now the Mac Pro was the closest to the competition, but ran OS X. Now you can't compare it directly to a PC workstation because no PC workstation has 6 thunderbolt ports and the vendors wouldn't want to force, thus can't guarantee purchase and reduce costing of, PCI-E SSD and two graphics cards.
AFAIK, most errors come from the backround radiation, which is usually very small. If you do not work on expensive projects, then ECC-RAM is not really necessary.
Most people will survive without ECC RAM, but I am willing to pay for it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECC_memory
I checked Dell uk for Precision workstations a month ago so go for HP!
With AppleCare the hardware is on a 3 year warranty so home built systems aren't really comparable if you are speccing workstations for business. AppleCare for the old Mac Pro tower is £199.
As I noted in this thread, homebuilt systems offer component warranties which mostly blow away Dell or Apple.
Dell's support is also superior on their workstation products to Apples. It is frequently on-site, 3 years, etc.
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I checked Dell uk for Precision workstations a month ago so go for HP!
With AppleCare the hardware is on a 3 year warranty so home built systems aren't really comparable if you are speccing workstations for business. AppleCare for the old Mac Pro tower is £199.
If you can figure out the HP UK website, then please let me know.
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However I don't have the time, nor the inclination, to be own my PC support guy. I don't feel like building my own computer and replacing my own bits. I used to build my own computers in my teenager years. My time is too expensive and too precious for that now.
Fair enough... but his point was the warranty was longer/better. They are not comparable.
I'd argue getting a replacement hard drive from WD in 2 days or driving to the local computer store and picking up a replacement component is quicker than hauling your Mac Pro down to the Apple store (where they may not have the part) or waiting for Dell to come over.
If you can figure out the HP UK website, then please let me know.
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However I don't have the time, nor the inclination, to be own my PC support guy. I don't feel like building my own computer and replacing my own bits. I used to build my own computers in my teenager years. My time is too expensive and too precious for that now.
You can't customise the HP models on the web site - it's a pain in the neck. I did ask my mate when I looked at Dell who does buy a lot of their gear who did say spec for spec he couldn't get near the Mac Pro with roughly comparable spec for the price and that included AppleCare and a 7x64 pro licence. Gets closer if you add more storage and PCIe cards as the workstations fit them in the box.
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Dell's support is top notch but Apples isn't that far behind with AppleCare. I've seen them come out next business day for 5,1's.
I don't offer next day support myself but do offer full support for bootcamp via remote as Apple won't touch windows with a barge pole!
If you live within 50 miles of an Apple store, they won't do on site.. Supposedly AppleCare will if you have their "business-level" service, which nobody has explained to me how one gets.
Thing is with businesses if their hardware goes down they need it up and running again next day, they are happy to pay the premium for minimal downtime. Home and non pro users do wait, perhaps even longer while I source cheaper parts off eBay for example as budget for them in many occasions is king!
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They have 10 Mac Pro's and 20-30 other macs so I guess that's definitely business level. I know my contacts who work in half a dozen different media companies some a lot smaller than that get looked after by Apple next day too though. I'm fortunate to have a top notch approved apple repair agent under a mile away
If you can figure out the HP UK website, then please let me know.
Try this - it's a US reseller site, but as close as I can find - http://dv411.com/hpz800.html
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However I don't have the time, nor the inclination, to be own my PC support guy. I don't feel like building my own computer and replacing my own bits. I used to build my own computers in my teenager years. My time is too expensive and too precious for that now.
Absolutely - the build it yourself PRO system answer is getting tedious and frustrating - let Modders Mod, no problem with that, but purveyors of Hackintosh have no need of a MP forum....there's enough info on the net!
Build your own will have the option to install a PCIe Raid card to bring up the speed drastically, but unfortunately here lies the diversion in trying to compare the nMP vs. A Pro workstation with PCIe slots.
If you could install a RAID card that allows you to break the SATA 3 - 6 Gb/s transfer barrier (750MB/s), and then add enough SATA drives to bring you over 1250MB/s nMP speed, then I would consider that an acceptable comparison for this thread. The card would have to RAID across multiple SATA controllers, not just across multiple SATA ports run by the same limited 750MB/s controller. Would that allow you to beat the nMB's pricing with a machine of similar performance, or would the price still go over the nMP for all of the needed parts?
I have such a setup in my current 4,1 MP that uses 3 SSDs in RAID0 on a Highpoint x8 PCIe card to achieve 1GB/s read and 1.3GB/s writes... so it's certainly possible (link). The card/cables is around $200 and then you need at least three or four SSDs to get to those speeds so it's a minimum of $500-600. There's certainly nothing as elegant in a single slot solution in the sub-$1000 price range that can do that kind of speed.
Impressive, it's good to know that it "could" be done even if it does cost more, for those who prefer to build a box with internal expansion. I think the lack of ECC is what's ensuring that you can't just build a cheap i7 machine with everything the nMP has. If you want ECC then the supporting parts cost more, and I'm having a real problem convincing myself that I want to spend thousands of dollars on an important work machine that doesn't have ECC just to build it cheap. Random crashes are very frustrating even if they only happen once in a while.
Yeah, I suspect ECC is one of those things that motherboard vendors use to separate consumers from corporate (eg. small budgets from big budgets)
I'm not sure what difference it makes to every day stability though.At any rate, it's impressive that any computer from Apple is remotely competitive with value leaders like Dell and DIY options. That says a lot about Apples supply chain given their penchant for 35%+ margins.
It is. Primarily about reliability though, rather than purely for profit.Yeah, I suspect ECC is one of those things that motherboard vendors use to separate consumers from corporate (eg. small budgets from big budgets)
For example, it's expected enterprise systems will be used for critical data (think financial transactions for example on a server, or science/engineering on a workstation), and the calculations may be recursive. One mistake would be bad enough, but in a recursive process, once there's a single error, everything after that is borked.
Great to see that, contrary to what some purported "pundits" love to profess around here, the nMP's value is way better than any other workstation-level PC out there...and I am not even talking about the design, of course...
Theres a reason why many businesses choose to have paid support. They just have one place to go if something goes wrong. On a homebuilt system you have to do all the troubleshooting, which means your not making money while your doing it.
You have different hardware vendors blaming one another the reason why it does not work. So you will be hopping between different manufactures to try to get it fixed.
Yes, support is much cheaper then comparable name brands. But then again, the home builder has no overhead costs that goes with it.