They gave the reads and writes information already.
Yes it up to his workflow but he's marketing his build as something comparable to the mac pro which it is not.
But you're trying to define comparable as equal to. They don't have to be the same to be comparable for most jobs. Does it have a PCIe SSD? No, but 2xSSD in RAID0 is pretty close for most uses. And....he could add one if he wanted. Sure, it would be more money, but the nMP expansion prices are high all over the place, so if you really want to keep up this tick-for-tack thing, trying to match the total performance as exactly a possible, you'll lose.
For example, here is my machine:
2x2630s (sandy bridge)
supermicro X9DAi
Supermicro SuperChassis 743TQ-1200B-SQ
1x1TB bootdrive
4x3TB in RAID5
2x4TB in RAID1 (ie 14 TB of total space after 2 redundant disks in the whole system)
DVD player
8x16 GB RAM (room for 8 more)
Microsoft wired keyboard/mouse
23" inch monitor
NVIDIA GT 520
OS - Ubuntu 12.04
Total sytem cost is now around $6000 (was just over $5K originally, but added 2x4TB recently).
The nMP is probably going to be $4999 or more with the 8 core, which might be the closest performance-wise to my 2x2630s (though maybe not, the 12x2.7 would be faster, but might be closer for heavily threaded stuff like what I often do). Then you need to add ~$1K for the RAM and you some how need to get a mirrored 4TB thunderbolt enclosure and either a RAID0/5 (I'd go raid 0 if I started from scratch now) space up to ~9TB. If you're trying to do that with thunderbolt, you're looking at at least $2K. Plus a few hundred more for a monitor and keyboard/mouse. So, that system is easily upto $8-9K. And I bought my machine about a year ahead of when the nMP will be available.
Yeah, my system has a 1TB HDD as the boot drive and the nMP will have the PCI-SSD, but I don't care. Almost everything I work with is going to using/creating files that exceed 1TB anyway, so the PCI-SSD is moot.
Yeah, my system doesn't have thunderbolt, but I don't care. I have 8 internal drive bays and 2 DVD slots that could be converted if needed. I have 2 USB3 ports for some cheap external backups that would be the same on the nMP. However on the nMP I'd also need 2 thunderbolt RAID divises or one huge one for $$$$$$.
Yeah, my system has a crappy GT 520, but I don't care. All of my work is parallel CPU bound. The only things on my screen are text/table files, terminal and firefox. And if GPGPU computing ever enters my field, guess what, I could add cards to do that then!
Yeah, I installed Ubuntu and maintain it myself, which is work, but I don't care. Configuring OSX for what I do is actually a bit of pain, even compared to installing/maintaining a linux box. See in linux I can just type sudo apt-get install xxxx for many of the things that need to be specially compiled and installed along with a host of dependancies to get working on a Mac. So neither option is "maintance" free. The only real draw back to my machine is that I have to run a virtual machine to get Windows products, which I absolutely need from time to time (Libre Office is good enough in a pinch, but if it needs to look professional, it sucks).
Anyway the point of this is what is comparable is relative. The two systems I just described are comparable for me but grossly different in configuration. One would probably be $2-3K more than the other and come with stuff I don't really need (ie 2 pretty nice GPUs and a PCI-SSD). The cheaper one comes with almost nothing I don't need, except maybe that DVD player I used once to install the system when I could have easily used a flash drive instead.
Maybe now you understand that the issue with the nMP is not so much the price, but the fact that its so expensive to make it what you need it to be given that it come with some pretty expensive stuff many people don't need (looking directly at the 2x custom AMD Firepros and absent space where SATA connections should be).
