So I'm still scratching my head over this. So when you customize a mac pro, you have the option of selecting two AMD Firepro D700s. Now these cards are not available for purchase for built PCs. Now I looked around and noticed that the closest consumer available fire pro is the W9000. But those cost about 3,400 USD each by themselves! On the mac pro, you can get two D700s, and 6 core Xeon, 16GB of DDR3 Ecc RAM all for abou 4500 USD.
So the question is, is this new mac pro a good value because of these GPUS or am I missing something here?
Yes. They will screw you on every other upgrade, but the GPUs are an incredible steal. The CPU and RAM are socketed and user upgradable, so you can actually leave those at the base configuration when you buy the machine, then upgrade with parts from a cheaper supplier. Try to price a full rig at the same specs as the new Mac Pro. You'll find it much more expensive to build yourself. It's entirely thanks to the graphics cards. Your custom PC of course will also have a much larger footprint and won't legally run OS X either.
Hopefully third party SSD upgrades will eventually become available as well, adding yet another way to bring down the cost.
Apple has never been known for value and I highly doubt this is the case with the pro since it has always had a bad track record of having poor specs for the cost compared to an equivalent pc. I could be totally wrong since I have next to no interest in workstation setups but hopefully someone more competent can answer.