I have been going over the specs of the new Mac Pro and I was wondering if it could be rebuilt as a PC for less. Of course it needs to be as small as possible and thunderbolt 2 is a must as well. I have not been able to find the AMD FirePro D300 or D500 online so i'm not sure what cards to put in it.
Please link to any parts or builds you come up with and maybe they can put that sponsorship money to good use and do a "Kill your Mac Pro" video.
Well Considering the size of the new Mac Pro. The only thing I can recommend with a case that might look better and takes mATX is the Silverstone FT-03
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811163176
That's a sweet case, but I'm not sure If they even make mATX LGA 2011 motherboards. So we might have to go a little larger.
There's the Asus Rampage IV GENE
No Thunderbolt and will only support 32gb ram.
This isn't possible without going ATX. Apple has split the board into 3 sections. With what's available in the market, we cannot get something as small to support the same specs. Just get the smallest ATX case you can get and load it
I believe that Thunderbolt 2 won't hit the mainstream market until 2014. I could be wrong though. Apple gets special treatment from Intel so they usually get the latest technology a few months earlier than anyone else.
The main issue is that Apple is achieving the 64GB of RAM via the use of 4 16GB ECC Buffered DIMMs that are only support by the Intel Xeons.
As there are few users who will even want a Xeon on a ATX board, there are obviouslyeven fewer smaller boards.
Nor do the X79, C602 or C604 chipsets officially list Thunderbolt as part of the spec.
As for the GPUs, in Apples slided they state that you can have FirePro cards with upto 2048 stream processors.
Basically if you want raw performance and not all the little extras that are on the Firepro Cards. You could use two 7970/ R9 280x.
This should be close enough to a d300 except with double the memory
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814195118
Let's be honest it's pretty hard to build a machine that has the same specs as the MacPro. For one FirePro and ECC memory isn't used for speed but accuracy, you can obviously build a more powerful machine for less. The Xeon's have more cache capacity than any CPU on 1055 boards out there, so you would need to go for 2011 platform.
There's also 6x TB2, PCI-e mounted flashdrive.. And the size, it's small. Really.
Even if you were to build a PC with similar specs it would still cost a lot. Why not just get the Mac?
I'm going to go with not really possible. I'd go with the Mac Pro in this instance. Those things aren't terrible value at release. Just if you buy new years later.
What do you plan to do with this computer?
one thing i've gotta say, they designed a great computer with the new mac pro. Well thought out design and they're able to fit two firepro's inside a build that small with them all connected to 1 heasink in a tunnel design. Gotta give the engineering department some kudos for that idea.
https://teksyndicate.com/videos/build-workstation-pc-our-dual-xeon-build-and-guidelines-help-yours
this will beat the new MAC Pro
How so?
the whole point of logan's workstation build was to build a better system than the Mac Pro for cheaper. and have customization.
They seem fair different to me.
Mac has two workstation gpus, 6 less cores, very fast ECC memory, Pci ssd, Much high clock speed on the cpu, no room for hdd. The whole system weighs in at 1/3 of the Fractal case alone. It also has six thunderbolt ports.
Whether anyone wants it is another matter. That said it is not an easy or cheap system to replicate.
And, no, more cores doesn't make a 100% better system.
well, for video editing, more cores is better, unlike gaming, such programs scale to as many cores as you can give them
The cores do not matter all that much when you have workstation GPU's. At least Adobe utilizes Tesla and FirePro for encoding, and effectively blocks anything that is considered a consumer GPU (forcing CPU encoding).
You can fake certain consumer GPU's as Tesla/FirePro as far as I remember, but this is not out of the box config.
I don't plan on actually building one, I was just curious if it couple be done.