16gb/3.6ghz machine from Dell with  a basic video card: $2100.

When you factor in the video cards is when the MacPro is an ok deal. The Dell comes in a little pricier for a  little better spec’d machine with two AMD W7000s (same as the D300 with more VRAM).

So the question is how important are the video cards vs. the CPU?

The nice thing about the PC is you can replace the video cards in a couple years when there’s something new and much faster. And it is cheaper if you don’t care as much about the video card. Although, if you know and like Macs, $900 is about how much the kool-aid has always cost. ;-)  (and you get part of it back in resale value)

That said, you could also plop a couple speedy cards into your current MacPro too.

Given that every software developer is jumping on the GPU bandwagon, the video cards can play a pretty important role. It really depends on how much of your work can be processed on the GPU. If you’re doing a lot of effects heavy AE work using all the CPU cores, the CPU matters more. For example, with our Beauty Box tests, the video card matters a LOT if you’re not using multi-processing. With MP turned on, the card becomes less of a factor. The more cores you’re using the less of factor it is. For editing work, I’m guessing the GPU matters more in most cases and you could just upgrade your current MacPro.

So… ultimately, it’s a fairly priced machine for what it is. Whether you need all of what it has…

I do hate the lack of expandability and am bummed it’s locked into AMD cards. We’ve found AMD cards to be more problematic than Nvidia. So I’m expecting more GPU related issues… ah well…

Cheers,

Jim

--------------- 

Jim Tierney

President

Digital Anarchy

OK I got a little carried away. Maybe I am a little bitter. But that 12 core xeon will run circles around the base New Mac Pro, and have tons more storage, for only $750 more. And if you built it yourself it would completely negate the price increase at all.

However, I agree, it is a fast SSD with little to compare it to. But considering my base OS 10.9 + Apps takes up over 150GB on my laptop, I can't imagine it being functional to actually store projects on. And then you're back to using a RAID

 

On Fri, Dec 20, 2013 at 2:20 PM, dennis@reelsolutions.com <dennis@reelsolutions.com> wrote:

You say "Not interested in starting any mac vs. pc debate..." Then 
"I imagine they are mainly for rich nerds to show off?" ... Ok...

 

Count me in as a rich nerd I guess - I'll be buying one. I've never regretted buying a Mac, when I've gotten a bad one (1 in 16+years, they've been great at correcting the problem).

 

I've made a couple PC purchases I'd rather not go into... 

 

Why make an assumption how long it will take to get repaired? I had a MacPro way out of warranty that had a power supply go bad; I guess they didn't have the part because they gave me a brand new base model MacPro for no charge at all, they didn't even charge for the diagnostic fee. (And they let me pay the difference to upgrade it to the fastest MacPro). What a waste of money!

This was for a 4+ yr old machine, they weren't obligated to do anything. Time to receive the new machine was about a week ( mainly because I requested a non-stocked configuration).

 

HP wants $3,749 for the 12 core Xeon chip, they're not cheap.

 

800.00 to upgrade from a 256GB SSD isn't bad considering it will do 1200 MB/s. To match that speed, you can't really replicate it easily (RAID adds latency).

 

mho... Dennis Wilkins

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VFX & Motion Graphic artist
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