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A $650 motherboard? $242 PSU? They obviously weren't trying very hard. $5000 is a lot of money to pour into one PC. Even if you are spending $1300 of that on

A $650 motherboard? $242 PSU? They obviously weren't trying very hard. $5000 is a lot of money to pour into one PC. Even if you are spending $1300 of that on a monitor.

freehunter 9y ago
Yeah might as well get cheaper RAM, a slower SSD, and a Pentium, because everyone knows quality components are a ripoff, and the people at PC Gamer are just Apple fanboys and don't know what they're talking about.
- thomastjeffery 9y ago
  ECC us unlikely to be worth the inflated price, too. A slightly slower CPU can be had for a significantly lower price. GPUs are a lot more important to most workloads. ... But I didn't mention any of those. The only reason for an expensive motherboard is to use multiple video cards. >$200 is not a good price for a PSU. 1000watt is absolutely unnecessary unless you need to power 3-4 GPUs. My point is that you can easily build a very similar system for half the price. This isn't the rattly '90s. $5000 is a lot for one PC. If you want to shell out $3700 on PC components, you can build a much more powerful system, especially when you start putting in more GPUs.
  - FireBeyond 9y ago
    > $200 is not a good price for a PSU. 1000watt is absolutely unnecessary unless you need to power 3-4 GPUs. For sure. I had this argument a few weeks before the iMac Pro came out with someone who insisted that it'd come with an 850W, more likely 1KW+ PSU... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15922978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15922978 iFixit's tear down? 500W PSU.
- fgonzag 9y ago
  That's a horrible system for $3700 dlls. You can easily shave $1k off if you're smart about shopping for the parts. Also, assuming you're not going for OSX (apples and oranges I know), a thread ripper would be a much better choice for a CPU.
maccard 9y ago
I can’t soeak specifics about the PSU but to get a server class intel motherboard (Xeon support, ECC ram), you really do have to spend quite a bit more than for the equivalent consumer board. Even if you reduce the cost of the motherboard to 200, and the psu to 150, you’re still not saving a huge amount off 5k, and you’re not getting an all in one
- thomastjeffery 9y ago
  > ECC ram I'm not sure how Apple has people convinced they need ECC. It's practically worthless outside of very specific workloads. A workstation user does not fill several gigabytes of RAM with terse important data, query it millions of times/day, and do so 24/7 all year long.
  - cjsuk 9y ago
    It only takes one bit wrong to fuck your file system.
    - thomastjeffery 9y ago
      You make it sound like filesystems are so vulnerable. They aren't. The chances of memory failure ruining data are extremely slim; lower than for hardware failure. If you care about your data, back it up.
      - burntwater 9y ago
        Backups don't do anything if the original material contains the flipped bits.
      - cjsuk 9y ago
        I ran a lab notebook in word for a number of years and the document got fried by a filesystem error. The backup was toasted as well. This was corruption which broke the stage machine or parser in word which acted as a damage amplification. As for the source of the error, we can only speculate but the possibility of a flipped bit is higher than you think. Try running memtest86 on a PC without ECC for a week. You will be surprised at the results. I’ve seen perhaps 3 or 4 failures of this in new hardware. DRAM is not perfect.
Synaesthesia 9y ago
Bit silly I reckon as well as you can get similar single threaded performance for much cheaper. If you need 18 cores maybe, but $5k? But Apple have always figured out how to upsell computers perfectly.
rayiner 9y ago
They under-balled it if anything. They used a $400 Broadwell Xeon, while the base iMac Pro has a Skylake Xeon W. The chip is a custom Apple SKU, but the closest is a $1,100 Xeon W 2145. $650 is steep for a motherboard, but it has dual 10 gig-e ports and supports registered ECC. A SuperMicro motherboard with the Xeon W support will run about $350 (they’re not out yet) and an X550AT2 NIC is about $200 on eBay.
- brigade 9y ago
  Slightly less: the iMac Pro uses the ~$100 AQC107 whereas the X99 motherboard chosen uses the more expensive X550AT2 because Aquantia only launched their chips this year. But yeah, the Xeon they chose is quite a bit slower than the 8-core Xeon-W; the Broadwell equivalent was really the $1100 E5-1660 v4. So -$200 for motherboard, +$700 for CPU, and -$100 for PSU if you're feeling generous. That's still $5k.
- michaelmrose 9y ago
  * Video Card: Zotac - GeForce GTX 1080 Ti 11GB Founders Edition ($678.99) whereas the actual gpu used in the mac is $399 * Power Supply: SeaSonic - PRIME Titanium 1000W 80+ Titanium Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply ($242.89)whereas they could have gotten a fine psu for $99 * Operating System: Microsoft - Windows 7 Professional ($134.99) How about not and say we did. * Monitor: LG - UltraFine 5K Display 60Hz Monitor ($1299.95) whereas one can probably get a really nice 4K monitor for 400-500. Some can spend the extra funds on another 4K monitor, others you know already have monitors. * CPU Cooler: NZXT - Kraken X62 Liquid CPU Cooler ($158.99) Did I miss the part where the mac is liquid cooled why is this here? * CPU: Intel - Xeon E5-2620 V4 2.1GHz 8-Core Processor ($408.99) This is an amazingly poor choice while relatively expensive its performance is decidedly mediocre being an older generation. Motherboard: Asus - X99-E-10G WS SSI CEB LGA2011-3 Motherboard ($649.00) Expensive not primarily because its awesome but because its xeon. The $1059 could have been better spent on this motherboard http://www.asrock.com/MB/AMD/X399%20Taichi/index.asp#Specification http://www.asrock.com/MB/AMD/X399%20Taichi/index.asp#Specifi... note supports dual gb lan and ecc, $340 this cpu https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113457&cm_re=threadripper-_-19-113-457-_-Product https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1681911... $535 and about $100 for a single port 10G lan Total $975 between motherboard and cpu All in all a machine could be built that is nearly equivalent for about 3544. Given the extra $1500 one could buy a second 27" 4k monitor upgrade to 16 cores and buy a second gpu. Pretending mac is comparable in price to pc remains silly.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

A $650 motherboard? $242 PSU? They obviously weren't trying very hard. $5000 is a lot of money to pour into one PC. Even if you are spending $1300 of that on a monitor.

freehunter 9y ago

Yeah might as well get cheaper RAM, a slower SSD, and a Pentium, because everyone knows quality components are a ripoff, and the people at PC Gamer are just Apple fanboys and don't know what they're talking about.

thomastjeffery 9y ago
ECC us unlikely to be worth the inflated price, too. A slightly slower CPU can be had for a significantly lower price. GPUs are a lot more important to most workloads. ... But I didn't mention any of those. The only reason for an expensive motherboard is to use multiple video cards. >$200 is not a good price for a PSU. 1000watt is absolutely unnecessary unless you need to power 3-4 GPUs. My point is that you can easily build a very similar system for half the price. This isn't the rattly '90s. $5000 is a lot for one PC. If you want to shell out $3700 on PC components, you can build a much more powerful system, especially when you start putting in more GPUs.
- FireBeyond 9y ago
  > $200 is not a good price for a PSU. 1000watt is absolutely unnecessary unless you need to power 3-4 GPUs. For sure. I had this argument a few weeks before the iMac Pro came out with someone who insisted that it'd come with an 850W, more likely 1KW+ PSU... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15922978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15922978 iFixit's tear down? 500W PSU.
fgonzag 9y ago
That's a horrible system for $3700 dlls. You can easily shave $1k off if you're smart about shopping for the parts. Also, assuming you're not going for OSX (apples and oranges I know), a thread ripper would be a much better choice for a CPU.

maccard 9y ago

I can’t soeak specifics about the PSU but to get a server class intel motherboard (Xeon support, ECC ram), you really do have to spend quite a bit more than for the equivalent consumer board. Even if you reduce the cost of the motherboard to 200, and the psu to 150, you’re still not saving a huge amount off 5k, and you’re not getting an all in one

thomastjeffery 9y ago
> ECC ram I'm not sure how Apple has people convinced they need ECC. It's practically worthless outside of very specific workloads. A workstation user does not fill several gigabytes of RAM with terse important data, query it millions of times/day, and do so 24/7 all year long.
- cjsuk 9y ago
  It only takes one bit wrong to fuck your file system.
  - thomastjeffery 9y ago
    You make it sound like filesystems are so vulnerable. They aren't. The chances of memory failure ruining data are extremely slim; lower than for hardware failure. If you care about your data, back it up.
    - burntwater 9y ago
      Backups don't do anything if the original material contains the flipped bits.
    - cjsuk 9y ago
      I ran a lab notebook in word for a number of years and the document got fried by a filesystem error. The backup was toasted as well. This was corruption which broke the stage machine or parser in word which acted as a damage amplification. As for the source of the error, we can only speculate but the possibility of a flipped bit is higher than you think. Try running memtest86 on a PC without ECC for a week. You will be surprised at the results. I’ve seen perhaps 3 or 4 failures of this in new hardware. DRAM is not perfect.

Synaesthesia 9y ago

Bit silly I reckon as well as you can get similar single threaded performance for much cheaper. If you need 18 cores maybe, but $5k? But Apple have always figured out how to upsell computers perfectly.

rayiner 9y ago

They under-balled it if anything. They used a $400 Broadwell Xeon, while the base iMac Pro has a Skylake Xeon W. The chip is a custom Apple SKU, but the closest is a $1,100 Xeon W 2145. $650 is steep for a motherboard, but it has dual 10 gig-e ports and supports registered ECC. A SuperMicro motherboard with the Xeon W support will run about $350 (they’re not out yet) and an X550AT2 NIC is about $200 on eBay.

brigade 9y ago
Slightly less: the iMac Pro uses the ~$100 AQC107 whereas the X99 motherboard chosen uses the more expensive X550AT2 because Aquantia only launched their chips this year. But yeah, the Xeon they chose is quite a bit slower than the 8-core Xeon-W; the Broadwell equivalent was really the $1100 E5-1660 v4. So -$200 for motherboard, +$700 for CPU, and -$100 for PSU if you're feeling generous. That's still $5k.
michaelmrose 9y ago
* Video Card: Zotac - GeForce GTX 1080 Ti 11GB Founders Edition ($678.99) whereas the actual gpu used in the mac is $399 * Power Supply: SeaSonic - PRIME Titanium 1000W 80+ Titanium Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply ($242.89)whereas they could have gotten a fine psu for $99 * Operating System: Microsoft - Windows 7 Professional ($134.99) How about not and say we did. * Monitor: LG - UltraFine 5K Display 60Hz Monitor ($1299.95) whereas one can probably get a really nice 4K monitor for 400-500. Some can spend the extra funds on another 4K monitor, others you know already have monitors. * CPU Cooler: NZXT - Kraken X62 Liquid CPU Cooler ($158.99) Did I miss the part where the mac is liquid cooled why is this here? * CPU: Intel - Xeon E5-2620 V4 2.1GHz 8-Core Processor ($408.99) This is an amazingly poor choice while relatively expensive its performance is decidedly mediocre being an older generation. Motherboard: Asus - X99-E-10G WS SSI CEB LGA2011-3 Motherboard ($649.00) Expensive not primarily because its awesome but because its xeon. The $1059 could have been better spent on this motherboard http://www.asrock.com/MB/AMD/X399%20Taichi/index.asp#Specification http://www.asrock.com/MB/AMD/X399%20Taichi/index.asp#Specifi... note supports dual gb lan and ecc, $340 this cpu https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113457&cm_re=threadripper-_-19-113-457-_-Product https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1681911... $535 and about $100 for a single port 10G lan Total $975 between motherboard and cpu All in all a machine could be built that is nearly equivalent for about 3544. Given the extra $1500 one could buy a second 27" 4k monitor upgrade to 16 cores and buy a second gpu. Pretending mac is comparable in price to pc remains silly.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]