The 2013 Mac Pro is Cheaper to Build as Windows PC

This should be a non-controversial opinion, but I’ve already received in an informal forum comments like:

• the Mac is a workstation not a gaming rig.
• If you try building it, you will end up paying more.
• For the money and given workloads it’s a good machine.
• For a workstation, a prebuilt is the way to go.

For the sake of this argument, we’ll be considering the higher specced 6-core, which retails for a dollar shy of $4,000. It has the following components of interest:

• Intel Xeon E5-1650 v2 @ 3.50GHz
• 16GB (4x4GB) of 1866MHz DDR3 ECC
• 256GB PCIe-based flash storage
• Dual AMD FirePro D500 GPUs with 3GB of GDDR5 VRAM each

The “FirePro D500″ is a cheaper version of the D700, which is functionally equivalent to an ATI 7970:

The W9000 is for all practical purposes a Radeon HD 7970 when it comes to hardware, but it runs at different clock speeds and has twice as much memory as consumer counterpart.

The FirePro W9000 will provide 3.99TFLOPS of single precision and 0.998 TFLOPS of double precision compute precision, unlike the Radeon HD 7970 (also based on Tahiti XT), which offers 3.79TFLOPS of SP and 0.947TFLOPS of DP performance, respectively.

The Mac Pro is already running on last generation graphics hardware, so we’ll substitute in the superior ATI R9 280X 3GB. Now is a good time to talk about tradeoffs:

• 99.999999% of people do not need ECC memory in the Mac Pro (and Fire Pros), unless they are processing banking transactions, or flying a mission outside of the ionosphere. For those that do, they should consider the plenitude of little DRAM buffers in their hard disk controllers, motherboards, USB hosts, etc
• We’re going to avoid Xeon, because we don’t need ECC. But we can still have hexacores, thanks to the i7-4930K, which actually outperforms the Xeon in the Mac Pro by about 8%.
• Whatever case we pick won’t be as pretty as Apple’s.

Here’s what I come up with:

This is a far faster system, with twice the RAM, a faster CPU, much faster GPUs, but without ECC or server-warrantied parts. We also lack the amazingly beautiful case that the Mac Pro comes in.