| TheRealMafoo said: Ok, you have $7,700 to spend, build me: 8 core 3.2 Ghz Xeon Good luck finding another system that can even do that, let alone for under 8 grand. |
You are talking about workstations now. that is a very inefficient rig for home use. To begin with not many programs will make use of the 8 CPUs and to contimue NOBODY buying a workstation would get 4 HD2600 XT cards period. The precisions come with much more advanced options and can get up to 64 Gigs of RAM and have a Blu Ray burner(you can't get blu-ray burners for Mac Pro yet inside the case). Also for a workstation you don't want Wifi and you may not want bluetooth but you can still get those if you want them. At this stage in the game it is about selective features and speciality cards. If you want 4 graphics cards for multiple outputs you don't deserve to be spending 7700 on a computer period. You will be wanting to use Thomson Grass Valley turbo iDDR and Barco Switchers. For non GPU intensive workstations you want to use only one maybe two HD2600XTs as a monitor output only other wise you are going to be using Quadros and FireGLs. the low end Mac Pros are comparitely priced as in that same rigg minus the HD2600 XT but plus a more viable graphics card comes in around 8 grand at dell but when you start maxing out the specs on the Mac it falls behind both HP and Dell in terms of pricing and specs.
A real workstation woudl be using SAS with RAID 10 at the least and be connected to a SAN for back up and data retrieval. You would be running an OS like Red Hat or Solarias or even Windows Server depending on what you are doing with it and the need for CALs. as for the best made workstations they are done by CAD2 IMO.
Don't look for a price because it isn't about that. For people here the ability to build and OC a Intel Core2Quad(though Dual Core is actually better for most uses here) with 4 gigs of RAM and 2 terabytes of HD running RAID 0 for about 3 grand with dual GeForce 9800s is more practical and yield better day to day performance than that would(even though that would perform better on Benchmarks)
