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The MPX is just the additional slot behind the x16 interface. You can remove the Apple "MPX" card and put in a standard x16 GPU.
The problem is that you can build a comparable Windows system for over a thousand dollars less, even considering the components. Heck, get a couple of good deals and you can build a DUAL 3647 system for the price Apple is asking for their base model.
Yup. So you can put any graphics card into the MPX slot, but an MPX card can't go in a traditional slot.
There's a 10-pin connector up above the x4 PCIe slot.
The display is not even remotely comparable to anything else on the market. First 6K display, the mounting system is magnetic with automatic locking latches. You do realise you don’t even have to buy the monitor yeah?
Retina simply means that the PPI has reached a point where the pixels are invisible to the human eye. 215DPI easily meets this
Agreed. OSX is the reason I'm considering one of these to replace my existing Mac Pro. The price difference and lack of CUDA hurts, though.
I don't see why not. Supermicro (what all of my non-Apple builds are) has no issue running dual 205W 28-core CPUs.
$1200 Xeon W-3225
$500 Supermicro X11SPA-TF
$275 4x8GB DDR4 ECC RDIMM
$200 Power Supply
$175 Radeon 580
$50 EATX Case
$35 M.2 256GB SSD
Is the custom Vega II not part of that $6000 price tag? Cause it seems a bit disingenuous to compare it with a radeon 580...
You left out a bunch of stuff, and the Apple pricetag also covers an overengineered computer where everything inside has been designed to gel and fit perfectly with an emphasis on cool & quiet, far nicer than some generic case with a bland Smicro motherboard. But the thing is that Apple isn't actually asking DIYers to care or see any point. We're not the target market. So "I can build it cheaper myself" isn't shining a light on anything unknown.
I work with 2 guys who if apples sales claims are correct will see a 4 month ROI on them.
That and with the Mac Pro you're getting turnkey, you're getting bulletproof, you're avoiding incompatibility issues of disparate components from different manufacturers, you're avoiding Windows 10 random updates hosing drivers or deleting data, and you're getting bumper to bumper warranty. And you don't need any tech staff to support and maintain, just plug in. If anything goes wrong for any reason, Apple deals with it. In a production setting, time is money, and there's no time for troubleshooting shit.
Yeah, there's really no direct comparison. At least, none that'd give you a quote just like that. But it's about as close as you can get from a generic (enterprise focused) systems builder. Just wanted to establish a baseline, minimum you should expect to pay for such a system.
My build includes a 1.4kW PSU and 10 Gig Ethernet. You can put quad GPUs in it if you want. I'm missing Thunderbolt support ($200 if you MUST have it), and "on the fly hardware storage encryption" (which is a very BAD idea for 99.999% of users - Some of us like being able to restore our computer when a part fails, not wipe the HDD) Not to mention the T2 chip is known to prevent users from replacing failed parts themselves. I'm also impressed that you know how fast the SSDs are, when the rest of us are left in the dark. I assumed that they'd be like the nMP SSD was when IT came out - bottom-tier solutions about half as fast as the typical consumer SSD.
My understanding is that you CAN'T do this. That the encryption key needed for decryption is stored on the motherboard, not on the drive itself. So if your motherboard dies, everything on the SSDs are lost too. If I'm wrong about that, groovy. I misunderstood, mea culpa, etc.
That's fair. Lord knows Final Cut kicked the SHIT out of AVID back when I was in that industry.