iFixit Mac Pro Teardown

Skripka said:
The old Mac Pro was 2p and could be loaded with two X5670 Xeons that were each 6c12t...So no you would not be comparing "12 core to 12 core" you would be comparing a 1p 6c12t machine to a 2p 12c24t machine.
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I'm not the one who compared it, anand is.
 
Snowdog said:
I am not sure what you are smoking, but to get that $2700 CPU, you pay Apple an EXTRA $3500(base model). So you aren't getting anything for free.

From Apple.com:
2.7GHz 12-core with 30MB of L3 cache [Add $3,500.00]
So a Minimum price of for the "free" system is $6500 with that CPU.

For a CPU that Intel lists at under $2700.

Even worse you don't get credit for the original CPU. There is nothing Free here.
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http://www.extremetech.com/computin...s-2000-cheaper-than-the-equivalent-windows-pc
 
iGrooCk said:
Dude, just drop it. You have absolutely no clue what you're talking about. The CPU alone costs $2700 if you purchase it by itself. Apple is practically giving you the rest of the parts for free, not to mention their support.
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This could not be farther from the truth. Apple gives nothing away for free.
 
Trimlock said:
That link does not make your case of Apple selling you a $2700 cpu and giving the rest for free.
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I was referring to the high end model, which I didnt state when I replied. If you put all the parts together as if you are building a windows machine, its well over 10k, while GPUs cost closer to 3500.

My reply was mainly to his argument that you can build a windows machine equivalent to what the mac offer for less. Well there are all the parts laid out, it costs more.
 
Yakk said:
That PSU is tiny for those GPUs, highly binned I's guess.
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A lot of people who build their own computers have a pretty unrealistic idea of the PSU's output versus the harware they're installing. Video card manufacturers aren't helping the situation by recommending much higher wattage outputs than necessary to avoid becoming liable for the failure of non-video card components. The result of that and reinforcement from hardware review sites is that people have a very skewed perception of consumption and output. Then again, there's a whole PSU industry built around overengineered and overspecced supplies and it helps move money around and employ a bunch of people (also there's bragging rights and pointless specifications lists in signature blocks) so whatevah. :)

But yeah, power supply in Mac is perfectly fine for the stuff in it. Like any other OEM, they're just smarter about components selection than the average modder/home PC builder.
 
Apple haters are running out of stuff to complain about, still not sure why the price comes up... $ for $ apples to apples its better value than Dell/HP workstations, and you certainly cant build it for less with the same parts

good to see its easily repairable
 
iGrooCk said:
My reply was mainly to his argument that you can build a windows machine equivalent to what the mac offer for less. Well there are all the parts laid out, it costs more.
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My point was that argument only works if you really buy into the bogus "workstation" GPU pricing argument.

This is where you jumped in and claimed you were buying $2700 CPU and get the rest for free.

Now you are back to making that same bogus GPU argument. The pair GPUs on the high end config are claimed to be worth $7000. This is what really inflates the "equivalent" PC pricing.

But with the PC you could get a pair of R9-290s and save $6000, and have equivalent(better) performance, and come in at half the price.

Furthermore, because there are no Mac apps that require special workstation cards, the "workstation" GPU designation on a Mac is largely meaningless and arbitrary. It is just enables some to justify the obscene over-pricing.
 
CreepyUncleGoogle said:
A lot of people who build their own computers have a pretty unrealistic idea of the PSU's output versus the harware they're installing. Video card manufacturers aren't helping the situation by recommending much higher wattage outputs than necessary to avoid becoming liable for the failure of non-video card components. The result of that and reinforcement from hardware review sites is that people have a very skewed perception of consumption and output. Then again, there's a whole PSU industry built around overengineered and overspecced supplies and it helps move money around and employ a bunch of people (also there's bragging rights and pointless specifications lists in signature blocks) so whatevah. :)

But yeah, power supply in Mac is perfectly fine for the stuff in it. Like any other OEM, they're just smarter about components selection than the average modder/home PC builder.
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"Perfectly fine"?

Aren't Thunderbolt storage drives bus-powered as a "feature"? This machine at stock full load with no accessories already uses 95% of it's power supply rating. All the external HDDs sold on store.apple.com I see are bus powered. Given that you have no choice for more storage than to buy external drives, and given that 7200RPM drives typically draw what 4-10W each it is a moronically setup Catch 22. "Perfectly fine" is laughable unless you don't plan on using any bus-powered accessories, which is all Apple sells.
 
Snowdog said:
But with the PC you could get a pair of R9-290s and save $6000, and have equivalent(better) performance, and come in at half the price.

Furthermore, because there are no Mac apps that require special workstation cards, the "workstation" GPU designation on a Mac is largely meaningless and arbitrary. It is just enables some to justify the obscene over-pricing.
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Back to this argument again? Overpricing? It's not like Apple dictates how much workstation class GPUs cost, are you suggesting Apple gets a 50% discount and just amps the price up because people will pay it?

I'm not aware of any Windows/Unix apps that *require* workstation class cards either, but they still exist because of two reasons. a) support b) reliability c) demand. That's right, if there were no demand for enterprise/workstation level hardware, the Mac Pro wouldn't of ever been built. It's not like they build this stuff to be hip and cool, they build it because they make money on it. Same reason Microsoft develops Windows and Office. The same reason HP sells hundreds of thousands of licenses for HP-UX to the government every year. You gonna hate on them too?

I know it's hard to comprehend but there are organizations out there that make millions+ in profit/year that are more concerned about losing ANY productivity due hardware failure over saving a few bucks up front by using consumer level gear. You're not in a position to fully grasp that, and it's ok, your blatant ignorance is understandable.
 
Snowdog said:
My point was that argument only works if you really buy into the bogus "workstation" GPU pricing argument.

This is where you jumped in and claimed you were buying $2700 CPU and get the rest for free.

Now you are back to making that same bogus GPU argument. The pair GPUs on the high end config are claimed to be worth $7000. This is what really inflates the "equivalent" PC pricing.

But with the PC you could get a pair of R9-290s and save $6000, and have equivalent(better) performance, and come in at half the price.

Furthermore, because there are no Mac apps that require special workstation cards, the "workstation" GPU designation on a Mac is largely meaningless and arbitrary. It is just enables some to justify the obscene over-pricing.
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So you want a workstation to use gaming cards... sure they are cheaper and faster, but having to run your software that cost more than the Mac in software rendering mode because of unsupported GPU and piss poor gaming drivers... kind of defeats this

if cost is your bitching point there is 2 reasons for it
1. you cant afford it
2. you dont need a workstation and should buy a gaming pc or build one
 
Snowdog said:
My point was that argument only works if you really buy into the bogus "workstation" GPU pricing argument.

This is where you jumped in and claimed you were buying $2700 CPU and get the rest for free.

Now you are back to making that same bogus GPU argument. The pair GPUs on the high end config are claimed to be worth $7000. This is what really inflates the "equivalent" PC pricing.

But with the PC you could get a pair of R9-290s and save $6000, and have equivalent(better) performance, and come in at half the price.

Furthermore, because there are no Mac apps that require special workstation cards, the "workstation" GPU designation on a Mac is largely meaningless and arbitrary. It is just enables some to justify the obscene over-pricing.
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I dont know much about workstation cards, but I do know they are not made for gaming. R9 cards are made specifically with gaming in mind and so are the drivers.

When it comes to workstation cards:

You are paying for the drivers (R&D) and testing. Totally different(opposite)behavior from how a gaming card renders the screen. Catered to rendering DDC and CAD apps. And working gracefully with large data sets. a gaming card is much less efficient with its rendering style (drivers).

You are paying for the certification. Testing that the card is compatible with a miriad of 3d and CAD apps. Look at any mid-to-highend software and notice there is a list of recommended and certified graphics cards. This is the result of testing the cards with every new version of the software and making sure the drivers preform well. Which is likely back and forth between the software vender and AMD.

You are paying for more VRAM Up until recently you'd only see more than 2GB of memory on a workstation cards. Right now you only see 6 on Titan and W9000, but 8 and 12 are coming.

You are paying for ECC VRAM. This eliminates artifact and floating point errors. CAD apps definitely use this where every millimeter matters or the application may be open for days straight.

You are paying for technical support - It costs money to pay tech support people by the hour.

We can argue for hours about this, but your original post about buying "same" specd hardware is simply not true. You cant buy the same hardware for the same money or get the same type of package. You bash apple for selling a product others want, while you may not which doesn't make apple bad.
 
Putz said:
So you want a workstation to use gaming cards... sure they are cheaper and faster, but having to run your software that cost more than the Mac in software rendering mode because of unsupported GPU and piss poor gaming drivers... kind of defeats this
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Name one piece of Mac Software that requires "workstation" GPUs to run HW rendering.
 
Skripka said:
"Perfectly fine"?

Aren't Thunderbolt storage drives bus-powered as a "feature"? This machine at stock full load with no accessories already uses 95% of it's power supply rating. All the external HDDs sold on store.apple.com I see are bus powered. Given that you have no choice for more storage than to buy external drives, and given that 7200RPM drives typically draw what 4-10W each it is a moronically setup Catch 22. "Perfectly fine" is laughable unless you don't plan on using any bus-powered accessories, which is all Apple sells.
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Even assuming that your estimate of 95% capacity is correct (I think it's sort of an off-the-cuff, and highly suspect number) that leaves 22 watts for external drives and your keyboard and mousey. Assuming an external drive actually needs 10 watts, you could easily add two and still not have any problems, even at the assumed 95% at full load thing.

I know it goes against a lot of PC enthusiast ideology to accept that 450 watts is enough, but it really is more than the Mac Pro needs or can use. They test this stuff because, like every other OEM, the moment the computer needs customer support or service for something broken, they start to lose money on the sale of the unit.

FYI, I have a desktop PC running a middle of the road video card on an off brand 300 watt PSU that came with the $35 dollar case. It's been working fine for over a year like that. At work, I have stuffed Dell Optiplex 360s with external graphics cards and have no problems with their stock 255 watt power supplies as long as you stay within the 75 watt limit of the PCI-E slot. They work for years that way without any power supply problems. So yeah, PSU ratings from forum users here are usually a bit more than necessary.
 
Also, hit up AutoCADs website, you won't find them recommending any consumer level cards. They flat out will not support them. This is universal across any platform btw, sure, you can run Maya with an integrated Intel chipset - but why would you?
 
http://usa.autodesk.com/products/mac-compatible-products

fire up any autodesk app with a gaming card and it will work, but once your line work starts to fail to render and complex drawings stop rending random items, the autodesk solution is to disable hardware acceleration

so you spend say 5k on an autodesk package (ours are alot more with the suites) and then you want to complain and save 500$ on gpus... your paying engineers X$/hour to fiddle fart with drawings in software mode..the "savings" doesn't exist for business

I built a couple of custom cad boxes here to put something together in a pinch and the Nvidia 770 would fail to draw alot of the line work, i changed drivers a few times to get it to work, then a service pack for autodesk came along and hey... more issues

bought a 169$ 1gb k600 and it does a better job in autodesk than the 770 which sure, will run laps around a k600 in heaven loops and 3dmark... both those don't make us money
 
kcmastrpc said:
Also, hit up AutoCADs website, you won't find them recommending any consumer level cards. They flat out will not support them.
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So you are saying the Autodesk flat out refused to support the Mac software they were selling, on Macs?

That is of course. Total nonsense.
 
Snowdog said:
So you are saying the Autodesk flat out refused to support the Mac software they were selling, on Macs?

That is of course. Total nonsense.
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I'm not sure if you're trolling or are really this ignorant. Autocad won't support consumer level cards on Mac, Windows, or Unix. It doesn't matter what platform you're working on.
 
kcmastrpc said:
I'm not sure if you're trolling or are really this ignorant. Autocad won't support consumer level cards on Mac, Windows, or Unix. It doesn't matter what platform you're working on.
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hes trolling, again
 
kcmastrpc said:
I'm not sure if you're trolling or are really this ignorant. Autocad won't support consumer level cards on Mac, Windows, or Unix. It doesn't matter what platform you're working on.
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Macs didn't even have workstation GPUs until the new Pro. So if they didn't support standard GPUs in Macs, then they wouldn't support Macs.

Which would be totally absurd.

A great many Autodesk customers have been using standard GPUs for years with great success. Standard OGL drivers are quite good today and the necessity of custom OGL drivers is disappearing. I wonder if Autodesk gets a big kickback from Nvidia/AMD to maintain this charade.

Autodesk inventor switched to DirectX, totally removing all the custom driver nonsense.
 
CreepyUncleGoogle said:
Even assuming that your estimate of 95% capacity is correct (I think it's sort of an off-the-cuff, and highly suspect number) that leaves 22 watts for external drives and your keyboard and mousey. Assuming an external drive actually needs 10 watts, you could easily add two and still not have any problems, even at the assumed 95% at full load thing.

I know it goes against a lot of PC enthusiast ideology to accept that 450 watts is enough, but it really is more than the Mac Pro needs or can use. They test this stuff because, like every other OEM, the moment the computer needs customer support or service for something broken, they start to lose money on the sale of the unit.

FYI, I have a desktop PC running a middle of the road video card on an off brand 300 watt PSU that came with the $35 dollar case. It's been working fine for over a year like that. At work, I have stuffed Dell Optiplex 360s with external graphics cards and have no problems with their stock 255 watt power supplies as long as you stay within the 75 watt limit of the PCI-E slot. They work for years that way without any power supply problems. So yeah, PSU ratings from forum users here are usually a bit more than necessary.
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Per Anandtech, at full load on CPU and 2xGPUs the system pulls ~437W, and the PSU per iFixit is rated for 450 (32.2A @ 12.1V output). So I was being off the cuff yes and it is actually worse, 437/450=97.1% rated PSU capacity without any expansion devices. At 463W load (overload technically), Anand saw performance throttling kick in cutting performance.

So yes, the box is underpowered especially given the expectation you are to use bus powered expension.
 
Skripka said:
Per Anandtech, at full load on CPU and 2xGPUs the system pulls ~437W, and the PSU per iFixit is rated for 450 (32.2A @ 12.1V output). So I was being off the cuff yes and it is actually worse, 437/450=97.1% rated PSU capacity without any expansion devices. At 463W load (overload technically), Anand saw performance throttling kick in cutting performance.

So yes, the box is underpowered especially given the expectation you are to use bus powered expension.
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The article you're quoting states multiple times this isn't anything close to typical usage.

From http://www.anandtech.com/show/7603/mac-pro-review-late-2013/14

I have to stress that I haven’t been able to get this to happen in any normal workload, only what’s effectively a power virus for the GPUs and something quite unrealistic for the CPUs. Either way it shows us the upper limit of what the thermal core can do.
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It's an unrealistic, invented situation and it clearly demonstrates the PSU can handle more than it's rated 450 watt capacity. Throttling isn't really even related since that was due to thermal rather than power output limits.
 
Putz said:
but having to run your software that cost more than the Mac in software rendering mode because of unsupported GPU and piss poor gaming drivers... kind of defeats this
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Mac Autocad doesn't even come with software rendering. So there is no need for a workstation card, it works and is supported with any GPU that is deemed acceptable at install time:

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=16470588
"Because AutoCAD for Mac does not have its own software renderer, it relies more heavily on the graphics hardware than the Windows version of AutoCAD"
 
I will state that while there are better workstation cards then gaming oriented cards, the r9's boast a pretty good capability.
 
Snowdog said:
Mac Autocad doesn't even come with software rendering. So there is no need for a workstation card, it works and is supported with any GPU that is deemed acceptable at install time:

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=16470588
"Because AutoCAD for Mac does not have its own software renderer, it relies more heavily on the graphics hardware than the Windows version of AutoCAD"
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I'm not sure why this is so hard for you to understand, directly from their FAQ:
9. Why is hardware designed for desktop or gaming applications not Certified or Recommended?

Some desktop or gaming-level hardware may work with the 3D display features in certain Autodesk software, but these products are not supported by Autodesk or the hardware vendor for use with 3D applications.

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=16318759
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What is so hard to understand in the statement, 'these products are not supported'?
 
CreepyUncleGoogle said:
The article you're quoting states multiple times this isn't anything close to typical usage.

From http://www.anandtech.com/show/7603/mac-pro-review-late-2013/14



It's an unrealistic, invented situation and it clearly demonstrates the PSU can handle more than it's rated 450 watt capacity. Throttling isn't really even related since that was due to thermal rather than power output limits.
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Running a system at full load is an "invented situation". Got it.
 
Skripka said:
Running a system at full load is an "invented situation". Got it.
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It's cool with me if you wanna ignore the stuff in the article you're referencing since it doesn't agree with your argument. :D

I doubt either of us would buy a Mac Pro anyhow. I don't like spending more than like a couple hundred on a computer and you don't seem like the sort of person the Mac Pro is targeted at either. For the people that are going to buy it, I'm sure the PSU is more than adequate. If not, it's under warranty and it'll get repaired or replaced at Apple's expense.
 
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