Marcus Jackman, ConnectedLiving Tech, has his solution if one wants to invest some serious money into this project:
All of us have our own preferred tastes, but we at ConnectedLiving are fond of all technology and tend to approach all new tech and gear from a pragmatists standpoint; we are geeks after all! If you're like us or have a 'do-it-yourself' personality, than you might enjoy building your own PC to match or even beat the 2nd Generation Mac Pro.
As of now, Apple is allowing customers to pick and choose from a decent variety of specifications for a Mac Pro build, although they won't actually start shipping these guys until February 2014. You can opt for two choices: the consumer build, which comes with Quad-Core CPU and a Dual-GPU build, or the more advanced version which you could consider the 'High-End Workstation' build which comes with a 6-Core CPU and Dual-GPU options. You can go to Apple's Mac Pro website where you can choose your specs and see how much it will end up costing you.
I went ahead and built the top tier Mac Pro with everything Apple had to offer. I built only the desktop itself, as that is the main focus, that is, I did not pick all the extra features you can purchase from Apple, such as the 4k Thunderbolt Monitors, or the External Thunderbolt 2 Storage for Backups etc. Below is a snapshot I took from Apple's website with price included, I believe, before tax. In order to get everything in the snapshot the Intel Xeon E5 chip's picture is cut out but you can still see that I selected it, also note that although the Xeon E5 has 12 cores; 6 physical cores & 6 logical/virtual cores, its speed is stocked at 2.7 Ghz, a slower speed than the 6-core or 8-core. Therefore you're compensating a bit slower Ghz processing speed for more cores and more L3 cache.
So, Apple's pricing this bad-boy at around $9,600.00. The hype on the internet is that this price is difficult if not impossible to beat considering the specifications and tech. I, personally, beg to differ. I went ahead and brainstormed with other geeks & nerds on multiple online forums and did my own personal research on the side. My build is the following; the snapshot is taken from Newegg.com, a great site for computer components.
For the graphics card, NVIDIA is more mature in workstation GPU acceleration with CUDA compared to AMD/OpenCL, and the TITAN is vastly more powerful than the D700/Radeon HD 7970. The TITAN also has the full double-precision capabilities still intact unlike other GeForce consumer-grade cards, so it holds its own with workstation cards like the FirePros in tasks that make use of that, although with over $1000 of room left you could change them out for quadros or FirePro cards. The TITANs don't have ECC RAM like most workstation cards, but neither do the FirePros in the Mac Pro for some strange reason, so they are still even on that front.
Regardless ECC is mainly best used for server based computers, its not that useful for workstation computers that are used for video/photo editing.The system RAM is ECC here as with the Mac Pro and the motherboard I chose does have ECC support. No cost-cutting here. Dual SSDs in RAID 0 will keep pace with a PCIe SSD, not that it matters since it's pretty much impossible to tell the difference between those and a standard 6Gbps SSD, but I put it there just for the placebo, and you get double capacity as well. You could replace it with ASUS's 240GB RAIDR PCIe SSD card which is about the same price as the dual SSDs and would match the Mac Pro's configuration even better if you really wanted to.
The power supply is extremely efficient and is one of the best available on the market, and the case is very well built and widely acclaimed, Fractal designs all their cases to be extremely quiet and to keep all your components as cool as possible. The CPU cooler is more than adequate and the fans I chose are silent. So, not only more power, you also have double storage capacity, double RAM capacity all at a lower cost without sacrificing any quality.
The RAM would still be DDR3 1600MHz since apparently no one sells DDR3 1866-rated kits but the clock speeds are pretty much arbitrary and can be set manually if you want to. Of course technically there is no guarantee on how far memory sticks will overclock unless you buy something like a DDR3 2400-rated kit which is guaranteed to overclock to 2400MHz. They would still install at 1600Mhz default, but going from 1600MHz to 1866MHz is a pretty small gap and even an ECC DDR3 1600MHz kit should be able to do that with 2 minutes in your BIOS messing around with the numbers/voltage.
This build comes in at $7,067.85, before tax, on Newegg.com.
Don't believe me? Check it out for yourself by clicking the link above to view it on the public wish list on Newegg! Undoubtedly you can find the different components at even better prices by browsing around and purchasing at different sites.
Also with about a $2000.00 difference in price you could go ahead and deck out your build with all sorts of extra fun stuff. You could opt to choose a different motherboard such as the Asus Z-87 Deluxe Quad, if you really enjoy and or want Thunderbolt capability.
The main differences is that this build is a bit more cumbersome, in size, compared to the Mac Pro of course, but as far as cooling and upgradability a PC is the way to go. You could opt to put in more HDD's or SSD's, setup an internal RAID and of course, my personal favorite, overclocking the systems CPU to squeeze out all the possible power you can. With overclocking you could purchase an i7 4770k and beef it up to 4.0-5.0Ghz, you could even go ahead and do a dual CPU configuration, two i7 4770k's, giving you 16 overclocked cores! Don't forget that you can also overclock your GPU (video card).
If you are interested in overclocking your systems CPU and or GPU, you would of course have to go ahead and invest in some good 3rd party cooling, such as water coolers and or radiators, such as the H100i Corsair for your CPU and something like the NZXT Kraken G10 for your GPU.
The beauty of a PC is the ability to configure, pick and choose every detail of your system. Of course this isn't for all of us, some of us use technology for the simple fact it makes our lives facile and far more simple and the last thing we want to deal with is learning about things such as clock speed, RAM or whether a motherboard comes with SLI, Crossfire or PCI 2.0 or PCI 3.0 capabilities. In that case by all means go for the Mac Pro, its a great build and workstation that gives you everything you could desire out of a high-end desktop system with the ease of use and technical support that Apple is famous for.
-Marcus Jackman @ ConnectedLiving
