Apple's New Mac Pro Costs Less than a DIY PC Version Thanks to AMD

Apple’s new Mac Pro began shipping several days ago and it’s no understatement to say that you will need quite a bit of money in your bank account if you’re hoping to pick one up. The base model Mac Pro checks in at $2,999 USD, though that price tag can easily climb up to nearly $10,000 if you really want to trick it out. Specifically the top-end configuration on Apple’s new Mac Pro will set you back $9,599. For this much money, you’ll get a machine with 64 GB of RAM, a 12-core 2.7 GHz Intel processor with 30 MB of L3 cache, a solid 1TB of PCIe flash storage and dual AMD FirePro D700 GPUs with 6 GB of GDDR5 VRAM each. With this price tag, the Mac Pro is clearly not geared toward the average consumer. Still, there is no denying that the price tag is a whole lot of money, even for seasoned professionals.

The final sum of the cost may come as somewhat of a surprise as well:

After tabulating all the major component costs (plus another $99.99 US for Windows 8 Pro), we are at a total of around $11,530.54 US using today's prices at retailers that actually stock the hardware. I'm not afraid to admit that compared to the asking price of $9,599 US, the new Mac Pro seems like one heckuva deal for these components. Everything is tested to work properly together (versus some of our unknown incompatibilities with this potential build), and a highly proprietary design that is small enough to fit into a carry on bag, with twice the amount of registered memory (32GB vs 64GB ECC). You simply can't build a smaller form factor PC that matches the Mac Pro today.

If you’re hoping to put all of the Mac Pro’s computing power into a do-it-yourself machine, good luck trying to get everything to fit into a machine the size of the Mac Pro, which is just 9.9-inches tall and 6.6-inches across. As for the nearly $2,000 price difference, the folks over at TechGage pointed out that a lot of the savings comes from the relatively cheap upgrade price that Apple offers for AMD’s dual D700s. TechGage posits that this is likely due to AMD “bending” for Apple to prevent them from going the NVIDIA route

Apple’s new Mac Pro is undeniably pricey but you’re getting a whole lot of bang for your buck too if you need the type of processing power it provides. Still, if you look at the concept from a different angle, the new Mac Pro is still much cheaper than the nearly $1 million an anonymous bidder put down for the red Mac Pro that was recently up for auction at Sotheby’s.

Source: FutureLooks , TechGage