

So, for the purposes of our price comparison, I simply searched for "Xeon motherboard" on Amazon and picked the most expensive.
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That brings us up to $1,479.įinding a motherboard to match the Mac Pro's specs wasn't entirely straightforward. The Corsair HX1200i matches these specs for a little under $230. We haven't priced out a motherboard, a power supply, a case, or cooling. Of course, that's not all a machine like this has to have. * You can pick up a comparable video card for under $250 * The teensy bit of storage in the Mac Pro can be had for $40 * 32GB of non-ECC RAM is $151, while Crucial lists ECC 2933GHz RAM for $209 * The Cascade Lake Xeon W-3223 processor lists for $750 I eventually settled on an Intel 2-port board that was about $200 in December and is now $179.

When I tried configuring a Hackintosh with specs comparable to my Mac Mini, I had some difficulty locating a 10GB network card that was both cost effective and might work. So, at least on the base model of the Mac Pro, Apple sure isn't spending its pennies on the storage.

On the other hand, it's possible to buy a 256GB NVMe SSD on Amazon for under $40. On the base Mac Mini, upgrading from 128GB to 256GB storage costs $200. Since that was soldered onto the Mac Mini's system board, I had to configure it from Apple at a cost of $600.
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It's hard to know how to say anything positive about 256GB of SSD storage on a $6,000 machine. We don't know what Apple charges for RAM on the Mac Pro, but when I spec'd out 32GB of RAM on the Mac Mini and an iMac, in both cases Apple added $600 to the price. Today, that's actually listed on Amazon for $151. When I bought my 32GB of RAM for my Mac Mini, I spent $288 on 32GB of 2666MHz DDR RAM. Therefore, in six-channel memory, you would get the best performance with six matching sticks. In quad-channel memory, you get the best performance by matching sets of four sticks. Generally speaking, if you have dual-channel RAM, you get the best performance by matching pairs of sticks. This might seem odd, because there are four DIMMs on a six-channel architecture. The Intel W-3223 processor in the base Mac Pro can only address 2666MHz memory, even though the machine itself is built for 2933MHz RAM. Base memoryĪccording to Apple, the base Mac Pro ships with four 8GB sticks of DDR4 ECC memory. If you're going to be stuck with one CPU for the life of this very expensive box, you'd probably be better off with a Core i9-9900K rather than the relatively weak Xeon W-3223. It's unfortunate, therefore, that Apple didn't say whether the base model CPU can be upgraded later. If it was, the Core i9 would have been a higher-performing model for most tasks at that performance level. Undoubtedly, the Mac Pro motherboard wasn't designed to optimize for the lower-end Xeon chip in the entry-level machine. The i9 is also $500, instead of the Mac Pro's base W-3223, which lists for $750.

According to their GeekBench scores, the i9 beats the Xeon W-2123 and Xeon W-2145 in both single and multi-threaded performance. In terms of the more consumer-level Core i9 chipset, the most comparable model is the i9-9900K, which also runs at 3.6MHz and has eight cores and 16 maximum threads. The closest performing shipping model with eight cores and 16 threads is the 3.7GHz W-2145. Of the Skylake processors, the 3.6GHz W-2123 is probably the closest in performance, but that has only four cores with up to eight threads. Our best opportunity is to compare similar Skylake Xeon W processors. Apple is including the $450-cheaper W-3223 in the base model Mac Pro.īecause this processor has just been announced, we don't have good benchmark numbers. But I carefully cross-checked all the detailed specs provided by Apple with Intel's processor specs, and those other sites are wrong in their estimations. Note: You may find that some other deconstructions of the Mac Pro's pricing online have guessed that the base Mac Pro will include the more expensive W-3225. It seems to benefit mostly high-end use, but the comparatively weak and slow W-3223 model may actually incur a performance penalty if those extensions are enabled. That said, the exact benefits (and performance cost) that come from use of the AVX-512 extended chipset are somewhat controversial. This extended chipset provides some advantages for scientific and machine learning applications. This is a pretty low-end processor, but it does support Intel's AVX-512 instruction set. That's the W-3223 model, which is priced at $749. Cascade Lake does have a 3.6GHz chip, with a Turbo Boost up to 4.0GHz (although max Turbo Boost is listed as 4.2GHz).
