Why good platforms ignore mac?

[volpunter]

First of all, nobody said you need to buy the same component to reach similar specs. An I7 CPU (for example I7-3770) for example gets you 6 cores / 12 hyperthreads and performs slightly better than your Xeon CPU listed below and it costs half the price (279 Amazon). Same with pretty much all other components you listed (except SSD which is in the price range you indicated). Next, why would you need the video cards you listed? You can get incredibly powerful GPU cards (two actually) for 1000 USD and still render graphics at such frame rates that hardly any need arises to upgrade. The only applications I could ever imagine that make use of your mentioned GPUs are CAD and high end graphics applications.

Finally, you just picked the top of the line tech comparison I brought up, what about the mid-range desktop and laptop comparisons.

Sorry but your numbers are highly inflated and do not make much sense.

I think you're not very familiar with the specs:

Xeon E5-1620v2, $580
2x8 GB PC3-14900 ECC memory, $178
Plextor M6e 256 GB PCIe SSD, $200
2 x Imaginary GPU priced between AMD FirePro W7000 and AMD FirePro W8000, ($750+1300)/2*2 = $2,050
Gigabyte 6PXSV4 (Socket LGA 2011 motherboard with 3x PCIe x16 slots and RDIMM support) = $369

Subtotal = $3,377 excluding + case + power supply + assembly work.

Turns out I'm very accurate to estimate a premium of $300 to $500.

 

[rieszrep]

I'm sorry but you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

An i7 CPU does not perform better than a Xeon E5 CPU. Many important tasks for a financial workstation are I/O bound at the memory bus, e.g. try opening a 10 GB file of comma-separated values on Notepad on your i7 and you'll find that a Xeon E5 of the same generation, even at lower clock rate, will open it more than twice as fast. Your argument only holds for the Extreme Edition i7s, which are comparable to the E5s in this aspect, but are priced around the same or more than the E5-1xxx models.

The Plextor is cheaper than the OWC/Intel PCIe alternatives, and the Gigabyte board is the cheapest one meeting the specs that I could find. I could have listed an Asus/Supermicro/Tyan if you wanted to inflate the prices. Nothing top of the line.

Sure, I can agree that you don't want an AMD FirePro, but sticking 6 USB external video cards onto your PC and telling me that you've achieved "comparable" specs to 2 x AMD FirePros, or sifting through refurbished parts on eBay to compare pricing against the Mac Pro MSRP, is just lying to yourself.

First of all, nobody said you need to buy the same component to reach similar specs. An I7 CPU (for example I7-3770) for example gets you 6 cores / 12 hyperthreads and performs slightly better than your Xeon CPU listed below and it costs half the price (279 Amazon). Same with pretty much all other components you listed (except SSD which is in the price range you indicated). Next, why would you need the video cards you listed? You can get incredibly powerful GPU cards (two actually) for 1000 USD and still render graphics at such frame rates that hardly any need arises to upgrade. The only applications I could ever imagine that make use of your mentioned GPUs are CAD and high end graphics applications.

Finally, you just picked the top of the line tech comparison I brought up, what about the mid-range desktop and laptop comparisons.

Sorry but your numbers are highly inflated and do not make much sense.

 

[volpunter]

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+E5-1620+v2+@+3.70GHz

And please enlighten me why a XeonE5 CPU would open a large file faster than an i7. I can guarantee you that on an otherwise nearly identical platform a XeonE5 will not read a 10GB file faster than an i7-3770. Not even if you consider the different chipset and bus. You make claims that you have zero factual backup for and which lack any logic. I am sure any user worth his salt really wants to spend the extra 6k so he can open his 10gb files 50 milliseconds faster on a MacPro than on a PC, if your claim would ever hold true, which it does not.

And any newer Nvidia GPUs that are priced around 400-500 USD each should provide plenty GPU performance to handle virtually any task you throw at them. Stop splitting hairs here over a few more or less GPU cores, a mac pro priced around 12-15k does not perform a whole lot better than a PC that costs 6k, and neither does a PC that costs 2000 dollars perform any worse than a 4000 USD Mac.

And please let's get back to the mainstream case (I understand some CAD designers would prefer a top-of-the line MacPro, especially if their IT departments sit on piles of cash). Claiming a PC in the 1500-3000 dollar range is just 300-500 dollars cheaper than a similarly performant Apple machine is simply not true.

Ridiculous, I am out of here.

I'm sorry but you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

An i7 CPU does not perform better than a Xeon E5 CPU. Many important tasks for a financial workstation are I/O bound at the memory bus, e.g. try opening a 10 GB file of comma-separated values on Notepad on your i7 and you'll find that a Xeon E5 of the same generation, even at lower clock rate, will open it more than twice as fast. Your argument only holds for the Extreme Edition i7s, which are comparable to the E5s in this aspect, but are priced around the same or more than the E5-1xxx models.

The Plextor is cheaper than the OWC/Intel PCIe alternatives, and the Gigabyte board is the cheapest one meeting the specs that I could find. I could have listed an Asus/Supermicro/Tyan if you wanted to inflate the prices. Nothing top of the line.

Sure, I can agree that you don't want an AMD FirePro, but sticking 6 USB external video cards onto your PC and telling me that you've achieved "comparable" specs to 2 x AMD FirePros, or sifting through refurbished parts on eBay to compare pricing against the Mac Pro MSRP, is just lying to yourself.

 

[rieszrep]

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+E5-1620+v2+@+3.70GHz

And please enlighten me why a XeonE5 CPU would open a large file faster than an i7. I can guarantee you that on an otherwise nearly identical platform a XeonE5 will not read a 10GB file faster than an i7-3770. Not even if you consider the different chipset and bus. You make claims that you have zero factual backup for and which lack any logic. I am sure any user worth his salt really wants to spend the extra 6k so he can open his 10gb files 50 milliseconds faster on a MacPro than on a PC, if your claim would ever hold true, which it does not.

Firstly, the i7-3770 has 4 cores, not 6 as you earlier claimed, which is already a huge flaw in your argument.

Secondly, the Xeon E5-1650v2 has 4 memory channels with DDR3-1866 support, therefore it is able to achieve a maximum memory bandwidth of 59.7 GB/s as opposed to 25.6 GB/s on the i7-3770. Passmark's software measures a broad set of metrics and does not stress test this feature.

And please let's get back to the mainstream case (I understand some CAD designers would prefer a top-of-the line MacPro, especially if their IT departments sit on piles of cash). Claiming a PC in the 1500-3000 dollar range is just 300-500 dollars cheaper than a similarly performant Apple machine is simply not true.

You have yet to describe to me a concrete example of a $2,000 comparable build, while I have given you a very specific and conservative build list that another forum user agrees matches the fair retail prices.

I can see why you are getting out of here.

 

[volpunter]

fair point, when I talked about a comparable i7 CPU I picked one of similar performance than your Xeon E5. It does not change anything about the fact that an about similar performance metric can be had for close to 1/2 the price for the whole platform.

And you are still incorrect that your choice of CPU impacts file I/O (it is at most negligible among the better ranked CPUs). It is total nonsense what you said that having an E5 CPU opens (and I presume you wanted to include "read" as well) faster than a comparable i7 cpu.

To be honest, I do not want to argue with you anymore about hardware components if you do not even understand hardware design and the fact that your stated file I/O has NOTHING whatsoever to do with your choice of CPU nor memory bandwidth. I showed you several pricing examples of Apple computers in various performance and price ranges and demonstrated how you can easily price a comparable PC at about half the price.

I run a 8 monitor setup on a i7-3930K, 64gb memory, and am sure I run circles around most MacPros (other than the top of the line products). My computer cost me less than 1400 to build. (screens not included obviously. Show me a MacPro that performs at similar levels that is priced at less than 2800 dollars and then we can talk. Caveat, I do not perform heavy GPU rendering work so GPU power for me is entirely unimportant. (but just for comparison purposes I run on 1 Nvidia GTX580 card and 2 even lower priced cards). I run Windows 7 and would love to see a MacPro that is priced at twice the price of my platform that runs analyses in R, Matlab, and self-programmed backtest algorithms (that take full advantage of multiple cores) anywhere as fast as my machine. Then, and only then we can talk further.

Firstly, the i7-3770 has 4 cores, not 6 as you earlier claimed, which is already a huge flaw in your argument.

Secondly, the Xeon E5-1650v2 has 4 memory channels with DDR3-1866 support, therefore it is able to achieve a maximum memory bandwidth of 59.7 GB/s as opposed to 25.6 GB/s on the i7-3770. Passmark's software measures a broad set of metrics and does not stress test this feature.



You have yet to describe to me a concrete example of a $2,000 comparable build, while I have given you a very specific and conservative build list that another forum user agrees matches the fair retail prices.

I can see why you are getting out of here.

 

[volpunter]

(246) Gigabyte LGA 2011 DDR3 2133 Intel X79 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Motherboard GA-X79-UP4
(569) Intel Core i7-3930K Hexa-Core Processor 3.2 Ghz 12 MB Cache LGA 2011 - BX80619I73930K
(160)16gb Memory (DDR3 2400 Mhz)
(140) 250GB Samsung 840 EVO
(280) GTX580 GPU
(150) PSU
Subtotal : 1545 (all prices off Amazon.com)
This is not my machine (though I do own some of the above components)

Admittedly you still need a case and couple small components but I think it is a fair comparison with the following MacPro because the Mac is only a quad core with 12gb memory ,
thus most likely will underperform the above platform in raw algorithm performance.

(2994) Apple Mac Pro ME253LL/A Desktop
http://www.amazon.com/Apple-Mac-Pro...e=UTF8&qid=1399985457&sr=8-1&keywords=mac+pro

-> The MacPro is 93% more expensive.

Please do not scream at the unfair video card differential. We are talking mainstream usage, and for raw performance computing, gaming, or most other tasks a GTX580 (or similar cards) are in no way inferior to an onboard D300 card (in fact in most benchmarks the GTX580 outperforms a D300 card). Admittedly in this particular example the MacPro may read data off the flash memory faster than from an SATA based SSD drive. So, with all the give and takes on the CPU side, GPUs , memory, and storage side, I think the above is a pretty fair comparison.

 

[SuperCruz]

This thread has a great discussion. I think Macs are cool and all, but I do agree that Windows has gotten a lot better and this whole “we hate Microsoft” mantra has to die. Linux and Mac have their uses and some of those are quite good, but Windows Server 2012 is a lot better than the old days of Microsoft. They’re really trying and succeeding at making good OSes.

 

[mgookin]

Apple is a horrible company. They prey on the young and naive. In the year the ipod came out I spent thousands of dollars purchasing ipods for disadvantaged kids. They all opened them up Christmas morning only to discover that even when you already have thousands of mp3 files, not a single one will run on them. You have to purchase "licenses" for each song from Apple. We since found a hack program to bypass the requirement, but that does not change what Apple did nor does it change the fact that a team of engineers spent pretty much the entire Christmas day fighting these devices from a "fuck you pay me" mafia company.

Fuck Apple. The best thing that ever happened to them was the death of Steve Jobs. The next best thing will be the death of the company.

 

[rieszrep]

To be honest, I do not want to argue with you anymore about hardware components if you do not even understand hardware design and the fact that your stated file I/O has NOTHING whatsoever to do with your choice of CPU nor memory bandwidth.

Seriously, just open an 8 GB text file in Notepad and then see your process memory usage.

(246) Gigabyte LGA 2011 DDR3 2133 Intel X79 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Motherboard GA-X79-UP4
(569) Intel Core i7-3930K Hexa-Core Processor 3.2 Ghz 12 MB Cache LGA 2011 - BX80619I73930K
(160)16gb Memory (DDR3 2400 Mhz)
(140) 250GB Samsung 840 EVO
(280) GTX580 GPU
(150) PSU
Subtotal : 1545 (all prices off Amazon.com)
This is not my machine (though I do own some of the above components)

Admittedly you still need a case and couple small components but I think it is a fair comparison with the following MacPro because the Mac is only a quad core with 12gb memory ,
thus most likely will underperform the above platform in raw algorithm performance.

(2994) Apple Mac Pro ME253LL/A Desktop
http://www.amazon.com/Apple-Mac-Pro...e=UTF8&qid=1399985457&sr=8-1&keywords=mac+pro

-> The MacPro is 93% more expensive.

Please do not scream at the unfair video card differential. We are talking mainstream usage, and for raw performance computing, gaming, or most other tasks a GTX580 (or similar cards) are in no way inferior to an onboard D300 card (in fact in most benchmarks the GTX580 outperforms a D300 card). Admittedly in this particular example the MacPro may read data off the flash memory faster than from an SATA based SSD drive. So, with all the give and takes on the CPU side, GPUs , memory, and storage side, I think the above is a pretty fair comparison.

I'm glad that you concede that read/write is faster on the PCIe SSD, but you're still sweeping the huge disparity under the rug: Sequential read/write throughput via a PCIe SSD is more than 3 times that of that Samsung Evo that you're citing, and bit error rates are higher on the Samsung because the data streams through a SATA cable. An i7 is nowhere similar to a Xeon and there's no ECC memory in your specs.

If you just tried to be honest with yourself and listed comparable specs, you will find that my statement of $400-$600 premium is very accurate.

 

[volpunter]

* Load times are negligibly different between top of the line PCI-E SSD drives and SATA SSD drives. I read reviews where a high performance SATA SSD drive performs a little better than a mediocre PCI-E one. However, the differences are negligible unless you are in the business of loading and storing files all day, which you and I and most likely nobody on this board is in.

* I thought we established in many pages of chit back and forth that an i7-3930K with 6 cores outperforms the specific E5 Xeon model you cited. Not one single review, not at Dr.Dobbs (arguably one of the most professional IT and hardware forums), nor at any other review places such E5 higher than an i7-3930K, not for gaming, not for algorithm performance, not for graphics rendering, not for anything. But again, it does not matter because the i7-3930K is similarly priced than your E5 and a board can also be had for a similar price than my spec board.

* Seriously, dude, ECC? If that really makes or breaks the deal then go ahead, champ, pay 93% more for your retarded MacPro and boast you have ECC memory. Simply pathetic.

I have nothing else to add, and I think we have said everything there is to be said, at least I did. Fact remains that a MacPro is ridiculously priced vs any equally performing PC setup. Cheers.

Seriously, just open an 8 GB text file in Notepad and then see your process memory usage.



I'm glad that you concede that read/write is faster on the PCIe SSD, but you're still sweeping the huge disparity under the rug: Sequential read/write throughput via a PCIe SSD is more than 3 times that of that Samsung Evo that you're citing, and bit error rates are higher on the Samsung because the data streams through a SATA cable. An i7 is nowhere similar to a Xeon and there's no ECC memory in your specs.

If you just tried to be honest with yourself and listed comparable specs, you will find that my statement of $400-$600 premium is very accurate.