So here’s the deal. I want a desktop/workstation to do photo stuff, but I think the Mac Pro is too expensive.
My general requirements are a good price/perf ratio new CPU, 2GB of RAM, 500GB+ of hard drive space, a mid-range graphics card, and nice looking, quiet case.
I can take the base Mac Pro, reduce the clock speed, add memory for MemoryToGo, add a seagate hard drive, and it comes to about $2500.
Or I can make one of several PC systems. I’ll first list the parts that would be common across all three:
* Antec P180 case ($130)
* Antec New HE 430W Power supply ($80)
* 2 x 1GB DDR2 800 Memory (~$200, I don’t plan to overclock)
* Nvidia 7600GT card (~$150-200)
* 2 x Seagate 7200.10 320GB SATA drives (~$100 each)
* Total cost: $760-810
As for the motherboard CPU combo, there are some choices:
* Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 + Intel basic motherboard ($260 + $120, total system cost $1140-1190)
* Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 + Asus P5B Deluxe ($260 + $260, total system cost $1280-1330)
* AMD Athlon 64 x2 4600+ + Asus M2N-SLI ($266 + $135, total system cost $1160-1210)
There are several tradeoffs:
* The E6400 seems more interesting than the 4600+, the performance is better for the same CPU price.
* The ASUS boards are more featureful than the Intel basic board. Especially the Asus AMD board has the nForce 570 SLI chipset which has all kind of fancy stuff. The Intel Asus board has a P965 chipset, but with lots of extras like dual gigabit and SP/DIF output.
The tradeoff between the first and third option is CPU performance vs motheboard feature set. If you believe “Tom’s hardware’s CPU price/perf chart”:http://images.tomshardware.com/2006/08/21/060821_dual-core_chart.jpg then the Intel CPU is about 10% faster than the AMD one. The second option is the ‘best of both worlds’ option that costs a little bit more.
When all is said and done though, even the most expensive PC configuration comes to about half of a Mac Pro. Sure it’s a quad, but I don’t need a quad. Commiting to a quad makes other things expensive too (notably, the add-on memory), so not only do you have a higher initial fixed cost, the later variable cost is higher as well. Adding another 2GB of memory to the Mac Pro is $350. The same for the PC is $200.
That’s not to say the the Mac premium is totally not worth it. There are several reasons why people go with the Mac over a PC:
* OS X + Apps
* Good looking
* Carefully picked and combined hardware configuration
* Time saved in acquiring a ‘good’ machine
The question for me is, are all these worth $1200 for me? Well, the first one I can’t get around. Unless Apple lets OS X run on generic PC’s that will always be the case. But specifically for the Photo editing domain, there is at least an equivalence between Mac and Windows apps.
As for the last three, I think I can still make a good looking machine (the P180 looks pretty good to me), I feel confident in my skills to put together a solid machine with good parts, and the time saving is, well, not worth it, especially if I enjoy part of the process of putting the thing together.
I think for the Powerbook, it was slightly different. I wanted OS X, and the Powerbook was actually the only machine that had the hardware configuration that I wanted (Dual-Link DVI, fast graphics card, etc.)
Certainly when I think my time is worth more, or when photo processing on the Mac is just that much better than on windows, I can see there being a day where I would go with the Mac Pro. But for now, it still looks like the PC may have better value for me for this purpose. Of course, I can always still use my Powerbook for all the other stuff.