One thing no one has talked about yet is whether you'll be able to easily swap out the motherboard for a newer one sometime down the road of your ownership.
Considering that Apple doesn't even offer SSD modules for upgrade and since this isn't something the average user can do, the chance of them offering a M/B for upgrade is almost certainly nil.
Besides, next gen Xeons will sport 8-channel RAM (i.e. 16 DIMMs) which would require redesigned cooling in the back of the M/B. This chassis and M/B were made for each-other, kinda like peas and carrots.
No one seems to be figuring in the cost of the proprietary Swiss Cheese MP case and 1.4 kw PSU when doing the price comparisons. The value of those two components has to be close to $1300 and the motherboard itself at least 7-800 dollars. Roughly one third of the $5999 base price is made up by those three parts.
- The Corsair AX1600i, which is arguably one of the best (if not the best) PSUs money can buy (1600W, 80 PLUS Titanium, silent, innovative all-digital architecture, GaN transistors, etc), costs <$500. I highly doubt Apple's is better or even as good.
- The M/B doesn't look like a deluxe $800 M/B to me. The only premium components seem to be the PLX and the dual 10G Aquantia chips
- There's a good quality copy of the case (Dune Pro) that will sell for ~$280 (Linus did a tear down). It won't be the same of course, but just to get a feel for the cost.
I'd put these 3 Mac Pro components closer to $1000-$1200
Here is the Gigabyte Aorus Xtreme C621 motherboard. Build your own T2 chip free 2019 Mac Pro.
There's also the Dominus Extreme from Asus (similar pricing) and the probably cheaper (~$1,000?) EVGA SR-3 Dark which will be released in the coming weeks.
But to be honest, I wouldn't bother with the X599 platform. It was a hastily put together platform, serving as a knee-jerk reaction to AMD's 32-core Threadripper last year. These M/B monstrosities had a limited production run and there were several reports of bugs/issues.
On the other hand, the X299 platform works well under MacOS and with the recent big price cuts on the CPUs, is a (never thought I'd say it) better value. In multithreaded workloads, an overclocked 10980XE 18-core, would come very close (if not surpass) the low frequency 28-core (W-3275) that Apple uses, and would easily best it in single/lightly-threaded workloads.
Also, ASRock is said to be
adding support for up to 2TB of RDIMM/LRDIMM ECC RAM for (some?) X299 motherboards.
I don't understand why motherboard makers have failed to evolve with the times... The vast majority of video cards now take up two and often three slots. Keeping their PCI-e slots in their existing configuration will effectively block two slots (or four with triple wide cards) in a dual video card configuration.
The manufacturers are limited by the standardized M/B sizes and case layouts. They can't make oddly shaped or massive M/Bs, nor can they put the DIMM slots in the backside to save space. They max-out the slots and hope for the best.
there's also currently no way for builders to get an Afterburner card.
The Afterburner card seems like a regular PCIe card (
sells for $2,000). Barring any artificial or other limitations, my guess is that it should work with any hackintosh. Cooling it might prove a bit tricky though, but I wouldn't consider it insurmountable.
The overclocking with this board is going to be excellent. 5 GHz plus on all 28 cores is never going to be possible with a Mac Pro.
5GHz is not possible without extreme cooling. Intel infamously used an industrial grade water chiller to achieve 5GHz and they "forgot" to mention it in the presentation. With a top-end watercooling setup the best you could hope for is ~4.4GHz, at which point the CPU would consume a ridiculous ~600W of power.
Don't get me wrong I think Apple have done an incredible engineering job with the new Mac Pro, it's probably one of the best designed and engineered computers on the market (in its class)
Have you seen Nvidia's $50K watercooled
DGX Station, with its 4 Tesla V100 GPUs and the metal-foam air filter on the top? Others can design awesome systems as well.