There is absolutely no debate here. Anyone who denies it is without a doubt a zealot of one camp or the other:
Alienware stomps the crap out of Mac Pros for performance.
Mac Pros stomp the crap out of Alienware for performance.
Depends on what your using them for.
If what your doing requires very low latency, high bandwidth, video performance then Alienware outshines the mac in so many ways it's humorous.
If you need to run multi-threaded apps and latency and memory performance is secondary and video is inconsequential, then Mac Pros shine.
Talking about "quality of parts" is fairly silly at this stage in the game. I mean who buys that marketing spiel about Apple getting the "super special reliable parts" of the exact same models. Read the press releases of every major OEM...they all say that. Apple computers ARE PC's now. In every way shape and form. So much so, that the only reason we can't run OSX on off the shelf hardware is due to a software dongle that apple uses to restrict users.
If the very top end of processing power in the 8 core Mac Pro models is used, then there is some ground to stand on in claiming Mac Pro's as performance kings since they are not available anywhere else.
As far as building your own, you can save 5-600 dollars by building your own dual xeon machine easily. I spec'd out the pieces at newegg real quick and it comes to about 2000.
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That includes a nice Lian Li case, when I first saw the design of G5's, I was sure that they had contracted Lian Li. A Tyan motherboard, the standard 1gb of ram, 2.66ghz Woodcrest Xeons, and a x1900GT ATI card (I picked the GT and not the XT because apple underclocks their XT cards to GT levels).
I also only have one cpu configured because they are sold out at the moment...the total with 2x cpu's comes out to right about 2k. Oh, looks like I forgot the hard drive. But that's like an extra 60 bucks for the 250GB Seagates that apple uses.
Apple's price: $2800
Build your own: $2100
Of course, people will start to nit pick. You get an os included, a nice personal management suite, warranties are exactly the same (1 year) and in some cases building your own gives you a better warranty (2 year). Maybe the mobo in the Mac Pro cost a bit more. But of course, the exact same could be done with a $2800 alienware compared to a newegg self bit (you get xp included, dell/alienware has a better default warranty if I'm not mistaken,etc. etc)
The mac is a pc with a DRM'd OS to keep you from running it on your own hardware (repeat that 3x).
And like any OEM machine, it comes with tax.
*edit* If you ask me what's sitting under my desk it's a Powermac G5. I felt the advantage of the best desktop Unix on the market right now was worth the tax and sacrifice. Not surprising since I thought the benefits of using Linux far outweighed the sacrifices
for what I do.
