Dear "Peace" and others who contend that one cannot build a Mac Pro equivalent for less money,
You forget the ease with which one can overclock components to achieve far higher performance than they are rated for. This is all but impossible to do well on a Mac, whereas it would be a piece of cake on a Hackintosh.
The 45nm Harpertown chips used in the Mac Pro are especially conducive to overclocking. To wit (all prices from everyone's favorite Egg):
Skulltrail 2 CPU MoBo: $630
Two 2.5 GHz E5420 Harpertown Quad Cores (same cache as that in the $2799 Mac Pro): $350 each, $700 total
Two Super Talent 1GB FB-DIMMS, DDR2 800, $48 each, $96 total.
If my math is correct, these core components come out to be right around $1,426. That leaves us $1,400 to play with for storage, optical drives, case and power supply, and a video card that isn't as anemic as the 2600 XT that the base Mac Pro comes with. I think one could probably come in at right about $2,000 total, for a savings of about $800.
As for the overclock, going from 2.5 to 2.8 is a very modest bump, and could easily be accomplished by bumping the FSB up a few MHz (both the MoBo and the RAM are capable of such speeds). Tom's Hardware found the Skulltrail board to be fairly decent at overclocking. I would venture to say that with luck, one could crank the Xeons up to a full 1600 MHz FSB, yielding a speed of 3.0 GHz (an option that, when specified on the Mac Pro, raises the total price to $3,600). For those who would like to argue that this would require an exotic cooling solution, I would point out that the higher spec'd chips come with the same heatsink as the lower ones do, and so they should be more than capable of dealing with the excess heat.
Whether or not this is what the Mac experience is supposed to be like is irrelevant; the point is, one can indeed build a system that performs equivalently for less money, and it would not be terribly difficult. Once the settings are made and tested, such a system will be as fast as (and possibly faster than) a Mac Pro for far less money.
) machines from an Apple authorised Hardware Compatibility List. Apple could code OS X to take a regular snapshot of machine specs and if the user were to phone up with a problem, provided from the last several snapshots there were no unsupported pieces of hardware, they could get help from Apple's Tech Support line.
