From a consumer point of view:Then buy a single CPU model Mac Pro, thats why they have them.
The single CPU (4 core) MacPro is overpriced for what you get (performance/price), better get an 8 core it is not cheap but worth the price if you need/want a genuine Apple branded computer.
If you need your computer for work and don't think it's fun to tinker with OSX - get the 4 core anyway. Spare time or time spend with the children can be precious too.
Why do people always think that others "Can not afford" something? I wanted a 4 core tower - i could "afford" a MacPro but i bought a Gigabyte Board, Q9450, 8 Gig of Ram and a 9600GT and a MacBox Set instead of a MacPro. For the rest i bought a 2.26 GHz MacBook Pro... I really see no sense in getting a MacPro at this moment in time. Maybe i will get a 32 nm "Sandy Bridge" MacPro later on, if i loose interest in tinkering with OSX/have to spend too much time with getting things straight after an upgrade. This mostly depends on how my "vanilla" Snow Leopard installation works out.What do you do if you can't afford an Audi? Buy a VW.
It's really funny, this discussion everytime goes from:Thats extremely easy, OSX isn't licensed to run on anything but Apple-built hardware. Since you don't work on Apple's design team (you wouldn't be here if you did) it would be pretty darn hard to build an Apple machine.
"You can only put a piece of thrash together for 900$" to "You are not allowed to do it"...
Building a Hackintosh mostly is about having a (mid sized) consumer tower for a "good" price. -> Apple won't give consumers their xMac -> consumers build their own.For me, the problem with building an i7 is you can't do 8 cores and you can't do dual processor configurations. At that point, you might as well go Xeon, and you might as well get a Mac Pro.
The 8 core MacPro will blow away a 4 core Hackintosh in Benchmarks - the 4 core MacPro won't do it necessarily...You could argue that not everyone needs 8 cores, but that still means a real Mac Pro will blow away a Hackintosh in benchmarks. They aren't comparable, don't pretend they are.
In real world applications the 8 core MacPro will blow away a 4 core Hackintosh if the software uses all cores. If the 4 core Hackintosh is clocked higher than the 8 core MacPro and the software does not make use of all cores - it could be the other way around.
I admit that my Hackintosh is not a MacPro but i think your comparison is flawed. I would say that comparing a Hackintosh with a MacPro is like comparing a "consumer computer" to a "Workstation". The "Workstation" could be faster than the "consumer computer" but it also could be the other way around. A Nehalem Xeon is not faster than the Core i7 9xx at the same clock rate.It's a bit like someone saying that a netbook is comparable to a real notebook. They both have their uses, but it's plain stupid to pretend they are the same class of machine.
Oh what was the topic? Hackintosh graphic cards ...