A curious-about-Mac, thinking-of-coming-over-to-a-Mac newbie question here: About how much is "comparable" to a Mac Pro?
I currently have a scratch-built Intel E8400 machine running at 4GHz (on air), with 8GB of memory, and an 8800GT nVidia card, running Vista 64 (surprisingly (based on years of Windoz experience), it has yet to crash). About ~$1000-$1100 invested.
Are Mac Pro's down in that range?
That's quite a nice machine you've got there.
And as a Windows machine, yes, in 95% of all tasks it would outstrip a Mac Pro; however, running Mac OS X it would not, due to its highly parallelized nature; and in 10.6, forget it.
And if you compare it to the base Mac Pro stripped of one processor, yes, it's faster (though it can't have nearly as much RAM, I'd wager). However, consider the fact that in order to run dual Quad-core processors, they had to use highly expensive Xeons, which means very expensive motherboards, which means also fairly expensive (less so now) FBDIMMs.
Luckily, this will not be so the next time around, and FBDIMMs will likely be dropped, meaning a slight decrease in cost. It's unfortunate there isn't a Core 2 alternative that allows for dual-socket without requiring expensive processors and MoBos, but right now there simply are not.
Also, Mac Pros can be slightly overclocked as well.
But if I were going to build a machine, I'd have done exactly as you did... for my needs, an OC'd 8400 is
exactly the CPU I would have gone for... it's definitely the sweet spot... already at 3 GHz, fairly cheap, and with a ton of headroom... not to mention plenty fast.
