sje wrote:The Apple Retina iMac can be had with a 4.0 GHz Core i7 (I7-4790K) for $2,750, but that system has limited expandability and there have been many concerns about thermal overloading of the Radeon video. Like the current Mac Pro, the Retina iMac has too much Revision Zero Apple hardware risk and too much effort was spent on looks instead of on performance.
I would like a high-end video card for its OpenCL capability for coding chess in OpenCL under Linux. Mostly the machine would be operated remotely anyway and would be hosting Symbolic for ICS competition. I already have a USB3 SSD for tablebase storage ready to go.
It does have some creature comforts that make it a pleasure to work with. All aluminum casing keeps the temp naturally cooled, turn turbo boost off and it's the quietest 4 core machine out there.
With that said, the Mac Pro is what you really want and you upgrade the base Mac Pro to 6 Core for $500 - $3499 total and with educational discounts you get that down to $3200. Everybody knows somebody that has educational credentials and my experience is that Apple is not real anal about the credentials to begin with - would you be if you were making 50% profit on every sale?
Are you going to have it build or are you going to build it yourself?
When you are going to build it yourself you have to be very careful when mounting the CPU on the mainboard, these 2011 tiny springs are so fragile that only the slightest touch will destroy the mainboard.
It happened to me in the past with a socket 1366 mainboard, I dropped the CPU on the socket from ~1.5 cm high and the board was destroyed beyond repair, and no warranty of course.
If you want to overclock the system, which it can easily handle, I would suggest to get a decent CPU cooler. I use a Noctua NH-D15 cooler which performs excellent, the only drawback is that it is very large and doesn't fit in all computer cases.
An 800 Watt power supply should be enough, even when you use one of these power hungry AMD video cards. I used a few AMD R290 cards in the past, for OpenCL, they were drawing ~300 Watt each on full load.
No overclocking for me; I don't want to take the slightest risk of having any incorrect results.
The store proprietor will be handling all the assembly and check-out issues. So he rightfully earns his profit by assuming all responsibility for a working machine.
The large number of ports on the US$382 ASUS mainboard puts Apple to shame. There's 10 x USB 3.0, 2 x USB 2.0, etc. There's even a Thunderbolt port!
I've been using the AMD 7850 before I bought the R290 cards, it also has decent Open-CL performance.
Is the WiFi adapter not present on the mainboard? I never used it because I have everything wired, but I noticed that there is a driver installed for a Broadcom 802.11ac WiFi adapter.
Last edited by Joost Buijs on Fri May 15, 2015 8:15 am, edited 2 times in total.
I happen to own a current model 27" iMac with a 3.4 GHz quad core Core i5 and a 2 GiB NVIDEA GTX 775M GPU. It's loaded with 32 GiB RAM I installed myself.
It looks nice, but some of the ergonomics are crap. Every time I have to plug/unplug USB/other, I need to get up out of my chair, rotate the iMac clockwise, and then bend over to get to the I/O ports. Sticking the power switch on the back of the machine was stupid, as was the idea unnecessarily restricting the speaker aperture just to make the case look thinner.
Joost Buijs wrote:Is the WiFi adapter not present on the mainboard? I never used it because I have everything wired, but I noticed that there is a driver installed for a Broadcom 802.11ac WiFi adapter.
I think that 802.11ac hardware is already part of the mainboard. I sent an email to the store guy asking about this. I can only hope that there's some Linux support.
Joost Buijs wrote:Is the WiFi adapter not present on the mainboard? I never used it because I have everything wired, but I noticed that there is a driver installed for a Broadcom 802.11ac WiFi adapter.
I think that 802.11ac hardware is already part of the mainboard. I sent an email to the store guy asking about this. I can only hope that there's some Linux support.
I heard back from the store this morning and he said that there were two versions of the mainboard; I'll now be getting the version with the WiFi support and so no PCI card will be needed.
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While there are differences between my order and the $5,500 octo core Mac Pro, what I'm getting has essentially the same CPU at the same speed along with four times the RAM at half the total price.
The only difference I can find between the Xeon in the Mac and the Core i7 in my machine is that the Xeon has a 30 MiB L3 cache while the Core i7 has only 20 MiB. However, the RAM in the Mac runs at 1,800 MHz while the RAM in my machine runs at 2,133 MHz, so maybe things are even overall.
The Mac has better video and an SSD. I can add these if I need them.
Joost Buijs wrote:Is the WiFi adapter not present on the mainboard? I never used it because I have everything wired, but I noticed that there is a driver installed for a Broadcom 802.11ac WiFi adapter.
I think that 802.11ac hardware is already part of the mainboard. I sent an email to the store guy asking about this. I can only hope that there's some Linux support.
I heard back from the store this morning and he said that there were two versions of the mainboard; I'll now be getting the version with the WiFi support and so no PCI card will be needed.
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While there are differences between my order and the $5,500 octo core Mac Pro, what I'm getting has essentially the same CPU at the same speed along with four times the RAM at half the total price.
The only difference I can find between the Xeon in the Mac and the Core i7 in my machine is that the Xeon has a 30 MiB L3 cache while the Core i7 has only 20 MiB. However, the RAM in the Mac runs at 1,800 MHz while the RAM in my machine runs at 2,133 MHz, so maybe things are even overall.
The Mac has better video and an SSD. I can add these if I need them.
Geek bench Comaprison of Mac Pro 8 Core to iMac. Specifically , my iMac which was ranked 13th of all iMacs ever tested when I ran it.
sje wrote:
I heard back from the store this morning and he said that there were two versions of the mainboard; I'll now be getting the version with the WiFi support and so no PCI card will be needed.
I've never seen an Asus X99 Deluxe without WiFi support here in Europe.
The latest one is X99 v3.1 with USB 3.1, Bluetooth and WiFi support.
