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Comment by thomastjeffery | Hacker News Reader

A $650 motherboard? $242 PSU?

They obviously weren't trying very hard.

$5000 is a lot of money to pour into one PC. Even if you are spending $1300 of that on a monitor.

They under-balled it if anything. They used a $400 Broadwell Xeon, while the base iMac Pro has a Skylake Xeon W. The chip is a custom Apple SKU, but the closest is a $1,100 Xeon W 2145.

$650 is steep for a motherboard, but it has dual 10 gig-e ports and supports registered ECC. A SuperMicro motherboard with the Xeon W support will run about $350 (they’re not out yet) and an X550AT2 NIC is about $200 on eBay.

Slightly less: the iMac Pro uses the ~$100 AQC107 whereas the X99 motherboard chosen uses the more expensive X550AT2 because Aquantia only launched their chips this year.

But yeah, the Xeon they chose is quite a bit slower than the 8-core Xeon-W; the Broadwell equivalent was really the $1100 E5-1660 v4.

So -$200 for motherboard, +$700 for CPU, and -$100 for PSU if you're feeling generous. That's still $5k.

* Video Card: Zotac - GeForce GTX 1080 Ti 11GB Founders Edition ($678.99) whereas the actual gpu used in the mac is $399

* Power Supply: SeaSonic - PRIME Titanium 1000W 80+ Titanium Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply ($242.89)whereas they could have gotten a fine psu for $99

* Operating System: Microsoft - Windows 7 Professional ($134.99) How about not and say we did.

* Monitor: LG - UltraFine 5K Display 60Hz Monitor ($1299.95) whereas one can probably get a really nice 4K monitor for 400-500. Some can spend the extra funds on another 4K monitor, others you know already have monitors.

* CPU Cooler: NZXT - Kraken X62 Liquid CPU Cooler ($158.99) Did I miss the part where the mac is liquid cooled why is this here?

* CPU: Intel - Xeon E5-2620 V4 2.1GHz 8-Core Processor ($408.99) This is an amazingly poor choice while relatively expensive its performance is decidedly mediocre being an older generation.

Motherboard: Asus - X99-E-10G WS SSI CEB LGA2011-3 Motherboard ($649.00) Expensive not primarily because its awesome but because its xeon.

The $1059 could have been better spent on this motherboard http://www.asrock.com/MB/AMD/X399%20Taichi/index.asp#Specifi... note supports dual gb lan and ecc, $340

this cpu

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1681911... $535 and about $100 for a single port 10G lan

Total $975 between motherboard and cpu

All in all a machine could be built that is nearly equivalent for about 3544. Given the extra $1500 one could buy a second 27" 4k monitor upgrade to 16 cores and buy a second gpu.

Pretending mac is comparable in price to pc remains silly.

I can’t soeak specifics about the PSU but to get a server class intel motherboard (Xeon support, ECC ram), you really do have to spend quite a bit more than for the equivalent consumer board. Even if you reduce the cost of the motherboard to 200, and the psu to 150, you’re still not saving a huge amount off 5k, and you’re not getting an all in one

Now if only they also made a laptop with ECC RAM.

I'd gladly pay 1k more to have a stable system.

It's your system really that unstable?

If so, are you sure it's the RAM?

Systems without ECC do crash, have transient "weird issues" and corrupt data significantly more.

If stability matters to you, you should really demand ECC for any system you purchase. It's the best bang for buck to that end.

> ECC ram

I'm not sure how Apple has people convinced they need ECC. It's practically worthless outside of very specific workloads. A workstation user does not fill several gigabytes of RAM with terse important data, query it millions of times/day, and do so 24/7 all year long.

I've had ECC RAM once, it failed and ECC caught it before it could damage any documents. ECC memory also keeps a log of how many corrections it's made. In a long running machine that gets hot there _are_ bit flips and they _are_ significant. Especially if you're spent days working on a video file and don't have the technical skills to fix it in a hex editor.

I've also had memory issues on non-ECC machines, it's a lot harder to diagnose and much more frustrating. ECC memory should be standard in modern machines IMO.

> Especially if you're spent days working on a video file

And didn't keep a backup. Most serious software will make incremental copies to avoid that problem too.

Seriously, hardware failures are just as likely.

ECC is useful, but isn't worth it for the price unless you actually can't be fault tolerant in any way.

Backups and ECC address completely different problems. Backup systems will happily store corrupted files into your backup disks. ZFS-style filesystem level checksums won’t catch many problems either, because they only check to see if what you wrote is the same as what was read back. If the data was corrupted in memory, it’ll happily pass you back corrupted data.

it only takes one bit flip in the FS cache, which is what your 'free' RAM will be used for, to make your day miserable. ECC (maybe) isn't worth it for consumers of content, but for creators it should be standard. not to mention rowhammer-like attacks which ECC makes harder though not impossible.

Just because there are real reasons to have ECC does not mean you are going to experience them, let alone experience headache because of them.

Software is fault tolerant. Small memory failures can be trivially tolerated.

ECC simply isn't worth the cost, especially for workstations.

> Software is fault tolerant. Small memory failures can be trivially tolerated.

Most software is not at all fault tolerant in this respect. It just crashes. Fortunately, most users are somewhat fault-tolerant.

It only takes one bit wrong to fuck your file system.

From what I understand (very roughly) with ZFS or BTRFS at least it takes one flipped bit in the particular block of memory which has just been successfully checksummed and 'approved' by the filesystem as valid for a write operation. Those are quite a few hoops to jump through so let's not head towards melodrama just yet.

That’s fine but most of us are running on NTFS, HFS+ or ext4 where it matters.

And then there’s the same problem with MLC SSDs which are just arrays of capacitors encoding that state as different charge potentials. As a former EE, capacitors leak regardless of implementation.

In 20+ years that bit eluded me...

dram cells used to be bigger.

Yes. Exactly.

Also SSDs scare me more. MLC disks have so many states stored in a capacitor that is trusted not to leak over the lifetime of the device. All it takes is a few electrons to go walkies and it’s game over.

As far as you know.

You make it sound like filesystems are so vulnerable. They aren't.

The chances of memory failure ruining data are extremely slim; lower than for hardware failure. If you care about your data, back it up.

Backups don't do anything if the original material contains the flipped bits.

I ran a lab notebook in word for a number of years and the document got fried by a filesystem error. The backup was toasted as well. This was corruption which broke the stage machine or parser in word which acted as a damage amplification.

As for the source of the error, we can only speculate but the possibility of a flipped bit is higher than you think.

Try running memtest86 on a PC without ECC for a week. You will be surprised at the results. I’ve seen perhaps 3 or 4 failures of this in new hardware. DRAM is not perfect.

Yeah might as well get cheaper RAM, a slower SSD, and a Pentium, because everyone knows quality components are a ripoff, and the people at PC Gamer are just Apple fanboys and don't know what they're talking about.

That's a horrible system for $3700 dlls. You can easily shave $1k off if you're smart about shopping for the parts. Also, assuming you're not going for OSX (apples and oranges I know), a thread ripper would be a much better choice for a CPU.

ECC us unlikely to be worth the inflated price, too.

A slightly slower CPU can be had for a significantly lower price. GPUs are a lot more important to most workloads.

... But I didn't mention any of those.

The only reason for an expensive motherboard is to use multiple video cards.

>$200 is not a good price for a PSU. 1000watt is absolutely unnecessary unless you need to power 3-4 GPUs.

My point is that you can easily build a very similar system for half the price. This isn't the rattly '90s. $5000 is a lot for one PC.

If you want to shell out $3700 on PC components, you can build a much more powerful system, especially when you start putting in more GPUs.

> $200 is not a good price for a PSU. 1000watt is absolutely unnecessary unless you need to power 3-4 GPUs.

For sure. I had this argument a few weeks before the iMac Pro came out with someone who insisted that it'd come with an 850W, more likely 1KW+ PSU...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15922978

iFixit's tear down? 500W PSU.

Bit silly I reckon as well as you can get similar single threaded performance for much cheaper. If you need 18 cores maybe, but $5k? But Apple have always figured out how to upsell computers perfectly.

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