Kind of funny, but what makes the new Mac Pro beautiful is the internal design, and that hackintosh is not beautiful on the inside.
Edit Since the link switched to the original forum post with more pictures: I must say the project was quite impressive and the end result is cool, though I still stand by my original point.
The trick of the MacPro is the integration of the AMD video which isn't something a modder is going to do.
The last tower machine I had years ago was loud and doubled as a room heater in winter. I still see video cards being made that require their own heat sink and fan. Then add all the other standard fans: power supply, CPU (+ heat sink), one or two on the case. You have these huge empty, inefficient boxes.
I really hope Apple brings their heat management knowledge to their other lines.
Edit: grammar.
[1] https://teksyndicate.com/videos/build-most-powerful-mini-itx...
But Apple has a truly novel design with the new Pro. Even the machine in your link has 1 CPU fan, 1 GPU fan and a power supply fan. And it's still quite empty and not that small. No one except Apple is even trying.
Zero upgradability? The Mac Pro is quite upgradable, with the exception of the GPU. It got a 8/10 from iFixit in this area.
I can slam in another PCIe SSD RAID next year and hopefully get rid of those too.
The Mac Pro of course can't slam in a PCIe RAID, you have only thunderbolt, which isn't as fast as a 16 lane. You have no ability to choose graphics cards made by third parties, my box just has reference design ones, with ek blocks on them for the cooling. Of course this means changing the graphics card takes 1 hour, then letting it "leak test" in the bathroom for a night. I would still say it's upgradable, but clearly I've traded ease for silence and performance (you can generally get very reliable over clocks with such cooling).
This is why people complain it isn't upgradable. You can't easily put in anything you want, it has to go external, which is fine for some, but abhorrent for others. The options of what you can upgrade are entirely a single vendor lock-in. Some people dislike that. These people (such as myself) like to have a free market of competition and innovation on every component available.
Being able to replace the PSU, GPGPU, 5.25" drives and 3.5" drives is upgradable. Expansion will have to be entirely done through external PCIe chassis, and TB2 is NOT as fast as PCIe3. It's such an inelegant solution and very half-assed.
I don't just want an engineering marvel on my desk. I want it to be pragmatic and easy to expand. Using the excuse that most machines are going the other way is not viable – this is a professional machine, and every professional has different standards.
Find a good price/performance ratio, buy and use machine for 2-3 years, sell and buy a new one. The fact that this machine houses all the components you want to upgrade inside of it (CPU,GPU,RAM,PSU) and all the components you want to keep outside (NAS/RAID primarily), makes this prospect that much better, less waste.
Not to mention the usually excellent value retention on Apple hardware makes this a pretty darn good investment. Again, if you are in the target market that is.
And it can also use thunderbolt based GPUs. But if your work justifies a $3K dual-GPU machine, would you really go about replacing graphics cards 2-3 years down the road, instead of just buying the latest model? It would have new-everything, and it would be a tax deductible busines expense after all.
Your thought train is living somewhere between these: https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/no-true-scotsman https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/special-pleading
Please review them, prove them wrong, and then we'll speak.
But even so, the fallacies are either stretched or completely inapplicable. Both the 'no true scotsman' and 'special pleading' fallacies involve constantly shifting goalposts, but we've only ever seen Jormundir say that internal design is part of what makes the new Mac Pro beautiful. Where are the shifting goalposts?
Like, I don't think that the fact that it's not beautiful on the inside is relevant to the fact that it's a cool as hell mod; I think it's completely irrelevant. But throwing fallacies at the statement is just weird. I don't get how they apply at all.
But inside, it was just a bog-standard Mini-ITX, standard graphics card, etc. Before I clicked on the link I was hoping to see something more unique.
Two of the neatest things about the new Mac Pro are it's size and silence. This mod is bigger (not surprising), but why not go further? If the enclosure was bigger you could have simulated the triangle layout of the Mac Pro and put something interesting down the middle.
Or you could work to make the machine quieter with some elaborate heat-pipe or water-cooling setup. I have a feeling the small graphics and CPU fans in that metal case make a fair amount of noise.
I guess I was expecting something much more exotic, maybe using a small single board computer (Beagle Bone or Raspberry Pi) or something else strange.
It looks nice considering the constraints of using normal PC hardware. Apple went back to the drawing board with the Mac Pro, I guess I'm a bit disappointed by this being 'just' a round case.
Macs have been using EFI boot for a few years, so the problem most have probably faced is trying to boot in BIOS emulation mode (which I've found to be iffy on pretty much every EFI motherboard I've come across).
Arch Linux has particularly good support. :P
Other distros don't seem to work with Apple's EFI implementation. To boot other distros, I've had good luck with the refind[1] bootloader. Granted, I have only been booting live USBs, not installing on the internal drive.
In fact, I have Win7, OS 10.9, and Arch Linux on this computer (early 2013 MBP Retina)
But you'll probably have to actually spring for your _own_ MacPro to mod the sensor.