Hello,
I'm looking to buy a Mac Pro for 1 simple purpose:
I run a web marketing agency, and we're starting to do a lot of video. Many of our commercials / videos are 15-30 minutes long. Encoding of a single video like that in 1080 HD takes my 17" MacBook Pro i5 + SSD about 4-5 hours to compress. It's hell.
We're about to ramp up the production of videos to a mass scale with final cut + compressor app, and I need a strong machine to pretty much tear through encoding in a batch sequence.
So I looked at the various options between iMacs and Mac Pros, and figured that for our organization, the best bet would be to have a machine where we can upgrade easily as we need.. aka a Mac Pro. Since we can upgrade CPU's, it's very attractive of a setup if in a few years down CPU costs drop and we need the extra juice.
So I stumbled on apple's Mac Pro Quad Core refurbished model, which is actually $600 cheaper than a non-refurbished model.
I was attracted to it, because I could buy a $279 Apple Care, and still pay $300 less than the non-refurbished model.
Now why was I attracted to the Mac Pro?
Well according to the Final Cut Pro X feature list, the new Mac Pro's architecture was optimized to best work with the Final Cut Pro X software.
Thunderbolt 2 is faster than USB3, supporting up to 20 Gb/s. And you can daisy chain up to 36 devices.
Supports up to 3 4K monitors.
Given the ability to add more Memory, change CPU in the future, and be nicely setup for 4K monitors while having the peace of mind of a 3 year warranty all for $2,908 CAD (I run a business, so I can expense the the machine), it sounded like a pretty good deal.
I brought it up to our CTO, and he suggested that I should look at option # 2 if we're going to dish out $2.9K on a computer for video encoding. He suggested that we build a PC at a fraction of the price, and possibly get more power while still being able to run Mac OS on it. So I agreed to take a look at the alternative option, and decided to reach out to a community for their opinions.
First I'd need to know if I could build an alternative machine to the following specs, for cheaper than the $2,629 Mac Pro:
- 3.7GHz quad-core with 10MB of L3 cache Intel Xeon E5 (upgradeable to the 12 core)
- 12GB (3x4GB) of 1866MHz DDR3 ECC (supports up to 64GB)
- 256GB PCIe-based flash storage (upgradeable to 1TB)
- Dual AMD FirePro D300 GPUs with 2GB of GDDR5 VRAM each
- Thunderbolt 2 alternative (USB3 may be the only choice).
Then how much warranty would each individual component come with on the PC side? Can I get the total 3 years warranty as well?
Once that's solved, then we need to deal with installing Mac on a non-Apple machine. My questions are:
- Will most new configurations work?
- What problems am I expected to run into in the future as Apple releases new updates / new OS's.
- Am I expected to run into problems with drivers and miscellaneous incompatibility issues down the line?
- Will a hackintosh running on a non-Apple machine / hardware perform as well as an Apple machine?
- Is Final Cut Pro X really that optimized for the Mac Pro hardware / architecture?
Cheers,
Mike
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