The Mac Pro: So what’s a D300, D500 and D700 anyway? We have answers

Continued from page 1

The Value Discussion

Some people are getting the wrong idea about Apple’s new Mac Pros–again feeling that Apple is throwing them a special curveball. Numerous posts on the Net suggest this. But it must be stated again that Apple’s use of dual GPU’s has its reasoning.

Why would Apple only make Mac Pros with two GPUs? 

Not enough people are asking this question…and trust me there is a great answer.

Apple’s entry-level Mac Pro is at 2,999.USD. Out of that price, the dual D300’s may have value not less than 900.USD—2000.USD for the rest of the unit. 

Apple’s mid-level Mac Pro starts at 3,999.USD. Out of that price the dual D500’s net yield 85 percent of the streaming processors, 69 percent of the teraflops, and 75 percent of the video memory of a FirePro W8000. Averaging these the D500 yields 76 percent of much of the value of the W8000, or 1,308.USD. Apple appears to be equipping users with about 1,800.USD of graphics value in the dual D500 configuration—2,199.USD for the rest of the unit. 

We don’t have a price of a machine with access to the D700. But as we noted above it seems to be nearly identical in specs to the FirePro W9000, a three-thousand dollar GPU. If you configure the baseline machine and simply add that D700 to it the final price may be approximately 6,999.USD.

Our math doesn’t add up on this last guess. And that’s because we think Apple may scale value on the D700 quite a bit, essentially giving away the extra heaps of video ram. That would make the D700-equipped Mac Pros a “must-have” for the top-end performing pro users…and it would steal away dedicated Windows workstation users as well.

It’s just a guess…. 😉

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