ProMagix HD360A workstation – $31,900 direct
(roughly £23,000/AU$43,500)
This monstrous Epyc-based workstation from Velocity Micro is capable of rivalling Apple’s top-end Mac Pro in all departments, at a much lower price point.
The Apple Mac Pro got heads turning for a number of different reasons; it sports a design like no other, it’s immensely powerful, and even got here with its own set of tremendous costly wheels.
At $51,399, it has 28 cores (courtesy of an Intel Xeon W-3275M CPU) and may accommodate as much as 1.5TB DDR4 ECC memory, two Radeon Pro Vega II Duo (that’s four GPU and 128GB HBM2 memory) and an 8TB SSD.
Nevertheless, there are machines on the market able to reaching identical heights at a lot lower price level. So we requested Velocity Micro, one of the many niche workstation vendors available on the market, to provide you with an AMD Epyc-based workstation to match Apple’s finest.
The first problem we stumbled upon was the fact that the Radeon Pro Vega II Duo appears to be a Mac Pro unique. Then there’s the fact that Velocity Micro programs have a for much longer lead time (4 weeks) compared to Apple’s (as little as 5 business days).
However aside from that, the ProMagix HD360A obliterates Apple’s top dog. Although it might probably go as much as 128 cores, we configured our SKU with 32 (EPYC 7282), paired it with 1.5TB DDR4 ECC RAM and a pair of Geforce TITAN RTX (each with 24GB of memory).
Add in a Sabrent Rocket Q PCIe SSD, a pair of 10Gbps Ethernet community adaptors, a 850W EVGA PSU, a Supermicro H11DSi – all securely hosted in a VM flagship chassis – and you’ve got a really capable machine that costs under $31,900. That’s almost $20,000 less than the most expensive model of the Apple Mac Pro.
Keep in mind, though, that the cheapest Mac Pro SKU can be had for “solely” $5,999.