This Mac Pro rival workstation costs almost half the price of Apple’s finest

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By Desire Athow
published

Two titans face-off, but there's one clear winner

Image

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.

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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 came with its own set of super expensive wheels.

At $51,399, it has 28 cores (courtesy of an Intel Xeon W-3275M CPU) and can accommodate up to 1.5TB DDR4 ECC memory, two Radeon Pro Vega II Duo (that’s four GPU and 128GB HBM2 memory) and an 8TB SSD.

However, there are machines out there capable of reaching the same heights at a much lower price point. So we asked Velocity Micro, one of the many niche workstation vendors on the market, to come up with an AMD Epyc-based workstation to match Apple’s finest.

The first issue we stumbled upon was the fact that the Radeon Pro Vega II Duo seems to be a Mac Pro exclusive. Then there’s the fact that Velocity Micro systems have a much longer lead time (four weeks) compared to Apple’s (as little as five business days).

But other than that, the ProMagix HD360A obliterates Apple’s top dog. Although it can go up to 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 network adaptors, a 850W EVGA PSU, a Supermicro H11DSi - all securely hosted in a VM flagship chassis - and you have a very capable machine that costs under $31,900. That's almost $20,000 less than the most expensive version of the Apple Mac Pro.

Bear in mind, though, that the cheapest Mac Pro SKU can be had for “only” $5,999.

Bear in mind

  • If this product is not available in your region, you may need to use a specialist parcel forwarding service to take advantage of the deal.
  • If you've managed to get hold of a cheaper product with equivalent specifications, in stock and brand new, let us know and we'll tip our hat to you.
Desire Athow
Desire Athow
Managing Editor, TechRadar Pro

Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled in website builders and web hosting when DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.