[dylanreeve]

The whole post was really just a mental exercise. Clearly it's not possible to build something that matches the Mac Pro exactly - even if you could perfectly match all the advertised specs, the Mac is on a custom board, with customised hardware and included hardware-specific OS optimizations.

Those GPUs specifically were chosen because they seem the closest match - while there is apparently a 2GB version of the card, it doesn't seem to be widely available.

I'm sure someone with a lot more disposable income than me will see what it takes to out benchmark the new Mac Pro when it ships. My guess is it will be quite a bit cheaper (around $2k) and i7-based.