The best box that Apple makes is the Mac Pro.

The best box that Dell makes is the Precision Workstation, commonly abbreviated as PW. Both are business machines first and foremost.

It is very easy to configure either to run you $20,000 for final cost.

How to do it? Simple. Check off every single possible option you can throw in when configuring it.

First, the Mac Pro.

This is an 8-core system (two 2.93GHz Quad Core Intel Xeons) stuffed with 32GB of RAM, 3 1TB hard drives, two optical drives, two 30-inch flat-panel displays, wireless everything, fibre channel, a bunch of preinstalled software and of course the AppleCare Protection plan.

And now, the Big Dell, the Precision Workstation T7500.

The screen shot of this would have been too long, so here are the specs:

• Windows Vista 64-bit Business Edition
• Dual Quad Core Intel® Xeon® Processors W5580 3.20GHz, 8M L3, 6.4GT/s,turbo
• 48GB, DDR3 RDIMM Memory, 1333MHz, ECC (12 DIMMS). You read correctly. 48 gigs of RAM. This is an $8,000+ option.
• 4 Year ProSupport for End Users and 4 Year 4HR 7×24 Onsite Service
• 4.0GB NVIDIA® Quadro® FX 5800, DUAL MON, 1DP & 2DVI
• Microsoft™ Office® Professional 2007
• McAfee® Total Protection for Small Business,15 Month Subscription,Eng
• Drive 1 – 1.5TB SATA 3.0Gb/s, 7200 RPM Hard Drive with 16MB DataBurst Cache™
• Drive 2 – 1.5TB SATA 3.0Gb/s, 7200 RPM Hard Drive with 16MB DataBurst Cache™
• Drive 3 – 1.5TB SATA 3.0Gb/s, 7200 RPM Hard Drive with 16MB DataBurst Cache™
• Drive 4 – 1.5TB SATA 3.0Gb/s, 7200 RPM Hard Drive with 16MB DataBurst Cache™
• Drive 5 – 1.5TB SATA 3.0Gb/s, 7200 RPM Hard Drive with 16MB DataBurst Cache™ Yes, this is 5 1.5TB drives for a total of 7.5 TB space.
• 16X DVD+/-RW w/ Cyberlink PowerDVD™ and Roxio Creator™
• Monitor 1 – Dell 24 inch UltraSharp™2408WFP Widescreen, Adjustable Stand, VGA/DVI
• Monitor 2 – Dell 24 inch UltraSharp™2408WFP Widescreen, Adjustable Stand, VGA/DVI
• Monitor 3 – Dell 24 inch UltraSharp™2408WFP Widescreen, Adjustable Stand, VGA/DVI
• Monitor 4 – Dell 24 inch UltraSharp™2408WFP Widescreen, Adjustable Stand, VGA/DVI
• Chassis Intrusion Switch

There are many, many different ways I could have priced out the Dell.

Instead of the four 24-inch monitors, I could have gone with three Dell 30-inchers (which I probably would). That would be a separate purchase albeit from the same company.

In addition, the Dell costs more mainly due to the extra 16GB of RAM, the four monitors and the extra two hard drives. Mac Pros at present cannot be configured from the OEM to go beyond 3 internal hard drives or 32GB RAM, and that’s by design.

What’s the Super Dell best suited for?

AutoCAD or high resolution medical imaging. With CAD in particular, this is still PC-only world.

And not gaming, you dope.

What’s the Super Mac best suited for?

HD/Film/Video editing suite. In a separate purchase I’d tack on either Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere or Media 100. Whatever had the most local (important) support. And when I say local I mean other shops in the area you live that support what you have. Some places favor Final Cut while others Media 100, etc.

Does anybody actually buy these things?

Yes, and routinely. Neither OEM would build them if there weren’t a market to buy them.

In medical, industrial design and research facilities you will see these Dells.

In pro video houses/animation studios, you will see these Macs.

Of course, neither looks any different from their lower-cost same-model boxes, but it’s what’s on the inside that counts obviously.

Could you build a PC with the above Dell specs for cheaper?

Yes. And in fact you can go higher than 64GB RAM.

How about 256GB RAM? Sound impossible? It isn’t. You have to use a server motherboard instead of desktop, like this one.

Ridiculous for a home PC? Very. And totally unnecessary. Sure, you’ll be the coolest nerd in town, but you’ll be paying a loan off for all that RAM for the next 10 years.

On the desktop side, the most RAM supported if you bought the motherboard thru NewEgg is 24GB. This is a bit crappy because there should be 32GB RAM support options for PC builders. Alas, there isn’t. Yet. Maybe there will be come 2010?

At present you’re best off using a board that supports 8 or 16GB. And you’ll obviously have to use 64-bit Windows (or Linux) to access all of that.

Is there any way to get the cost of the Mac Pro down?

Several ways, actually.

The first rule to buying Mac is to purchase as little as possible from the Apple Store concerning the box itself.

Instead of ordering your Mac with 32GB, order with 1GB. Fill it up with RAM from another vendor. Just remember to specifically order Mac Memory.

Instead of Apple 30-inch Cinema Displays, use 30-inch Dell UltraSharps. Even Mac people know that those are awesome monitors.

Instead of ordering 3 hard drives, take 1. Like with the RAM, buy the others from another vendor and install it yourself.

This is essentially no different than configuring the Dell. You put the money into the processors more than anything else. For the rest, you go with other vendors.

The only drawback to this is that the other-vendor stuff isn’t supported under OEM warranty. This can be said for either OEM.

When it comes time to get a new computer, whether you are building your own or purchasing a pre-built, to really get the most bang for your buck you should only pay for the hardware you need. For example, if you are getting a machine for just internet and email, you don’t need a fancy graphics card because you ‘might’ play games on it… the integrated graphics will do just fine.

You can very easily nickel and dime yourself, especially with computers when you consider virtually everything is upgradable. After adding just a bit more memory, a slightly faster processor and a little bit better graphics card (etc., etc.) the price of your computer is now $50-75 (give or take of course) more. Instead, just get what you know you need and upgrade when the time comes. Usually you can get much better parts for a cheaper price than what you would have paid for at the time.

Granted this tip assumes you know how to upgrade components yourself, if you do fall into this category you will most likely find this does save you some money.

While I’m sure a lot of our readers are not into gaming, I am also sure a large number are. If you are and prefer to build your own system over purchase a ready made, then this tip is for you. This article on Tom’s Hardware titled ‘System Builder Marathon: Performance & Value : Is Spending More Justified?‘ covers building a gaming machine on 3 distinct budget ranges and compares the resulting systems.

The 3 budget values examined are $625, $1,250 and $2,500, which seems like typical amounts people spend on gaming machines judging by posts in the forums here. The really interesting angle of this article is the comparison of what extras you get for the extra money.

Jumping to the conclusion:

As we’d hoped, performance scales directly to dollars spent, but not proportionally. Performance increases are almost linear whereas build-cost increases are exponential. Doubling our $625 PC budget produced a 78% performance gain in the $1,250 PC, but doubling the $1,250 budget gave our $2,500 PC only a measly 13% gain. Overclocking helped the $2,500 PC more than the rest, but  the value of high-end systems is always somewhat questionable.

One thing to keep in mind, is these systems were spec’ed in December, but for the most part the prices should not have fluctuated too much.

I am always looking for ways to make my computer quieter, cooler and consume less energy (usually they are all one in the same). On that note, here is an interesting walkthrough on how to build your own hard drive silencing enclosure.

The idea is quite simple: sandwich a hard drive between two layers of gel packs which will absorb the sound and vibrations. One thing you will want to be sure of if you try this method is to make sure there is enough ventilation to allow heat from the drive to escape.

When you think about it, fastening a hard drive via screws to a rigid metal case is pretty stressful on a hard drive as the case isn’t going to give much to absorb the vibrations of the drive. At the very least, if you can put rubber gromments around the screw connecting to the hard drive, this will help reduce the vibrations some.

This chapter is a video presentation.

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This chapter is a video presentation.

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This chapter is a video presentation.

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This chapter is a video presentation.

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This chapter is a video presentation.

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Now that we have used a table to create a basic layout for our website, we can expand the site to more than one web page. Watch below as I show you how to do this. After all, almost all sites have more than one page involved.

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Tables can obviously be used to lay out data in an organized way. However, you can also use tables to create the overall structure of your website. This video below will explain and show how to do this.

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Now that this course has provided the basics on hand-coding your HTML, we will delve into the world of WYSIWYG editors. Using an editor like this will allow you to create your web pages in a much quicker fashion and in a style much more similar to a word processor. You can accomplish much of what you need without doing any HTML coding by hand.

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Often, the difference between a “blah” looking webpage and a good looking one comes down to the images used. Images are used not only to accent your text, but also for the actual design and layout of your web page. We will get into how to actually design a web page a little later in this course, but for now it is necessary to know how to insert images into your HTML.

In the Introduction to Website Files, I talked about what a JPEG, GIF and PNG image file is. These are image files, and these files are SEPARATE from your HTML file. You use an HTML tag to reference the external image into your HTML document.

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OK, it is now time to start actually creating a webpage. In this lesson, I am going to introduce you to HTML. In the following lessons, we will get into specific areas of HTML.

HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. An HTML file is just a text file which contains small “markup tags”. A markup tag is a small little bunch of text which tells the web browser how to display things on a website. And HTML file must have an HTM or HTML file extension, and that file can be created in any simple text editor. HTML is NOT a programming language.

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