Value for money on top-end Macs

[d000hg]

A few there, blimey those Xeon chips are expensive - even a single-CPU Xeon system is way pricier than an i7.

I'm pretty surprised how many of those systems only have 8GB RAM, if I'm spending nearly £2k (which seems to be comparable to the Mac spec) 8Gb is not a lot.
In fact, considering I haven't bought a PC for several years I was a little underwhelmed... somehow I expected top-end PCs would be 16Gb and SSD as standard these days.

[doodab]

Lenovo and HP both sell dual CPU workstations so have a look on dabs, eBuyer etc for those I suppose e.g.

Lenovo ThinkStation D20 4155 Tower 2 x Xeon E5620 RAM 8 GB HDD 2 x 500 GB Win 7 Pro 64-bit (SNFK7UK) - dabs.com

[d000hg]

Not really into self-build TBH; do you know any sites who do these kind of top-end PCs?

[doodab]

Those Xeons are around £630 each, motherboard is £450 or so, so on a self build you could save quite a bit and/or get a better specced machine for the same price. Obviously you won't get the apple happy glow though.

[d000hg]

I was looking at the Mac Pro range, and saw that this is the jewel of the crown:

• 12-Core
• Two 2.4GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon
• 12GB (six 2GB) memory
• 1TB hard drive1
• 18x SuperDrive
• ATI Radeon HD 5770 with 1GB GDDR5

No monitor included, £3000

I've never really noticed other vendors doing 12-core machines so does anyone know what a comparable spec PC might cost and where one might look? Or for comparison, what £3000 would get you in a Windows PC?