MCPRUE sells shameless ripoffs of the Mac Pro case, but with support for standard motherboard sizing, if you really want your PC to double as a cheese grater: https://www.mcprue.com/case

I own one and there's nothing shameful about it. It's basically CNCed to Apple's standards, just without the logo. The cool thing is since Studio Displays work on Windows too, with Thunderbolt motherboards you can have a setup that's visually the same as a Mac but is actually a PC.

P.S. Does anyone know how well Studio Displays now work on Linux? The best I could get it to work was on Ubuntu, where it basically worked out of the fresh install. X11 KDE on Fedora was a close second. Couldn't get it working on Wayland whatsoever.

$1,000 just for the case... ouch! (neat though)

I own one of these, it is amazingly well manufactured. Not cheap, but (with the exception of the power button) well made.

Burn more power for a slower computer! That’ll shoe em.

A Ryzen 9800X3D is about 40% faster in single-core tests and the same speed to slightly faster at multi-core tasks, as compared to the M2 Ultra in the Mac Pro. In addition, the Ryzen computer would presumably be modular and allow for the user to choose their preferred configuration of memory, storage, GPU, etc, with options far exceeding those offered by Apple in its limited and non-user-upgradable machine. In addition, configuring the Ryzen machine with comparable specs to the base model Mac Pro (64GB of ram, 1TB of storage, and a low-end to midrange discrete GPU) would put you at a total system cost of something like 20-25% of the $6999 that the Mac Pro cost, even with today's inflated memory prices.

I'm not sure if this is what the parent meant by "a real modern PC," but it would certainly be 1) faster and 2) vastly cheaper than the Mac. So at minimum, your assertion that it'd be slower is wrong.

Depending on your configuration, you could likely also match the overall power consumption of the Mac as well, though yes, it is easily possible to exceed it. But the most likely way you'd exceed it is with a high-end GPU, which would vastly outperform the (fixed, non-upgradeable) GPU in the Mac.

Can confirm. I have a Ryzen 9800X3D with RTX 5070, 128GB of RAM and TBs of Gen 5.0 NVMes.

Not only it is screamingly fast (the fastest on earth for some workloads), but I can upgrade it easily. And is dead silent too.

The best thing is it runs native Linux and it just works.

And a 9800X3D is not even the fastest CPU out there, nor even the fastest CPU you could use with your specific motherboard. A 9950X3D is essentially two of the 9800X3Ds combined, and would be a drop-in replacement.

Wrong. See benchmarks. Many games run faster on 9800X3D.

There are many reasons for this, major one being the 9800X3D has more L3 cache per core.

And also wrong that a 9950X3D is 2x 9800X3D combined. A quick glance would tell you that since 9950X3D has 128MB of L3 cache shared between more threads while 9800X3D has 96mb for half the threads.

And most of the times, when a 9800X3D loses to 9950X3D in games, it's within 1-4% margin.

It's a single-thread monster.