Now I found this email very interesting. I just laid down a lot of money for this machine. Like always, I am going to break this down into different points. I think this is the easiest way for me to illustrate my points.

• The Design – The Mac Pro design really can speak for itself. For someone who reguarly spends time inside a PC casem the inside of the Mac Pro is one of my favorite parts of a Mac Pro. Adding a hard drive, upgrading ram, and even swaping video cards couln’t be easier. If I ever wanted to upgrade the ram in a PC, I would have to open up the case, mess through all the cables. Struggle to get the ram secured and making sure it is installd properly. Another thing would be upgrading the hard drive. I have spent some great, quality time rangiling with drive cages, and let me tell you, I am done with the fustration. With the Mac Pro, it is simple to upgrade components, and you’re good from there.
• Ports – The Mac Pro comes standard with all the ports you would need (except more USB). There are plenty of FireWire 800, audio jack, optical in and out, and many more ports that are all easy acsessiable. Now when you go out and buy a PC these days, you hardly ever see a FireWire port. My entire Video Editing base is depeneded on FireWire. I need to get the HDVs offloaded somehow. A FireWire for me is a must! And I don’t want to buy an affter market FireWire port, and have to install it my self
• Power- I know there are many PCs on the market that are screaming fast! I see more and mor PCs with great processers and most come standard with at least 6GB of ram! That’s great, but none of the PCs I can go and buy off the shelves have 2 Quad Core Nahalem Processors. 8 physical cores, 16 hyper threaded. That is insane!

I also see some pretty good high end PCs without about 8GB ram. That s fine, but not for me. I have yet to find a PC that supports 16GB of ram! Now I know that sounds like a lot of ram, but the amount of video work I do for my school, is overkill. I need the ram, and 8Gb just won’t do. As far as ram goes I generally try to give each core 2GB of ram. This will be a dream when I am runnign Windows 7 in VMware fusion. I can give it 2 cores, 4GB of ram, and I have plenty to work with.

As far as the provcessor 2x 2.26GHz processor are not the top of the line. But they are fast. hy would thye be in the Mac Pro if they weren’t? I have also read numerous places that the 2x 2.26 actually is faster than the previous gen 2x 3.0GHz. That is great!

• Dual Optical Drives- Most PCs these days come wth, or can be configured with 2 CD-DVD (Optical) drives. Not a big deal.  I can turn my iDVD project into a disk image, and then utilize both drives to burn a once.
• Vidoe Vard- Now wether you an Apple Fanboy or a PC Fanboy, we can all agree that the stock Graohics card in the Mac Pro sucks. The GT 120 isn’t the worsst, but by far is not a great graphcs card. Now I am not doing high end photogography, 3D Rendering, or really anything where I need great color accuracy so the GT 120 is okay (for now) I did order 2 of them just for the heck of it. I will be hooking up daul monitors (Each running on a seperate DVI port on a GT 120) to start. And then I have the room to add up to 2 more screens with my current config.
• Networking- This is nothing special. Most desktops these days have the option of bult in Wifi, but no other stock systems have dual gigabyte ethernet ports.
• Storage- Now this is a part of the Mac Pro that really shines! Liked I mentioned earlier, adding HDDs to a Mac Pro couldn’t be easier. There are basically 4 HDD sleds. All you do is remove an empty sled, screw in the drive, and pop it right back in. Absolutely no cables to worry about. The drive will just snap in. You can have a total of up to 8TB of internal storage on the Mac Pro.
• Misc: The Mac Pro also has the option of  built in RAID, and Fiber Channel.
• Apple Care- I ordered Apple Care with the Mac Pro, and never thought twice. After my macbook’s logic board died on me, I knew that any Apple Compuetr I bought, needed Apple Care. Now I have piece of mind that if in 2 1/2 years a hard drive dies, or the GT120 goes out, I don’t have to pay a cent.

So there you go. Those are my comparisons between the Mac Pro and any system you can buy. If you have any others, make sure to leave them below.