Anyone tried Mac Pro for gaming?Follow

It's not a great choice if your primary focus is gaming.

Most of the reasons you'd actually want one don't apply to games. 12 cores? Great. If only more than a handful of games actually supported more than two (granted, more will over time). 5870? Sure, it's a nice card. It's soon to be replaced though. Drivers and such under OS X tend to be subpar to boot. Even after tuning, Valve's games still perform significantly worse under Mac OS than Windows - plus, of course, only a fraction of games are even available for the Mac compared to Windows. So you'd likely spend most of your time booted into Windows via Boot Camp anyway.

There's also the matter of price/performance. Now, to be perfectly fair, the dual processor models aren't terribly priced - sounds odd, but really, price out a Dell or HP dual Xeon workstation, and you see the same kind of markup that Apple has. Again, for dual processor models (though on the PC side you can actually get workstation GPUs). The single CPU model is shameful. It's at least $1k more than it should be. Caveat too, if you build it yourself, a dual processor Xeon machine is significantly cheaper than most any OEM will sell it for. Also, most of the target market for the machines (corporate/education/etc) won't pay retail for them anyway.

Part of it becomes that you're paying for things that aren't a priority, or that don't even matter for gaming. Again, few games (yet) even support a quad-core. They don't need registered memory. They don't benefit from OS X. For $2500, much less the $5200+ it'd cost for the 12-core with a 5870, you can put together one heck of a gaming oriented Windows box.

If you have other needs that'd drive you to purchase a Mac Pro, such as Final Cut or other more Mac-specific software, but wanted to use it for gaming on the side, fine. Make a Boot Camp partition with 7, and it's a capable enough machine. It makes -zero- sense to buy one specifically to play games on.