Last week, the new Mac Pro finally went on sale. At $3000 for the entry-level model, and a max price of $9,600 for a customized top-of-the-line model with a 12-core CPU and two GPUs, the Mac Pro certainly isn’t cheap. If you take a closer look at the spec, though, the Mac Pro, rather unusually for an Apple product, is a surprisingly good deal. If you try to match the components as closely as possible, it would actually cost around $11,500 to build the equivalent Windows-powered DIY PC.

This might come as a surprise to Windows PC builders, who are usually the first in line to rage at Apple’s overpriced hardware. And, to be fair, the margins on Apple’s MacBook Pros, iPads, and iPhones are extraordinarily juicy. For the Mac Pro, though, you appear to get a lot of hardware for your money — and not to mention, a uniquely diminutive form factor that can’t currently be matched by Windows OEMs or DIY PC builders.

According to Futurelooks, which has priced out each of the components in the Mac Pro, it would cost at least $11,500 (including a Windows 8 license) to build a Windows PC that is almost equivalent. Some parts cannot be matched like-for-like, as the Mac Pro features proprietary, custom-made logic boards, rather than off-the-shelf components. To build a top-end DIY PC that has almost equivalent specs to the $9,600 Mac Pro, you would need the following hardware: 12-core Intel Xeon E5-2697 V2 CPU ($2750), two AMD FirePro W9000 graphics cards ($3,400 each), Asus Rampage IV Gene micro ATX motherboard ($280), Silverstone FT03 and Strider 850W PSU ($360), 32GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR3 RAM ($360), and two 512GB Samsung 840 Pro SSDs ($450 each). Throw in a copy of Windows 8, and you’re looking at a total of $11,500.

Despite costing $2,000 more than the Mac Pro, the DIY PC isn’t even as good: It has 32GB of RAM instead of 64GB (non-registered 16GB DIMMs don’t seem to exist), and the PC doesn’t have Thunderbolt support. The Silverstone case, though similarly trash can shaped, is still much larger than the cylindrical Mac Pro. For the most part, these compromises exist because Apple built the Mac Pro from scratch, and could thus build the chassis and its components to spec, while DIY builders have to work with off-the-shelf parts. Likewise, imagine trying to build your own car from parts, versus a finely crafted Tesla or Mercedes. Futurelooks also took a look (!) at the entry-level Mac Pro ($3,000) and found that it was impossible to build a comparable DIY PC ($4,000).

The DIY PC does have some advantages, though — namely, upgradability, and thus longevity. The new Mac Pro, unlike its fairly normal PC tower case predecessor, is very hard to upgrade. The RAM appears to use normal sockets, but the GPUs are situated on proprietary logic boards that don’t use normal PCIe connectors. The CPU is socketed, but whether it’s replaceable or not (due to firmware and thermal restrictions) is unknown. The $11,500 DIY PC, on the other hand, can be upgraded and tweaked to your heart’s content. It’s also worth noting that you have the option of using cheaper graphics cards, too — instead of paying $3400 for a FirePro W9000, a couple of Nvidia Quadro or GeForce cards would be thousands of dollars cheaper, and could yield better performance in CUDA-optimized apps.

So, there you have it: The Mac Pro — a pretty good deal, if you’ve got $10,000 burning a hole in your pocket and you’re in the market for a workstation-grade PC.