Apple

http://www.ebay.com/itm/370713949084

I was after a 2009 model but was outbid so with my luck it is best to stick with BIN... this is a 2006, a couple hundred less but still plenty sufficient for my needs. I don't mind the uprated ram (10gb) and graphics (radeon 5750). And free shipping! The airport is also a nice touch.

If you have a 2006 Mac Pro and you want to run Mountain Lion on it, you still have to hackintosh it .

Oh, the irony

I'm still planning to run snow leopard, however it comes with lion already installed. I don't have a problem with lion but we'll see what it ultimately ends up with.

My Snow Leopard DVD is version 10.6.3 and I'm not sure it will support the Radeon. I suppose the solution is to install and boot in safe mode (hold down shift key) to update to 10.6.8 ?

I also use Irix 6.5.22 and Windows XP, my ego does not need the latest and greatest mountain lion software to be happy. In fact, 10.8 was quite buggy on my macbook air: sleep would kill the battery <10 hours, frequent lockups and panics, lost connection to AEBS disk, even itunes stuttered when playing music, just nasty all the way around; I dropped back to 10.6.8 on my air as well.

But, point well taken, this machine has been long obsoleted. Caveat Emptor . Was even considering a powermac G5

Looks like the price only reflects the extra RAM, so nice catch with the 5750! Prices for the 2009's seem to hover around USD 1,200+ - I'd need to believe I'll do something with the machine that makes money at that point...

With the 2008 I'll have an interesting time figuring out how to upgrade the 2600XT on a shoestring - mostly for the challenge, after all I've been getting by with Intel GMA3100 all this time in the MacBook.

A couple of people have been asking on irc what on earth one would do with such a "powerhouse" machine. Hopefully, despite being 6 years old, I guess that means it should be pretty quick!

I spend a lot of time in aperture, and with my new camera and the fact that I'm taking more shots than ever before, it is rather sluggish on the little mac air. In addition, I have been spending a lot of time processing video in imovie lately, would like to get fcpx running properly as well but I've decided it's too heavy for the little guy. The mac air is still a famously fabulous little netbook, but at the end of the day it is still a netbook, unlike the more fully-featured thinkpad x-series it replaced, which was wickedly fast in it's day despite similar size (with a price tag to match ). In the air's defence, it runs rings around my desktop.

I would also like to consolidate my nas (aebs) and handfull of other external USB disks into a single box, which was the reason for choosing an older mac pro over a newer mac mini.

Perhaps understanding why I chose the machine I did will help with your own purchase. Unless you've already bought yours, in which case this is just a mindless dick-waving contest

Even with a workload like this, the air remains snappy and responsive; but this job will take almost 2 hours to finish. Snow Leopard has never crashed with heavy work even on this knocked-about portable. Thumbs-up in my book. Reminds me of my good old Octane <3 I think having swap on a wicked-fast SSD makes up for the limited RAM.

Oh Boy! It just showed up! And it's MUCH BETTER than I was expecting!

*The graphics is actually a Radeon 5770 1gb, not 5750. It is an official apple graphic card.
*The memory spec consists of 4x2gb and 2x1gb, and it is all official apple parts.
*The outside of the case looks very nice except for one small dent and some residue from an asset tag on the front.
*There are two disks installed, 250gb+160gb.
*The keyboard and mouse included is a white apple wireless keyboard (white/clear plastic, feels quite nice), and mighty mouse. I was expecting bargain-basement crap that would be thrown out with the box.
Snow Leopard installed and updated without a hitch. Might try out a newer OSX in virtualbox for the "lulz".
It is *quiet*. Our central heating doesn't make much noise but I still can't hear this machine over it.

I guess somebody at that ebay reseller was feeling generous this christmas

So... merry christmas everybody!

x-mas boon, congrats!

now you can let that horse do the dirty job while you're out swinging with your girl :)

Result!

Yeah, uhm, I was confessing to having won that auction I mentioned seeing... My MacPro arrived late Friday - cloned the MacBook's disk overnight, then pushed stuff around in the office to make room for the tower. Heading out of town for a few days, so not much more than a first impression until next week.

Mine came exactly as described. (just kidding) Fortunately most of the marks on the case in the auction photos are streaks from poor cleaning and tape/sticker residue. The machine is stupidly quiet when running - certainly can't hear it over the PC next to it, even with the side panel off. Delightfully solid object.

I have a few Woodcrest -> Harpertown systems, and they still pack a pretty good punch for the money. Unless you need the 800MHz parts, the FB-DIMMs are priced pretty reasonably. ISTR recondas was looking at swapping the heat sinks from official Apple DIMMs to 3rd party parts - I spotted these add-on heat sinks for $20/pair in case it comes up.

If you find you want to speed things up even more, look around for some X5355 quad core CPUs @ $40-50. Same clock speed as you've got now but twice the cores, might be worth the effort involved... Worked a treat in an HP DL140. There are some games you can play with BSEL mods using parts sold for the 1066MHz bus, but at this point the difference in cost probably isn't worth the hassle.

congrats smj, it's raining MPs

this thread reminds me of sky's mac path in reverse, he was so happy with his hack he bought real macs


i think i've read about this before, is it a matter of swapping cpus? or does it involve soldering irons and further software hacks?

Well my path with modern (post-68k) Macs began with inheriting a friend's "Lombard" Powerbook G3 upon his death in 2004. That led to a G4 Cube that got upgraded with a 1.8GHz CPU and reflashed Radeon 9800, then a couple TiBooks, and finally a black Penryn MacBook...

I believe there would be no software mods, let alone soldering irons - though physically removing heatsink assemblies may be challenging, some gripes about some screws on the memory cages being tough to remove. People report successful swaps on their MacPro 1,1 without a firmware update where the CPUs were not properly labeled in About This Mac, but there's a thread on putting 2,1 firmware on 1,1 machines that should cause them to be properly recognized/reported.

It's Apple, so of course you need a very long screwdriver. Looks like the SLAEG / G0 stepping X5355's feature 50% less power/heat at idle, so might be worth looking for those specific CPUs - otherwise people reported having to raise their base fan speeds to keep the temps at the same level as pre-upgrade.


Linkage:
Upgrade thread on Apple support forums
Upgrade trade-offs reviewed , e.g. quad-core CPU vs. SSD, etc
A photog's tale of upgrade
Discussion of CPU steppings and idle power draw
Upgrade procedure via static pages , circa 2007
Check this reference for proper thermal compound application

Video of procedure, part 1
Video of procedure, part 2

pure quality smj, thank you


hell yeah, i still remember the time i had to get one to replace the fan in my colo(u)r classic some decades ago

merry hoho kids!

Very nice - congratulations! There doesn't seem to be much demand for 512MB Mac Pro FB-DIMMs, with some patience I was able to win three sets (six DIMMs) with original Apple heat sinks for at or near the opening bid. Even with shipping the entire lot was about the the same money as one pair of the Max Upgrade heatsinks.

As far as third party FB-DIMMs go, all of the 667MHz 2Rx4 FB-DIMMs I've tried have worked (your mileage may vary, but I tried *one* set in 2Rx8 configuration that weren't recognized). While all of the third-party 2Rx4 FB-DIMMs have worked reliably, the 2RX4 Nanya 2GB FB-DIMMs don't supply a reading to Temperature Monitor, while the 4GB Samsung and Hynix FB-DIMMs I've tried do supply temp readings. May be coincidental to the temperature reading, but if I found the correct spec sheets, the Samsung and Hynix units use an Intel AMB chip, the Nanya units have a non-Intel AMB.

I've done both mods - replacing the dual core CPUs with quad core as well as the MacPro2,1 firmware update. It's fairly painless - just remove the heat sinks, swap CPUs, apply new compound and reinstall. I didn't find the mounting screws overly difficult with the right tools at hand.

@recondas - I have a few (bad) memory modules you could steal heat sinks from if you want them. Was going to toss them anyway.

Aperture runs as swift as a jungle cat on this thing. It's great. But what I really like is the attention to details, such as how the front USB sockets face the right direction so I can see my watch face when it is plugged in (my old PC had it facing the wall). And it is really, really quiet.

Build quality is not as good as other x86 workstations I've owned and/or used in the past (HP xw series, z800, sun ultra 40, etc). But it's better than a cheap PC.

You had an Ultra 40 ? How did you like it ?

I used one on a co-op. It was alright, but I wasn't familiar with solaris. At the time (hey, I was young, don't we all grow up so fast?) I thought it was just broken linux. I did get to poke about the insides, would not say it was anything remarkable as I had no desire to own one...

My favourite workstation of this type (at least hardware-wise) will be the hp xw9300. Just berry well put together and nicely designed. After playing with those disk sleds everything else will make you wish it worked the same way. And you can probably get solaris running on one as well...

But the mac liberates you from windows (in a way that is an improvement for the user IMO) and is also well thought out. How often do you need to swap drives out anyways?

I had thought about replacing my 2009 iMac with a used Mac Pro, but I had a few fundamental flaws with it (this coming from a previous PMG5 owner who misses his cheese grater monolith). I have a full loaded Dell P490 (have had it for a few years, it was my hackintosh for a while there) with dual 5160s and 16GB of ram (8x2GB for quad channel config) and 4 drives in it. If I had bought a 2006/7 Mac Pro for cheap, would I be impressed with it? Probably not... I would have to spend another few hundred in upgrades and get the quad core cpus, a beefie gpu, etc, etc... Then how much is my cheap Mac Pro and how many features am I still missing from say a new iMac?

I thought about it for days, watched a few ebay auctions, talked to everyone on IRC, co-workers, the boss (the wife), and just couldn't decide what to do. Put and SSD in the iMac? New / used iMac? Get a baseline mini to hold me off for a while? It was a fairly endless conversation with my self.

I really fucking lucked out though. I went to bestbuy last Saturday and managed to find a miss priced open box 2012 base mini. It was marked for $569 CAD which was actually the sale price for the new ones. I bugged the sales rep about it being oddly high for an open box and they repriced it to $499 - but there was a problem. It was going to take 10 minutes for the new price sticker to take hold in the system, so they priced it even lower to $479 since I had to wait. On top of it all, I had a few hundred in gift cards and gift cash in my wallet which officially made this the cheapest new Mac I have ever purchased.

Things I love about it? All the new features. Thunderbolt, USB3, Ivy Bridge performance. All in a very low power, low space package.
Things I hate? The 5400 rpm drive it came with is terrible, worst I have ever had in a mac. I get like 65MB/s in disk perf. It will be replaced, along with an upgrade to 16GB of ram. So I will still have to spend some extra on it, but atleast all of the new features are there.

For shits and giggles, here are some benches of a dual 5160 Mac Pro:
http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbenc ... %20bits:32

Here is the base 2012 mini (same as mine):
http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/search?utf8= ✓&q=model%3A%22Mac+mini+%28Late+2012%29%22+platform%3A%22Mac%22+processor%3A%22Intel+Core+i5-3210M%22+
EDIT: Sorry, this link is crazy broken, just copy paste it or take my word that the mini generally out benches it.

In fact, here is mine: http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/1474097

Anyways, I think I will wait for the next model Pros.

I havent own'ed a 40, but I have seen them and own a 20m2 and work with around 50 20m2s and 20 first gen 20s. My big complaint with the silver workstations is that the cases are a little flimsy. I've seen the panels and chassis warp fairly easily. The plastics (like the front name plate) are a little brittle too, but there isn't much for plastic on them. That said, they are work horses are are still going strong.

If you want a U40, you might do better to look for a Sun Java Workstation 2100z. Very similar hardware with the 939 opterons and supports both SCSI and SATA drives, and its classic quiet purple hardware. A few years ago I got one with 2 cpus and 8GB of ram for $200. The U40s are hard to get that cheap, but its really hard to find drive rails for these guys. If you really want a U40, make sure you get one with both disk planes. This config supports 8 internal drives which makes for an awesome ZFS server. The U20s and the U40s take the classic spud trays so that wouldn't be a problem there.

Hope that helps.

Yes, yes you did. That's an amazingly sweet deal.

There are some Ultra 20's floating around for under $150, I'm tempted to pick one up just to gut it and transfer the MSI 990FX board that's in an old Lian Li aluminum case now. Don't think it qualifies as a case mod, doesn't look like there's any modding required. But then, that's $150 I don't really need to spend -- or could put towards that Philips Hue lighting kit...

Yeah it's probably not worth modding unless you can figure out how to get more disks into it. The base model U40 has room for 4 drives but the U20 only has room for 2 which is a let down. For ~$100 you can get a new case that has a lot more room and functionality.

That said, if you can get a u20m2 for $150, it makes for a nice low power server that supports VT and 16GB of ram.