Offered a free Mac Pro: is it worth it?

obviouslytom

obviouslytom

Fully [H]
Joined
Feb 24, 2005
Messages
29,735
I have the chance to get one these for free from work and I am wondering if it is worth it. Here are the specs

I do know that it has 4gb of ram and dual video cards and a 500gb hard drive but that is about it.

What say you?

Edit: If I take it, how do I find out if it supports the current version of OS X?
 
Last edited:
not sure if this a post to brag or a legit question.

why wouldn't you want one for free?
 
Well, at least you can get FB-Dimms these days for next to nothing from server pulls, but it'll put a hurting on your electricity usage for roughly the performance of a Q6700.
 
Gut them and install new hardware. I have a 2007 vintage Pro at work and it is a dog doing anything heavy.
 
That's all I wanted to know. I wasn't sure if it was still good for anything. Had I asked about it a week ago, I could have gotten one that had dual quad cores with hyper threading

Since I am not familiar with Macs, is it possible to swap the CPUs for faster ones? Also, what type of video card can I put into it? I would prefer to have something with Hdmi so I can hook it up to my large tv
 
obviouslytom said:
That's all I wanted to know. I wasn't sure if it was still good for anything. Had I asked about it a week ago, I could have gotten one that had dual quad cores with hyper threading

Since I am not familiar with Macs, is it possible to swap the CPUs for faster ones? Also, what type of video card can I put into it? I would prefer to have something with Hdmi so I can hook it up to my large tv
Click to expand...

Dang... Should've lept on that for no other reason than it would have been a nice score for dusting out and reselling. I may not be an Apple fan, but they sure do have good resell value.
 
You could consider donating it. I'm sure someone out there could actually put it to good use — use it to learn about computing and any number of life-enriching creative endeavors.

And, no, I don't mean to me.
 
obviouslytom said:
That's all I wanted to know. I wasn't sure if it was still good for anything. Had I asked about it a week ago, I could have gotten one that had dual quad cores with hyper threading

Since I am not familiar with Macs, is it possible to swap the CPUs for faster ones? Also, what type of video card can I put into it? I would prefer to have something with Hdmi so I can hook it up to my large tv
Click to expand...
you can upgrade the cpu's and the gpu's.
 
Definitely take it. Despite its age, it can still make a good solid windows 7 workstation and handle most day to day tasks with ease. Memory for it is cheap, and you can max it out for very little investment.
 
Makes for a good heater right now. Xeon 5100 and FB-DIMM run hot. Performance wise a dual-socket benchmarks about a fourth of a recent single socket with, for example, Winrar.
 
if it's free -- do you have any obligation to keep it?

Take it, clean it up, and put it on ebay or craigslist -- I have no idea how much something like that is worth, but it's all profit at that point.
 
not worth it, old hardware in these days means nothing. Have them keep it and give you something newer. The reason you are getting it free is because they have no use for it at all. If you keep it as is, it won't be much help except being a regular desktop which does regular desktop operations like office apps, internet etc...If you sell it, you are not going to get much for it and all the headache that comes with that, on top of that your work may not even allow you to sell it, it may be something you need to return at some point. If you spend money on it, it is never going to be something decent and again if they ask for it back, all your investment is gone.

Life is too short and precious to mess around with things like that, especially since it looks like you have a decent job which probably pays well.
 
I already got something newer from them. I got a core i7 with 16gb of ram, ati he 5900 with a case. I could have this Mac as something for my kids to learn on. I was thinking of adding a ssd to it to give it some new life
 
obviouslytom said:
I already got something newer from them. I got a core i7 with 16gb of ram, ati he 5900 with a case. I could have this Mac as something for my kids to learn on. I was thinking of adding a ssd to it to give it some new life
Click to expand...

It's still more than enough machine to drive OSX or Windows 7/8 etc., Go for it and hook the kids up with something to play on :D
 
I'd get it and run Fusion on it.

Gives you a nice little lab platform to learn (or teach) from.

Or heck, use it to help [F]old with the [H]orde
 
So I got the Mac Pro today and they gave it to me without the hard drive and any install disks. Does anyone know how I can download OS X (on the PC) and install it on the Mac? I have a drive for it so I am not worried about that
 
That Mac Pro can officially run OS X 10.7 (Lion). You can go into an Apple store and they may install the OS for you free (I'm not sure if they'd require Snow Leopard now that Mavericks is free). Or you may need to have Snow Leopard installed before going in. If you can get Snow Leopard then you can get Lion, however, and in fact if you can do either of those you can just go ahead and put Mavericks on your Mac Pro. It will work but you'll need to follow some guides to get it working.

OS X is now free and there is no copy protection (on current or old versions) so if you can create an install disk from a PC it will work but telling you how to build an install disk might cross some forum boundaries so you'll need to go elsewhere for help in that regard.
 
I still use an 06 mac pro at home, I put an SSD in it, some cheap quads off ebay, got some ram from a fellow [H] member, thing runs windows 7 just fine :)
 
Snow Leopard is $20 from Apple (in a disc form). Once you have that you have to call Apple and get a special download voucher code for Lion, which is another $20. That being said, no core OSX software requires any form of serial code or uses anti-piracy measures. So buying the OS is what I would recommend, but there are some other software packages that you simply will not be able to buy from Apple legit even if you wanted to. There are some things they will not take your money for.

I bought 8GB of FB-DIMM's and 2x Xeon L5335's for like $50 total. 8 real cores at 2.0Ghz is more then enough for normal usage and gets about the same processing strength on MP4 encoding as my i7 920 did using Handbrake. The L5335's are also low voltage so two of them is actually less power then just one of the high end quad core processors.

Overall, I am very happy with mine. I absolutely love Linux/Unix for server usage and for $350 total I got a very solid piece of hardware. Plus I have had a nerd boner for the Mac Pro case for many years :)
 
you could put in a new video card, new cpu, a ssd, more memory. and sell it for profit $$$. people like the idea of having a mac pro. specially these days, with the new mac pro.
 
Got the Mac Pro up and running and have (I think) 10.7.4 running on it. From what I have been reading, the only reason why I can't do 10.8 or 10.9 is that the firmware on the motherboard is version 1.1 and I need to have version 2.1. There are some work arounds to this but I don't know if I really want to mess with that.

All in all, it seems like a powerful system from the limited time I have had on it so far. I will see about running some benchmarks on it.

Anyone know if I get a benefit of having 3 Nvidia GeForce 7300GT 256mb cards inside it? They are not connected together with any sort of SLI cable. Do they somehow work in unison or is it so that I could have up to 6 displays? I am confused.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top