Anonymous Freak
Well-known member
All the talk of the upcoming Mac Pro had me renew my search for a Cube.
Picked one up today. 450 MHz, 640 MB RAM, original 20 GB hard drive, Rage 128 Pro graphics. Came with power supply, keyboard, and mouse. Good-but-not-great physical condition. A bunch of scuffs on the plastic, but no cracks. Talked the seller down to $100.
Now that I have a second ADC-equipped Mac, I did verify that the USB ports on my Studio Display are indeed dead. And one USB port on the Cube itself is iffy. (The plastic separator is gone, so have to be *EXTRA* gentle plugging/unplugging.) I may just put a Bluetooth dongle in the one good USB port and go wireless with it.
The hard drive is LOUD though - now I'll need to hunt for a PATA SSD (or get a PATA-to-CF adapter and a big CF card.)
Ironically, as I was driving to get it, I got a response on another Cube ad - $160 for a fully loaded Cube - 1.5 GHz CPU (plus fan,) 1.5 GB RAM, 120 GB hard drive *AND* a Studio Display. But, I'd already talked this guy down, so I would have felt bad backing out literally as I was driving over - and $60 is $60. If it had been a Cinema Display instead of a Studio Display, I probably would have gone ahead and gotten both.
Also picked up four rack servers. One 2U storage server (12 SATA drive bays) with a Pentium 4-era Xeon, two functional dual Pentium III servers plus a spare that is missing parts. The storage server was bought to be a storage server. The dual Pentium III machines are interesting - they are SGI 1100 machines (back during the first period that SGI flirted with x86 machines running customized Linux,) and they came from the Weta Digital render farm! These machines were used to render Lord of the Rings. They're pretty standard era Pentium 3 machines, and can run bog-standard Windows as well as Linux. I'd just been on the lookout for cheap low-power-consumption rack servers for a while, and found these. Ironically, they came from someone I went to high school with, so he gave me a big discount off his asking price.
Picked one up today. 450 MHz, 640 MB RAM, original 20 GB hard drive, Rage 128 Pro graphics. Came with power supply, keyboard, and mouse. Good-but-not-great physical condition. A bunch of scuffs on the plastic, but no cracks. Talked the seller down to $100.
Now that I have a second ADC-equipped Mac, I did verify that the USB ports on my Studio Display are indeed dead. And one USB port on the Cube itself is iffy. (The plastic separator is gone, so have to be *EXTRA* gentle plugging/unplugging.) I may just put a Bluetooth dongle in the one good USB port and go wireless with it.
The hard drive is LOUD though - now I'll need to hunt for a PATA SSD (or get a PATA-to-CF adapter and a big CF card.)
Ironically, as I was driving to get it, I got a response on another Cube ad - $160 for a fully loaded Cube - 1.5 GHz CPU (plus fan,) 1.5 GB RAM, 120 GB hard drive *AND* a Studio Display. But, I'd already talked this guy down, so I would have felt bad backing out literally as I was driving over - and $60 is $60. If it had been a Cinema Display instead of a Studio Display, I probably would have gone ahead and gotten both.
Also picked up four rack servers. One 2U storage server (12 SATA drive bays) with a Pentium 4-era Xeon, two functional dual Pentium III servers plus a spare that is missing parts. The storage server was bought to be a storage server. The dual Pentium III machines are interesting - they are SGI 1100 machines (back during the first period that SGI flirted with x86 machines running customized Linux,) and they came from the Weta Digital render farm! These machines were used to render Lord of the Rings. They're pretty standard era Pentium 3 machines, and can run bog-standard Windows as well as Linux. I'd just been on the lookout for cheap low-power-consumption rack servers for a while, and found these. Ironically, they came from someone I went to high school with, so he gave me a big discount off his asking price.