I've been doing some work with older software that required a 10.6 or earlier Mac. Problem was that they were sometimes processor intensive and the fastest machine I has, a 2ghz C2D was bogging down sometimes. So I started keeping an eye out for a Mac Pro. I thought my budget might suffice foe a first model if I found a good deal. For the last month I've been missing every one that was advertised, luckily. Today I ran across a 2.8ghz 8 core Mac Pro for $100. Only a 320gh hard drive but I've got a lot of 1 & 2tb drives gathering dust.
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2008 Mac Pro
- Thread starter waynestewart
- Start date
That is a pretty good deal, the 2008s do a good job running all the OS X'es upto the latest, You can run Windows 10 on it, but the bootcamp drivers are going to be older, but for that price, its a mega deal. Add an SSD to that (if you can find a deal) and it's a screamer. How much ram did you get in it?
I'll be installing some more hard drives so I'll likely install 10.10 or 10.11 on one
2008 is nice. I know you got it for 10.6, but that sucker will run 10.11.
It's got 6gb and 4 empty slots. I think I have a spare 120gb SSD so this may be where it'll end up
$100? Wow! I paid $5200 for mine in 2009!
Anyway, I can say from experience that it is extremely reliable. I've never had any problems with it that haven't been related to software somehow.
Also, for anyone else looking at this thread, any pre-2013 Mac Pro will run Snow Leopard just fine.
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Anyway, I can say from experience that it is extremely reliable. I've never had any problems with it that haven't been related to software somehow.
Also, for anyone else looking at this thread, any pre-2013 Mac Pro will run Snow Leopard just fine.
c
If you wanna push the machine to the max (storage wise), get this Apricorn SSD Card, they are terrific, but use it in Slot 2 above the GPU, Slot 3 and 4 are PCIe 1.0. Getting ram should not be hard, cheap deals on eBay, just make sure it's the FB-Dimm. A great little upgrade too is finding a cheap GTX 680 2GB, and flash it for EFI. All in all you can get a ton of juice out of that machine still and it would sell cost less than buying a 2009-2012 model.
The cMP Pros are tanks, just air out the dust every once in a while and the components do well. It really comes down to the Xeon platform being very mature and stable. Scary thing is they make awesome Windows machines if used with Apricorn SSD card that is native AHCI as opposed to Boot Camp's ATA emulation.
I don't want to spend too much on it as it won't be my main computer. So far I've added a SSD, two 1tb hard drives and a BD-ROM. It's got 10.6.8 and 10.11.5. I'm pretty busy the next few days so I'll have some time to consider upgrades.
There was a pretty huge amount of dust inside it. I probably should have taken it outside to blow it out.
There was a pretty huge amount of dust inside it. I probably should have taken it outside to blow it out.
I am debating one item. It's a $20 PCIe card that will hold a SSD from the 2013/14 Macbook air. I have one gathering dust. Only thing holding me back is that the vendor says it's not bootable.
My daily driver is still a 2006 Mac Pro 1,1. They're built extremely well. I've swapped out the stock CPUs with 3ghz quad-core X5365s and it's running a GeForce GTX 570 card. 120gb SSD boot drive and a 1tb storage drive, with a 2tb RAID to host backups for all Macs on my network.
I used to cart it around to LAN events all over the state, until I got tired of carrying it and built a mini-ITX PC. Now it runs OS X only. Mavericks right now, but I hear it will still run 10.11, so maybe I'll go to that when 10.9 goes the way of Lion...
It's the most solid, dependable Mac I've ever owned, bar none.
The OWC Accelsior S with any standard SSD allows booting and is very speedy. I have one in my MP and it works great with a 1TB Samsung EVO.
They have a couple in their current "garage sale" for $43.75. No affiliation, just a satisfied user.
https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/SSDACL6G.SO/
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