So I got that mac pro!

Well the day finally came and my craigslist trade went through. I sold my servers for 300 bucks and a Mac Pro 3,1. This is exciting for me because this is the next step up in MP’s that I wanted to play with next.

Now, in comparison, its probably not as powerful as my Lenovo TS140 was. However, that board had a driver problem, as it turns out, and my OS would just decide to crash. As a windows machine though, it’ll work great for its next user, but for me I need a bit of beef and it just wasn’t cut out for what I was trying to do.

Compared to my TS140, this 3,1 is a bit weaker processor wise. Its specs are:

2 X Xeon E5462 @ 2.8 GHZ
8 or 9 TB total drive space (with an SSD in the mail that the guy forgot to put in as an OS drive)
64 GB total of DDR2 memory
My RX580 8GB
Currently runs Ubuntu and I have had little problems if any aside from the normal one with my apple cinema display.

So what will it do? What will you be doing with it?

Now, I want to get into some hacky shit with this thing. I’d love to have it running OSX 10.13, which apparently is rather easy, but I’d like to have its services running as well. So like Siri works, Messages works, stuff like that. I’d also like to get windows on it if only tho play games like Quake Champions until it works better in wine.

Past that?

My opinion so far is positive. My RX580 actually stays tool in this thing, unlike the other case. My room is also noticeably cooler because of the airflow. The size of the case also forced me to redo my desk and I’ve been meaning to do this for a while now. I have yet to really benchmark it. But I can say that scrolling through text doesn’t randomly jitter, for example, so thats rather nice.

Theres also some things you can do to the efi in these to make boot times faster or to optimize ram speeds. I don’t know much about these things yet but I def need to look into them.

Upgrades?

Well I have a mpcie wireless AC card in the mail that will arrive tomorrow, and I’m looking at getting another GPU in this thing to do VM play stuff. Maybe find another GPU to put in my TS140 to sell and then use my R7 370 with it? IDK yet.

Def wanna upgrade ram. If not capacity, at least speed. I can easily get 800 MHZ ram, but theres 1066 and 1333 ram made for these for stupid performance, so if I can get some of it I am totes going to.

If yalls got ideas on stuff youi want me to make this thing do, let me know!

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Congrats.

Vintage Mac Pros weren’t slouches.

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lol I don’t really consider this vintage.

It’s got DDR2, its vintage.

But, congratz with your purchase, I hope it serves you well :slight_smile:

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Ehhhh, DDR1 is vintage my guy. Hell, DDR2 that can’t handle 6677 very well is vintage. 2008 is not vintage, and I can assure you that one lel.

Also, it will indeed serve me well.

But the ThinkCentre A55 I just rebuilt is and it’s only a year older, that and it was a low end pc in the first place. But I got a way to transfer stuff to the 1996 pc now… At a whole 41Kbps… Thinking I should just buy a DOS compatible NIC at some point.

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Wrong thread?

Just find it amusing that these are one year apart and pretty much as far apart as can be use wise. When I first went to reply I had originally put how being one year apart and from the opposite ends of the spectrum how the A55 was vintage but the Mac Pro was still good for modern use. But I erased that line and posted before I remembered to add that part back in when I had to steal my usb keyboard to use on another computer and had to reboot to use my Model M on my main computer.

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Well, I’ll tell ya this, any PC is useable. Could be a mac pro from 08 or 06, an Amiga 2000, literally any computer. Just depends on how much work you want to put into it.