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!
