Used 1st Generation Mac Pro a Good Deal?

[soperrepos]

Looking to upgrade from my aging PPC Dual 1.8 G5 and noticed several first generation Mac Pros on eBay under $1000. I haven't kept on top of Mac Pro related news; are there any issues I need to be aware of about this gen of mac desktops before making a purchase?

[Hellhammer]

The biggest issue with them is the 32-bit EFI. That's an issue because OS X 10.7 may not support 32-bit EFIs (i.e. only 64-bit kernel), but that's just speculation and there is zero news about 10.7. Otherwise it's a good computer and you can even use current gen GPUs if I'm not mistaken.

[zorinlynx]

Go for it, especially if they have 4GB or more RAM.

They're good machines, I still use mine heavily and it feels fast to me.

[lloyd709]

They are a fantastic buy as long as you aren't earning your living doing lots of multicore processor intensive rendering - which I'm guessing by the way you are considering one that you are not!!

Stick a fast SSD boot drive, a couple of RAID 0 fast disks and 6 gig or more RAM and you would be hard pushed to notice the difference between it and the most current Mac Pros (unless as mentioned above you are hammering all the cores at the same time).