Thanks for detailed feedback
$500 should be a good deal if that's a real 5,1
It is, and literally spotless even dust wise. Also came with a lot of extra stuff.
I'm assuming one of your first upgrades will be the processor, as the e5620's are very slow in comparison to even semi-modern processors
consider a hackintosh.
Lucky I don't have "professional needs" more or less an idiot at home that likes decent things. It'll be used for unprofessional 4k drone edits, go pro video and managing large photo and media libraries. My typical computer path going back a number of years has been to buy apple systems at a good price, keep them a year or so and resell for a net cost no worse than $10-15 a month and sometimes a profit. Unfortunately apples decisions of the last couple years have left me regretting selling the various quad i7 minis and 15 rmbp i had. Lately i'd been trying a 13' tb mbp within a best buy return policy. The only thing it excels at is make me regret selling the 15 rmbp.
Re hackintosh: What originally drew me to the apple side of the fence to begin with 12 ish years ago was the lack of tinkering, overclocking and optimizing. I had set up a hackintosh drive on my 4790k windows box, it ran, albeit with a decent bit of usb freezes, after adding a gtx 1080 this summer to that computer its days as a hack are likely over unless the driver situation changes.
what the system will cost you in total.
- Mac Pro $500
- CPUs $500
- dual RX 480 $440
- 48GB RAM $300
- 512GB 850 EVO x2 $360
- 6TB HDD $250
- USB 3 adapter
- WLAN/bluetooth module
That will give you a "nice" real Mac that upgrades to the latest MacOS with Handoff working and AC wireless.
Total cost is about $2525. Remove a gfx card and one SSD and you might keep it just below $2k.
After selling all the extra stuff that came with it theres a pretty strong likely hood i'm sitting around $200-250 net cost for the mac pro itself, but I'll pencil it in as 300. My math was as follows.
Machine: $300
cpu: $160-360 depending on range sought for matched 3.06-3.4 12 core sets going off ebay listings
Ram: $100
Video: $60 have a 270x here that i could get $50 ish selling, so opportunity cost + $10 for a 6 pin cable. If this proves inadequate I'll look into other options. I'd prefer to avoid tweaking which the 480 looks to currently entail. If i'm going to spend a lot of time tinkering, I may as well flip this and build a hack.
Ssd: $260 could drop in a 256 i have here, likely will do 2 512 m.2 in a raid 0.
pci ssd card: $20
usb card: $25 vantec 3.1 usb + usb c card from microcenter, they pricematched newegg, working fine in sierra
At the high end that put this in the $1200 total range using fuzzy math. At which point it becomes a question of how long i would keep it and what could be expected on resale.
I did have to plug in a bt 4.0 usb i had bought for the hackintosh experiment because of usb 3 interference with the factory chip, set up the system to use that on boot instead of the internal bt. Its cost was minimal. Wifi will not be used, i will however need a new network switch to utilize link aggregation to my nas.
Impressions using this for general use the last day or two: Its far more pleasurable in terms of smoothness than the 13' tb mbp I've been using lately, for that sake alone irregardless of its advantages with handling media it has a leg up. Let alone the cost part. It does handle 4k playback terribly, the extra mini 6pin should be here today, then will be able to try the 270x, see if its adequate and go from there.
