Early 2008 Mac Pro....what's it worth?

[dcpmark]

Need some help. I have an 3.2 Ghz 8-core early 2008 Mac Pro with ATI Radeon 5770, 32 GB RAM, 512GB Samsung 850 SSD startup drive, three WD Caviar Black 1TB drives, and the 500GB HD drive that came with it new. I also have a 30" Apple Cinema Display. I'm not interested in getting top dollar for it....just want to let it go for a good price on Craigslist. Throwing in an iSight camera, an Apple mouse, and a 2-button Logitech mouse. What should I advertise it for? I had upgraded it to High Sierra, but it's now factory reset to El Cap. Everything is in great condition and work perfectly.

TIA!

 

[sgouver]

Definitely more than £600, especially since you include monitor. This is a really powerful setup.

 

[G4DPII]

Have a look on ebay and Craigslist for similar spec'd machines. USe those as a guide to set your price.

 

[AidenShaw]

Need some help. I have an 3.2 Ghz 8-core early 2008 Mac Pro with ATI Radeon 5770, 32 GB RAM, 512GB Samsung 850 SSD startup drive, three WD Caviar Black 1TB drives, and the 500GB HD drive that came with it new. I also have a 30" Apple Cinema Display. I'm not interested in getting top dollar for it....just want to let it go for a good price on Craigslist. Throwing in an iSight camera, an Apple mouse, and a 2-button Logitech mouse. What should I advertise it for? I had upgraded it to High Sierra, but it's now factory reset to El Cap. Everything is in great condition and work perfectly.

TIA!

Have you checked the Marketplace Forum here?

Also, note that OWC sells shipping boxes - the cMP is easily damaged during shipping. https://eshop.macsales.com/search/?q=box

 

[dcpmark]

Have you checked the Marketplace Forum here?

Also, note that OWC sells shipping boxes - the cMP is easily damaged during shipping. https://eshop.macsales.com/search/?q=box

Thanks, but after having the Mac Pro and 30” display on Craigslist for a long time for $450 I ended up just donating them to The Salvation Army for the tax credit. I had some calls on the display, but I was very surprised that no one was interested in the Mac Pro at $250.

 

[tomscott1988]

Depends where you are. In the UK:

The 2008 models are going for less than half the 2010 models and decent spec 3.46ghz Hex models are about £800.

The 3,1s are significantly less powerful and useful now especially with the Sata II bus and are far less sought after.

CEX is a good place to see the value of these things. The 3.2 isnt listed but the 2.8 is and is £180 retail with £83 trade in.

I would say £350 max for the system. Now the 5,1s wont support Catalina I would shift before the older ones get

Sell the monitor separately, the 30" model is quite sought after.

 

[sigmadog]

Thanks, but after having the Mac Pro and 30” display on Craigslist for a long time for $450 I ended up just donating them to The Salvation Army for the tax credit. I had some calls on the display, but I was very surprised that no one was interested in the Mac Pro at $250.

Yeah, I've got my old 3,1 packaged up in a box. I thought someone would want it, but no takers. So I'm going to gut it and use it as storage for tools in my shop. It's big enough I can mount it on the wall and keep my routers and bits all together.

 

[dcpmark]

Sell the monitor separately, the 30" model is quite sought after.

I offered it at $150 and got a few emails, but no actual takers.

 

[goMac]

The 2008s really don't have any value on the open market anymore. A few hundred at most. The maximum OS is pretty low and the hardware is constrained by a slow bus. The dropping prices on the 2009s/2012s pushed them out of whatever market was left for them.

It's hard to put much value on an 11 year old computer.

 

[belfong]

I saw an ad for a 2008 at around US$250. The photos of the case implied that the Mac was quite well taken care of. And while I do need a spare Mac around the house, for upstairs, I am not sure I like the heat this thing will generate nor the relatively slowness.

Xeon 8 core sounds pretty good.. but how is it in practice? I think it can only go up to El Capitan.

I would love to tinker with a Mac Pro and see how I can upgrade it further and it is a good price (we have limited listing of Mac Pros in my country and a 5,1 goes for 4 times the price (US$1000), so it makes the 2008 pretty attractive. Will I still be able to squeeze good life out of this or should I wait further?

 

[jbarley]

I saw an ad for a 2008 at around US$250. The photos of the case implied that the Mac was quite well taken care of. And while I do need a spare Mac around the house, for upstairs, I am not sure I like the heat this thing will generate nor the relatively slowness.

Xeon 8 core sounds pretty good.. but how is it in practice? I think it can only go up to El Capitan.

I would love to tinker with a Mac Pro and see how I can upgrade it further and it is a good price (we have limited listing of Mac Pros in my country and a 5,1 goes for 4 times the price (US$1000), so it makes the 2008 pretty attractive. Will I still be able to squeeze good life out of this or should I wait further?

My MacPro 3,1 quite happily runs Sierra, High Sierra and Mojave using Dosdude's installers, could even run Catalina if I chose.
Even supports the newer APFS file system

 

[belfong]

Nice. How’s the performance? Did you upgrade CPU also? I’m hoping to see a price drop for 4,1 and 5,1. I’m not ambitious to try those difficult hacks. Just wanted a good Mac Pro and probably upgrade the memory and harddisk only.

 

[iluvmacs99]

Nice. How’s the performance? Did you upgrade CPU also? I’m hoping to see a price drop for 4,1 and 5,1. I’m not ambitious to try those difficult hacks. Just wanted a good Mac Pro and probably upgrade the memory and harddisk only.

If you have a Macbook Pro 2017, the Mac Pro 3,1 is less in terms of single core performance. Multi-core is the same as your Macbook. Don't be fooled by 8 core Xeons, because what's really important is how fast is the single core performance because that is a sign of how fast those Xeons can do when a software that uses multithreading will benefit.

The best compromise is the Mac Pro 4,1, which is similar to the 5,1 and can be flashed to 5,1 and don't need a lot of hacks to get it working well and is cheaper than the 5,1.

 

[now i see it]

It's not worth anything to anyone cuz nobody really wants that slow power hungry thing. But it could be useful to you as another computer to offload some chore for it to grind away on as you work on something else with a better box. Keep it.

 

[OS6-OSX]

Early 2008 Mac Pro....what's it worth?

 

[velocityg4]

It's not worth anything to anyone cuz nobody really wants that slow power hungry thing. But it could be useful to you as another computer to offload some chore for it to grind away on as you work on something else with a better box. Keep it.

Not really. At this point outside of special software requirements. It is more of a nostalgic item for collectors and enthusiasts. It's cheaper to run a much more efficient newer machine. Even at idle an old Mac Pro can cost $150 per year to run at $0.10 per KWh. Something like a used i5-4790s system will bury it in energy efficiency and the sales price of an old Mac Pro will certainly pay for it. Starting with Sandy Bridge there were huge strides in performance per watt.

 

[tomscott1988]

Got rid of my 2008 4 years ago it was painfully slow... if you want one get a 2009/2010 because they are still useful.

The main thing is they are huge, use loads of power and the single core performance is pretty poor. Ive just retired my 2010 mac pro because its past its useful lifespan for me.

 

[OS6-OSX]

My MacPro 3,1 quite happily runs High Sierra using Dosdude's installers...

I'm pretty much with you. For someone to buy the OP's setup in 2019 they would have to know exactly why.
People that are still running 3.1's probably have overtime tweaked the systems to where they "work" for what is needed. You have to know how different SW & HW interact and work a-rounds. A prime example:
1. Exporting a 2:12 2.93GB clip out of Avid (8.10) H.264 takes 18:00
2. Saving the same file out of Avid as an AAF takes 00:03 secs. Importing the AAF into Resolve (15.3) takes 00:03 secs. Exporting to H.264 using CUDA cores takes 03:48!

Without knowing this "workaround", I could have cursed the 3,1 but the issue was Avid's playback/render engine. You get the same bad results across the board. There is supposed to be a "new" engine in Avid 2019.7

This was just 1 example on the video side. The only issue on the audio usually can be over come with RAID speeds and RAM. I use lots of NI instruments which are RAM hungry.

This is not to say there are not apps and things that just will not work on the 3,1. It's probably not on the minimum requirements list for a host of apps! When you get into other fields, Houdini, Cinema 4D, MAYA etc. the 3,1 may be a big nogo!

But only 3,1 users get one of these from Apple each time you have to wait for the computer to process something!

 

[weezerr]

I am still using my 3,1 as a daily driver running Mojave with no issues. Upgraded to 32 gigs of RAM and GTX 680, works respectably fine. I have been treading water for a few years waiting for apple to come out with a machine to sell me.