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eBay bargains - what's your latest conquest?

Amethyst1 said:
Why not? Unless you have Thunderbolt 3 or USB 3.x on the Mac Pro and a matching enclosure you could use instead.
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USB 3.x I'll soon have when the card arrives. I've got half a dozen USB 3.x external drives at the moment and numerous Lacie and Freecom externals with the quad interfaces. Thunderbolt, I'm uncertain about as the compatibility seems uncertain. Does it actually work on the Mac Pro 1,1?

Perhaps I should spin this off into a separate thread in the Early Intel forum.

netsrot39 said:
I have an eSATA card in my Mac Pro 2,1 (this one) and it is amazing. It is actually faster than the USB3 card in my Mac Pro 2,1 but that could also be due to the drives and the card itself that I'm using. Anyways, I can highly recommend a quality eSATA card in the Mac Pro ;)
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Thanks for that recommendation. I'm split between the StarTech or the Silicon Image Steelvine SBA312406001 which I've seen going cheaply online. If the StarTech is better then I'll go for that instead. :)

Edit: all I needed to do was check the specs! The StarTech offers 6Gb/s whilst the Silicon Image card is 3Gb/s. There's no contest, despite the latter possessing double the eSATA ports.
 
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TheShortTimer said:
Thunderbolt, I'm uncertain about as the compatibility seems uncertain. Does it actually work on the Mac Pro 1,1?
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Since Thunderbolt 3 (what this post talks about) requires Sierra, the answer is no. There's also the question of whether these flashed GC-TITAN RIDGE cards will initialise with the 1,1's 32-bit EFI.
Interestingly, there seems to be no information on whether Thunderbolt 2 PCIe cards (ASRock made one) can be made to work or have been tried in a Mac Pro. Thunderbolt 2 requires Mavericks.
 
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Amethyst1 said:
Since Thunderbolt 3 (what this post talks about) requires Sierra, the answer is no. There's also the question of whether these flashed GC-TITAN RIDGE cards will initialise with the 1,1's 32-bit EFI.
Interestingly, there seems to be no information on whether Thunderbolt 2 PCIe cards (ASRock made one) can be made to work or have been tried in a Mac Pro. Thunderbolt 2 requires Mavericks.
Click to expand...

As always you've got the answers. :)

I forgot that the requirement of Sierra would exclude my machine from TB3 anyhow. If I can find a TB2 card at a decent price, I might be up for the role of crash test dummy and if it's a no-go, I could always sell the card anyway.

A little off-topic fun...

ToniCH said:
I think were are going to need a bit more of climate change for that... ;) I used to live in London for couple of years back in the day and I remember some extreme weather but not so much snow. Could be different in north though.

Last couple of days its been snowing. Yesterday and today total of 3.5 hours of clearing snow out of our driveway (2 people) and my sportswatch reports 200% of daily activities reached and 1700 kcal spent. 😵 I am too old for this s...t. ;)

Ps. wife just calculated that yesterday we removed approx 30m3 of wet and heavy snow and today 75m3 of light (frozen) snow. By hand. I am spent. 😫

Little-snow.jpg
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weckart said:
As for snow, we had an inch or two in Cheshire yesterday, none really in the Midlands although some fell today and melted on the roads.
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My neighbourhood in London, currently. :)

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Amethyst1 said:
Since Thunderbolt 3 (what this post talks about) requires Sierra, the answer is no. There's also the question of whether these flashed GC-TITAN RIDGE cards will initialise with the 1,1's 32-bit EFI.
Interestingly, there seems to be no information on whether Thunderbolt 2 PCIe cards (ASRock made one) can be made to work or have been tried in a Mac Pro. Thunderbolt 2 requires Mavericks.
Click to expand...

Someone posed this question in Jan regarding TB2 cards (and a MP 5,1) but received answers about the Titan Ridge instead.

Amethyst1 said:
I suppose these cards are all basically the same, as they all use the same chipset anyway.
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Let's see if I can find one at an attractive price to play around with...

Tratkazir_the_1st said:
@ToniCH
@TheShortTimer

And they say Russia is cold country :). Right now in Moscow quite everything melted to pools with ice, it got me hard time to come to office :D. Well, the forecast promises lowering temperature during week , to -15 C at Saturday. We'll see.
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It seems that not all of England has experienced snowfall because I was on the phone earlier to someone who lives in the East Midlands and they were surprised to discover that London is snow covered as they've not seen anything so far. Some of the youngsters on my street built a mini snowman. :D

-15 C? Good lord.
 
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Hello guys,
I have to share this ebay find. After two years of looking I finally hit the jackpot.

First I've found an ebay listing with a PowerMac G4 with a dual cpu Sonnet upgrade - with unknown specs. Based on a blurry picture I decided to bid on it and won the auction.

See photo of the CPU upgrade:
Image_20221215_134047_734.jpeg


After few days the machine arrived to my home. I opened it a there were a few more surprises inside :)
Image_20221215_134111_034.jpeg


A GForce4 graphics card!! And a Sonnet Tempo Sata PCI card!!!

And all this for 150Euro shipped!! The best Christmas present ever :)

Now I have to check it, if it all works.....and then assemble my dream machine ....
 
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staso28 said:
Hello guys,
I have to share this ebay find. After two years of looking I finally hit the jackpot.

First I've found an ebay listing with a PowerMac G4 with a dual cpu Sonnet upgrade - with unknown specs. Based on a blurry picture I decided to bid on it and won the auction.

See photo of the CPU upgrade:
View attachment 2128664

After few days the machine arrived to my home. I opened it a there were a few more surprises inside :)
View attachment 2128665

A GForce4 graphics card!! And a Sonnet Tempo Sata PCI card!!!

And all this for 150Euro shipped!! The best Christmas present ever :)

Now I have to check it, if it all works.....and then assemble my dream machine ....
Click to expand...
Sweet 👏 What were the specs of the Sonnet upgrade in the end?👍
 
I'm embarrassed offering a fortune for NVIDIA 7800 GT (when it wasn't needed) PCI-E but I hope Amnesia TDD will run faster on a higher than (128x128) resolution on my Quad.
 
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Amethyst1 said:
I just snagged a late 2008 MBA (1.86GHz/2GB/128GB Samsung SSD)... We'll see how this performs compared to my 2010 MBA (1.4GHz/2GB/64GB Toshiba SSD).
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The 2008 MBA has a faster processor, which should on paper point towards it outperforming the 2010 MBA. Though in practice there could be an entirely different outcome... I look forward to seeing your comparative results. :)

I could do with some advice from you all regarding my latest acquisition. This is a 14" iBook G4 (512 MB RAM, 55GB? HDD, 1.42 Ghz) that I won with some last-second bidding for basically £12 GBP. I'd mistakenly thought it was a 12" iBook G4 whilst bidding but no matter, as it wouldn't hurt to have a second machine as a spare and it didn't cost me a lot of money.

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Here's some images from the listing.

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In pretty good condition for a machine of its vintage. The seller pointed out that there was a slight blemish. See for yourself...

DNtKuRj.jpg


Trivial in my opinion - and I'm sure most of you would agree. After all, you're hardly going to spend hours gazing at that - but they highlighted it nonetheless. They also warned that the trackpad had stopped working after they erased the HDD and reinstalled Tiger and advised that you could use a mouse instead.

When it arrived, I also noticed that many of the function keys were not working either but that and the trackpad issue were solved by simply updating the OS from 10.4 to 10.4.11. :)

A little clean with anti-bacterial wipes and it looks even better. :D

Vhd8M6H.jpg


The iBook was described as "in good working order" but I soon discovered that the battery is faulty: it's stuck at 73% and the lights flash appropriately but it doesn't hold a charge. When you remove the mains adapter, the computer instantly shuts off.

I contacted the seller to query this and they of course claimed that it was charging fine when they tested it. This purchase is covered by the eBay guarantee but for £12 GBP I'm not sure whether I should file a complaint. Everything else works fine and I'm aware that at this price there isn't a huge profit margin for the seller.

What say you, my fellow MR members?
 
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It's a final release iBook and £12 for one these days is a gift. I couldn't get too excited about the battery. You're not going to find another at that price in a hurry.

Not surprised it went wonky when they wiped it and installed 10.4.0 onto it. It shipped with 10.4.2 and realistically needs 10.4.3 to make sure all the required drivers are installed for the hardware it came with. It took me a little while to find one which wasn't smashed to bits or yellowed to death. The 12" versions are more plentiful but this 14" version came with a tiny speed bump 1.42GHz vs 1.33GHz, so there's that.
 
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TheShortTimer said:
The 2008 MBA has a faster processor, which should on paper point towards it outperforming the 2010 MBA. Though in practice there could be an entirely different outcome...
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Indeed. :)

TheShortTimer said:
I could do with some advice from you all regarding my latest acquisition. This is a 14" iBook G4 (512 MB RAM, 55GB? HDD, 1.42 Ghz) that I won with some last-second bidding for basically £12 GBP.
Click to expand...
That's a steal for a final-generation iBook G4, even with a dead battery. Are you going to do something about the *drumroll* 4200rpm hard drive? ;)
 
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Amethyst1 said:
Indeed. :)
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What a read! I wonder if it would be possible to overclock the CPU to overcome this throttling?

Amethyst1 said:
That's a steal for a final-generation iBook G4, even with a dead battery.
Click to expand...

Dronecatcher said:
I wouldn't quibble for £12 :)
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MarkC426 said:
£12......bloomin eck, that's an absolute bargain.
I wouldn't expect it to even work at that price....😃
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Okay, no more quibbling from me. A bargain it is. :)

Amethyst1 said:
Are you going to do something about the *drumroll* 4200rpm hard drive? ;)
Click to expand...

Ah, I knew that this wouldn't escape your attention. I was hoping that I might evade the question but I dug a hole for myself by bringing up this subject recently. :D

I'll have to do something about the HDD because experience has made me extremely wary about units in pre-owned machines. There have been too many incidents where they've failed within a short space of time and I wound up having to purchase new drives and restore my data. Much better to act pre-emptively I think - especially in a scenario like this where the HDD is aged (slow, even for its era) and its history is unknown.

I do not relish the disassembly process that this will entail and I'm already ranting at the geniuses at Apple who thought it was a good idea to make this component so inaccessible. My iBook G3/500 remains partially dismantled because I abandoned the nightmare procedure halfway through.

Dronecatcher said:
In the past, ailing batteries for me have partially responded to the usual OF resets, PMU resets and also - but potentially dangerous, removing and inserting the battery whilst the machine's charging!
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Knowing my propensity for mishaps, I'll give the last troubleshooting step a miss because it's bound to end badly. It'll be safer for me to just look for a new battery! On that note...

MarkC426 said:
Is the battery replaceable?
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Amethyst1 said:
It’s a 2005 laptop, so yeah. :)
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Yeah, this was before Apple ventured into selling disposable computers that were designed to limit any possibility of repair or upgrade and instead push the consumer to purchase their latest, equally locked down model. :)

Judging by the prices I've seen on eBay, brand new batteries are expensive though.
 
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