Have I got a good deal?

[Haywood]

Hi, I just bought a Mac Pro on Ebay and will be collecting it on Wednesday. I want to know whether I got a good deal, and if the setup is good or not.

Mac Pro 2.1
2 x Quad Cord 5355 Xeon CPU (Giving 8 Cores in total - 2.66ghz x 2) - (Arctic silver has been used as the Heat sink Compound).
16 GB Apple Approved Heatsinked Ram.
1 x 500 Gb HDD
1 x 1TB HDD
ATI 1900 Graphic Card (option to upgrade to a ATI 5770 for £150 more)


I paid £1000.


If you were to change any of the aspects of this setup, what would it be?

I'm sorry for being a noob, but I'd really appreciate your inputs.

 

[bax2003]

Things you need to make that machine fly are:

1. Graphics card upgrade - Radeon HD5770 +
2. SSD as system drive.

Considering that you did not get crappy 7300GT....1.5TB of storage and 16GB of FB-DIMM, I thing that you got a good deal.

 

[Haywood]

Things you need to make that machine fly are:

1. Graphics card upgrade - Radeon HD5770 +
2. SSD as system drive.

Considering that you did not get crappy 7300GT....1.5TB of storage and 16GB of FB-DIMM, I thing that you got a good deal.

Thanks a lot for the reassurance. What SSD would you recommend? The current Geekbench score is 10600, is that good?

 

[Haywood]

Has anyone else got an input?

 

[refison]

I think that MacPro 2.1 falls under the 2006-2007 first gen category as nothing changed other than 4 & 8 cores config. For comparison, I picked up a 2008 2.8GHz 8 core, 16GB ram, ATI 5770 video for $1250 five months ago from an off-lease company sold on ebay (tower was excellent condition, kb & mouse were dirty). The 2008 MP (3rd gen) has faster bus, ram speed, PCI-E 2.0 for faster graphics, more PCI-E bandwidth allotment for add-on cards such as capture cards & hardware raid cards. I guess since you already bought yours this isn't helping but maybe it can help others in determining purchase decisions.

The only thing worthwhile to add is is an SSD. I use the Samsung 830 256GB and love it. Was on sale for $172. Don't spend on anything else that will be obsolete in the first gen come next year.

 

[derbothaus]

The current Geekbench score is 10600, is that good?

Thats what a base 15" Macbook Pro gets on average in 32-bit. 11,500+ in 64-bit.

 

[ashman70]

At the end of the day if you are happy with your purchase then thats all that matters. If it suits your needs and is what you wanted, then you did well. These early Mac Pro's can still be upgraded as outlined in some of the posts, so there is room to grow, but there are also limitations. I don't know what the market for used Mac Pro's is in the UK, but here in Canada, I wouldn't have paid more then $700 for that machine. The fact it has 16GB of RAM is fantastic, hopefully you'll never have to upgrade at its very expensive.

 

[Snowshiro]

Hi, I just bought a Mac Pro on Ebay and will be collecting it on Wednesday. I want to know whether I got a good deal, and if the setup is good or not.

Mac Pro 2.1
2 x Quad Cord 5355 Xeon CPU (Giving 8 Cores in total - 2.66ghz x 2) - (Arctic silver has been used as the Heat sink Compound).
16 GB Apple Approved Heatsinked Ram.
1 x 500 Gb HDD
1 x 1TB HDD
ATI 1900 Graphic Card (option to upgrade to a ATI 5770 for £150 more)


I paid £1000.


If you were to change any of the aspects of this setup, what would it be?

I'm sorry for being a noob, but I'd really appreciate your inputs.

You can just stick a generic PC 5770 card in it as long as you're running at least Snow Leopard 10.6.4 or Lion. It'll cost you a lot less than 150 quid. You'll get a black screen while it's booting until it gets to the login screen, but it'll run fine.

I have an almost identical machine to yours (with a PC 5770 in it) which I've had for 6 years. I added an SSD as the main Boot/OS drive and it makes a pretty huge difference to the overall snappiness of the machine. It's still a very capable beast and besides not being able to "officially" run Mountain Lion, it still holds up perfectly well against brand new Macs.