Mac Pro buyer needs advice

[daverso]

I'm looking to buy a Mac Pro. Today, I went into the apple store with my heart set and my mind made up. I called ahead and the lady said you could customize the Mac Pro in the store, and it was the only computer they sold that could be customized. I now found out that is only a half truth.

If you go to purchase a mac pro, they cant replace the baseline video card or hard drive with the one of your choice. they can only add in an additional card or hard drive, and they obviously will still charge you for the original parts. It's hardly customization.

So needless to say, I decided to take my business to the online store. But I decided to check ebay first. I decided to bid on this:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dl...:MEBIDX:IT&item=190235914289#ebayphotohosting

I now realize it does not qualify for apple care... Is this a safe buy? The processors in there are not the original. I'm hoping i'll get outbid, i set my highest bid at 3,000, so if anyone wants it, go for it haha. Thoughts?

 

[Silencio]

What do you want to customize?

I think the best course of action is to just buy one of the stock Mac Pro configurations from a retailer like MacConnection and customize it yourself through upgrades from third parties.

That eBay auction is for one of the previous-generation Mac Pros, just so you know.

 

[mBurns]

What do you want to customize?

I think the best course of action is to just buy one of the stock Mac Pro configurations from a retailer like MacConnection and customize it yourself through upgrades from third parties.

That eBay auction is for one of the previous-generation Mac Pros, just so you know.

Great advice. I'd try to get out of the eBay auction. Can you retract your bid?

 

[daverso]

I dont know, Is there an option to retract bids on ebay?

 

[daverso]

What do you want to customize?

I wanted to change the hard drive to the 500GB version, and change my graphics card to the NVIDIA gforce 8800.

Do you guys recomend not doing that and installing my own additional parts?
Is that cheaper/does it not void the warranty?

 

[Tallest Skil]

I wanted to change the hard drive to the 500GB version, and change my graphics card to the NVIDIA gforce 8800.

Do you guys recomend not doing that and installing my own additional parts?
Is that cheaper/does it not void the warranty?

Don't buy hard drives from Apple. You can buy an additional terabyte HDD for the price of the upgrade to ONE from Apple.

If you're up to it, you can buy a PC 8800 GT and flash the EFI64 firmware. Get an overclocked one and you can run it at 700 MHz in both OS X and Windows.

 

[daverso]

If you're up to it, you can buy a PC 8800 GT and flash the EFI64 firmware. Get an overclocked one and you can run it at 700 MHz in both OS X and Windows.

Not a bad idea. What will that do to my warranty though?

 

[Tallest Skil]

Not a bad idea. What will that do to my warranty though?

Well, the GPU itself won't be supported, but the rest of your Mac will be... provided you don't break anything during installation (but it's a PCI-E slot...).

 

[Silencio]

If you upgrade the video card after purchasing the machine, you can do one of two things with the stock Radeon HD 2600 XT:

1. Stick it in a slower PCIe slot in your Mac Pro and run a third or fourth display off of it.

2. Sell it to a first-gen Mac Pro owner, as that card will make a nice upgrade over the old, stock GeForce 7300GT.

And I echo the previous sentiment: just add your own bare SATA hard drive from Newegg or Other World Computing or whoever. I ended up using the stock 320GB drive that came with my Mac Pro strictly as a Time Machine volume to keep my boot partition and home directory backed up.