I have been after a Mac Pro for my home recording studio for some time to replace the laptop and the ever growing collection of external hard drives I have been using, setting a budget of £750 - £1000 for the Mac and Monitors, initially I was after either a 4.1 or 5.1 browsing through e bay I came across a new listing for a 2008 Mac Pro 3.1, a short distance from me making collection viable,
The specs are:
Mac Pro 3.1
Quad core Xeon
2 processors
8 cores
3.2GHz
12MB cache
Graphics card: NVIDIA GEF 8800 VRAM 512
2GB memory
Sold with 2 x 22" Acer V223HQV monitors
Keyboard
Mouse
With a buy it now price of £280 I decided to take a chance and hit the buy it now button. I wasn't disappointed the machine and monitors were almost immaculate, opening the case to clean the interior, there was very little dust which indicated low usage.
It needed upgrading to run my software both the OSX it was running 10.5 and the memory 2GB's wasn't enough. With the machine being well within my budget I decided to spend the saving on
4 x 3TB HDD's for storage £260 Local Computer Store
16GB's Memory from the USA £85 ebay buy it now
Samsung 850 EVO 500 GB SSD for the boot drive £110 ebay auction
Sonnet Allegro USB 3.0 4-Port card £64 Amazon
Total £515
I spent a day installing the new hardware, 10.10 Yosemite and the applications, now, the machine is more than capable of handling everything I throw at it, unlike most USB 3.0 cards the Sonnet Allegro is compatible with Yosemite and El Capitan, The total cost of £795 might seem a bit overpriced for a 3.1 though bearing in mind it came with two monitors, keyboard and mouse which most don't come with, it is still a relatively cheap upgrade.
The specs are:
Mac Pro 3.1
Quad core Xeon
2 processors
8 cores
3.2GHz
12MB cache
Graphics card: NVIDIA GEF 8800 VRAM 512
2GB memory
Sold with 2 x 22" Acer V223HQV monitors
Keyboard
Mouse
With a buy it now price of £280 I decided to take a chance and hit the buy it now button. I wasn't disappointed the machine and monitors were almost immaculate, opening the case to clean the interior, there was very little dust which indicated low usage.
It needed upgrading to run my software both the OSX it was running 10.5 and the memory 2GB's wasn't enough. With the machine being well within my budget I decided to spend the saving on
4 x 3TB HDD's for storage £260 Local Computer Store
16GB's Memory from the USA £85 ebay buy it now
Samsung 850 EVO 500 GB SSD for the boot drive £110 ebay auction
Sonnet Allegro USB 3.0 4-Port card £64 Amazon
Total £515
I spent a day installing the new hardware, 10.10 Yosemite and the applications, now, the machine is more than capable of handling everything I throw at it, unlike most USB 3.0 cards the Sonnet Allegro is compatible with Yosemite and El Capitan, The total cost of £795 might seem a bit overpriced for a 3.1 though bearing in mind it came with two monitors, keyboard and mouse which most don't come with, it is still a relatively cheap upgrade.
