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Advice: Get an older Mac Pro?
- Thread starter cmm
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The mac pro is one of the easier ones to fix. I just suggest going for one at a price where you can afford to replace a gpu if it dies. Logic boards can die too but I haven't seen as many complaints on any mac pro model. I remember with the G5s that preceded them it seemed like everyone I knew had at least one logic board failure. That was just ridiculous.
Very, I'd say.
Parts are expensive for the MP.
Yeah I know you can do that, but I personally wouldn't want to go through that hassle. That's why I said I wouldn't buy it.
What parts are in a Mac Pro? The motherboard? Thats going to expensive on any Apple product unless you have Apple Care. The power supply, sure, although I haven't heard of many of them ever dying. What does that leave? Fans? Sure I guess they'd be somewhat expensive. The rest, CPU's, don't generally die, hard drives, well you can replace them, optical drives the same, and I guess RAM can go bad or the trays for that matter. Most of what I hear and have read thus far indicates that Mac Pro's are workhorse computers, they last a very long time and few people have real problems with them and they don't seem to die, hence why you see so many for sale on Ebay and craigslist. People seem to get rid of them only when they want more horsepower not because they die.
I just checked and from what I can find doing a quick search is that a replacement logic board goes from about $400 up to $800 depending on type and needs. That's nothing to sneeze at. Plus the older it gets the harder it will be to find the more expensive it will become.
Parts are pretty much expensive for all macs. A logic board problem, even if it's a minor board component, can completely total a macbook air or pro out of warranty unless a flat rate is offered (when you figure for depreciation it's often not worth fixing).
My point on a mac pro was that it's relatively unlikely. The base gpu is the most likely thing to die. I'm saying if you plan to keep an older computer for a while the thing to do is budget at least $300 toward repairs figured into the price you pay out the door. That ensures it's unlikely to add up to a silly amount. I think on the old ones a logic board is around $500. A gpu on one of those can be replaced with an upgrade for about $230. With older computers and those out of warranty, a big thing is whether they're worth the price being asked. I still think a used 2009 at a good price, which will definitely drop significantly if they release new ones, could be the way to go right now if the OP intends to use it for a few years.
They're good computers. My only point was that every computer fails at some point, so on a used computer you should calculate some budget for potential repairs into the price you pay. Otherwise it can kill the economy in a used machine. Personally I think the $900-1200 commonly asked is quite high for a 2006 machine. The only reason they go for so much is because of the lack of other models with that kind of expansion and duty cycle from Apple. The OP specifically is looking for 3-5 years from a machine built 3-5 years ago, so I think it's natural to budget somewhat for the potential of repair costs.
I think a reasonable price for a 2006 model with 12GB of RAM or less is $7-800.00 a 2008 model your going to have to double that budget but you can find deals if you look, many 2008's are advertised for $999 but end up going for a lot more, so if your lucky you can snag a deal. I had a 2006 model and recently upgraded to a 2008, I paid $700 for my 2006 model and it had 9GB of RAM. If I had to do it all over again, I'd still get the 2006 model, I had no problem with it and it ran 24x7 for almost a year, I even installed Windows 7 64bit on it and ran it in bootcamp.
You can put a 3,1 mother board in..I have the issue is you really don't benefit other than efi 64..
you need to buy a 3,1 rear fan assembly and a couple heat sinks it's far from painless and not at all worth it..especially being that 3,1 logic boards refub are still 600-800 dollars then figure a 100 for each processor so it's an 800-1000 dollar "upgrade"
That's a bad way to look at it. 16GB of ram for a newer model is cheap as hell. Expensive parts can remain expensive when they're old even if the value of what they match has declined. Consider the cost of factory replacement parts for a ten year old car. The car may have declined in value, but the cost for parts remains about the same. Anyway that one is leveraged by the fact that it has nice upgrades, but I still don't think it's worth purchasing for that much.
The value of these older ones is artificially inflated by the entry cost of the newer ones and their low volume nature.
I know you're just stating it because it could be done, but that would be a dum upgrade for anyone. You could get a much newer machine when you add up the cost of the initial machine + the cost of those updates.
Maybe when the refresh comes out the prices of the 2008 will go down. I just don't want to spend close to $1000 on a 5 year old computer, I don't see the real value in that. Right now I'm going to build an i3 fileserver for $350 and store my 5 hard drives of media/documents there and just browse via Finder on my MacBook Pros. Too bad I couldn't use Mac for it, but that's too expensive. Lightpeak products are also too expensive ($1400 for a RAID NAS)-- that's insane! (I was considering using a NAS that would work with an iMac instead, but ran when I saw the pricing!
I don't blame you. They cost too much partially due to the high markup of new units. It's been stated before, but that $2500 used to buy a dual socket workstation. That is no longer the case. Personally I think the 6 core should bump out the entry model, but that won't happen. High minimum sale with crappy hardware is a really bad combination.
I had the same problem as the OP.
I ended up going the Hackintosh route once Snow Leopard came out and I could no longer use my old G4 file servers.
The SATA PCI card I had for them would kernel panic on boot in Leopard so they were stuck on Tiger.
For some reason my MacBook on Snow Leopard would no longer time machine back up to the server running Tiger.
Thats when I built the Hackintosh, it's pretty much as simple as buying a Gigabyte board and running a utility called Multibeast these days.
I ended up going the Hackintosh route once Snow Leopard came out and I could no longer use my old G4 file servers.
The SATA PCI card I had for them would kernel panic on boot in Leopard so they were stuck on Tiger.
For some reason my MacBook on Snow Leopard would no longer time machine back up to the server running Tiger.
Thats when I built the Hackintosh, it's pretty much as simple as buying a Gigabyte board and running a utility called Multibeast these days.
Are there downsides and things that do not work? I considered it a long time ago, but I heard there are a lot of compatibility issues...
It depends on what you want, you can build a very stable system, however when an update comes out, you have to wait to see how it might affect your system, do a CCC of your drive, apply the update, cross your fingers and hope it doesn't mess anything up. Or you can choose not to apply the updates and stick with your stable system. I had a stable hackintosh for quite sometime, but in the end, I wanted my system to be up to date all the time, and didn't want to bother with hassle of possible instabilities so I opted for the real thing.
Lurking here on the sidelines with great interest. I should really swap out my G4. So a Mac Pro is in the future. I'm retired, so my power needs are modest. I would just like something that will afford insulation in the future from OS changes and Browser connectivity.
If you stick with it long enough and you're good with problem solving and searching the Internet for solutions you will have a fully functioning machine.
The biggest compatibility issue I ever had to deal with was when 10.7.2 added iCloud.
If you didn't have an Ethernet card installed that was recognized as built in all hell broke loose. You couldn't login to iCloud, iTunes would crash as soon as you opened it (if you had genius and or match enabled) and you couldn't login to the Mac AppStore.
On my Hackintosh I had an Ethernet card, it was my only network interface but it was NOT recognized as built in.
Long story short I had to make an EFI string for my Ethernet card and inject it into the boot loader and viola it was recognized as built in.
It took a few hours for me to find this info and implement it and get it all to work but since then I've been going great.
The more "vanilla" your install is (the less hacked kexts you have installed) the less of a chance of updates giving you issues.
I remember pretty much the only kext that gave me update issues was sleep enabler. With the new Sandy Bridge boards and chipsets many of the builds need very few if any non-vanilla kexts. So theoretically they should have very few, if any issues when updating.
Personally I no longer use sleep enabler, I'm not even sure if it works with Lion. Since I have an older board from 2009 with less than stellar support I miss out on sleep capabilities. Since being a file server is in its list of duties that's no big deal.
But at the end of the day I have a silent machine that is every bit as good to me as a Mac Pro expandability wise (obviously not performance wise) that only uses 80w idle and 100w under load according to my kill-a-watt. That's with a Gigabyte g31m-es2l motherboard, 2.8 GHz Core2Duo oced to 3.2GHz, Nvidia G210, 4 GB of 800 MHz DDR2 RAM, PCI Gigabit Ethernet card, 1 optical drive, 3 hard drives and 4 low RPM case fans. My Power Mac G4s are at my parents so I can't test their power usage against my Hack, but I imagine they would use more power than it. I'm fairly certain a Mac Pro would as well.
If using sandy bridge and the integrated GPU I imagine that idle number would drop even lower.
But I'd strongly recommend against having a Hackintosh as your only Mac. You will make a mistake at some point and not be able to boot your machine. If you don't have a back up bootable disk you'll need a real Mac to access the utilities to repair or reinstall Lion.
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