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After 12 years..

bpd115

bpd115

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Feb 4, 2003
823
88
Pennsylvania
I'm going to finally retire my Mac Pro 1,1...

Bought new at the end of 2006, upgraded from 4 to 8 cores and a 1 Gig Radeon 4870 along the way, with SSD...hacked to run OS's up to 10.10...

In 2014 I got a Retina 27" iMac (still my daily desktop machine, along with a 2017 15" MBP) and moved my Mac Pro into another room and remote desktop into it. It sits running as an iTunes server and I'll run handbreak jobs on it.. but I realized this thing, while still going, could be replaced by a much less power hungry Mac Mini....

So I scored a late 2012 2.5 Ghz Core i5 Mini off eBay for $200. I have a 500 gig SSD for it and an 8 gig Ram module to bring it to 10 gigs of RAM. Should suffice and probably pay for itself in the power savings alone....

Looking forward to the rebirth of the modular Mac Pro as this thing, from a build/reliability stand point, is a tank.
 
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I have two of the 2012 i5 Mac Mini's. Great little systems, mine are used as servers and have been running trouble free for over 3 years (running Linux).
 
bpd115 said:
With Rainbow fish.
Click to expand...
Ah yes, such as these...
Boesemani-rainbow.jpg
 
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bpd115 said:
Bit of overkill for an iTunes server with the power draw. My next pro machine will replace my iMac as a daily use machine....whenever Apple decides to get around to it.
Click to expand...

So swap out the CPUs for a pair of low power Clovertowns - you can drop the wattage to 80 watts combined. They are about $10.
 
ssgbryan said:
So swap out the CPUs for a pair of low power Clovertowns - you can drop the wattage to 80 watts combined. They are about $10.
Click to expand...
It will still consume a lot more power than a Mac Mini. For the intended use the Mac Mini makes a lot more sense than a Mac Pro.
 
ssgbryan said:
So swap out the CPUs for a pair of low power Clovertowns - you can drop the wattage to 80 watts combined. They are about $10.
Click to expand...
The 2012 Mac mini under full load consumes only 85 W according to Apple's spec sheet. Idle is probably closer to 30 W.

So it's much more efficient than a Mac Pro 5,1, and one of the reasons I wouldn't mind replacing my 5,1 with a new Mac mini. A $1,099 hex-core i7 Mac mini (2018) would have comparable performance to a 12-core Mac Pro 5,1 (2012) with only a fraction of the power used - that is if Apple would actually bother releasing one.
 
redheeler said:
The 2012 Mac mini under full load consumes only 85 W according to Apple's spec sheet. Idle is probably closer to 30 W.

So it's much more efficient than a Mac Pro 5,1, and one of the reasons I wouldn't mind replacing my 5,1 with a new Mac mini. A $1,099 hex-core i7 Mac mini (2018) would have comparable performance to a 12-core Mac Pro 5,1 (2012) with only a fraction of the power used - that is if Apple would actually bother releasing one.
Click to expand...

Agreed. I was going to wait around to see where they go with the Mini, but for $200 I couldn't pass it up. I did want to go with the 2012 model, as they support dual HDs and the RAM isn't soldered to the logic board. I hope if and when Apple updates the Mini they reverse those decisions from the 2014 models, but I'm not too hopeful.

The Geekbench scores of the 2012 dual i5 are neck and neck with my 8 core Mac Pro in multicore and higher in single core.
 
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In my twisted mind, the timeout status of Mac mini product is because the next time we see it, it's going to be the low-cost development mule for ARM Mac software!
 
bpd115 said:
Agreed. I was going to wait around to see where they go with the Mini, but for $200 I couldn't pass it up. I did want to go with the 2012 model, as they support dual HDs and the RAM isn't soldered to the logic board. I hope if and when Apple updates the Mini they reverse those decisions from the 2014 models, but I'm not too hopeful.

The Geekbench scores of the 2012 dual i5 are neck and neck with my 8 core Mac Pro in multicore and higher in single core.
Click to expand...
I would recommend that you put absolutely no value into Geekbench scores. They're worthless for real world tasks and I fail to see why people rely on them so much.
 
Massive props on keeping it alive that long. I had to use one of those in 2012 and it was slower than molasses.
 
droog said:
Massive props on keeping it alive that long. I had to use one of those in 2012 and it was slower than molasses.
Click to expand...


Depends on the work you're doing with it I guess. I haven't done anything crazy on it in a while. With an SSD its been fine as a server and space heater. I definitely got a good ROI on it.... now I'm dying to see what they do with the Pro Line so I can replace my 27" iMac.
 
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bpd115 said:
I'm going to finally retire my Mac Pro 1,1...

Bought new at the end of 2006, upgraded from 4 to 8 cores and a 1 Gig Radeon 4870 along the way, with SSD...hacked to run OS's up to 10.10...

In 2014 I got a Retina 27" iMac (still my daily desktop machine, along with a 2017 15" MBP) and moved my Mac Pro into another room and remote desktop into it. It sits running as an iTunes server and I'll run handbreak jobs on it.. but I realized this thing, while still going, could be replaced by a much less power hungry Mac Mini....

So I scored a late 2012 2.5 Ghz Core i5 Mini off eBay for $200. I have a 500 gig SSD for it and an 8 gig Ram module to bring it to 10 gigs of RAM. Should suffice and probably pay for itself in the power savings alone....

Looking forward to the rebirth of the modular Mac Pro as this thing, from a build/reliability stand point, is a tank.
Click to expand...
NOWHERE close in performance. But it depends on what you do with it.
 
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