Buying advice

[kilcher]

I know very little about Mac's but would kind of like to try one, can you guys tell me if this is a good price and how old this might be? The guy started at $600 and has dropped the price a couple times.

 

[NOTNlCE]

Do not buy, imo. This is the LOWEST MODEL Mac Pro 1,1 and in order to be even remotely usable would require significant upgrades. I wouldn't pay more than $200 for a 1,1 - especially one without an upgraded GPU and the lowest grade processors available in that machine. Reasonable CPUs (E5355s, which are Quad Core 2.66GHz) run about $50 for an upgrade, and RAM can be expensive, though I just picked up 16GB for about $45, then you would need a new GPU to take advantage of the Tiamo hack for Mavericks.

And even after all that, you're still running 2006 hardware with a GPU running in a PCIe 1.0 interface with 667mHz RAM. The upgrades and a reasonable GPU are going to cost $100+ depending on what you wanted to do, to upgrade, but I can't imagine anyone using that machine as a daily driver in its current hardware state.

 

[kilcher]

Ok, thanks! That's really what I needed to know. I'd rather not have one at all than have one that's too old or underpowered. It was kind of hard to tell from the info he posted. I'll pass!

 

[NOTNlCE]

Yup, that's the oldest of the old as far as the Intel towers go. Just glancing at the completed sales on Ebay show the highest end 1,1/2,1 towers going for around that $350 price mark, with ~10GB of RAM and the 2 x Quad Core Xeons, often with other goodies like a 1TB after market hard drive or an upgraded GPU. But I mean, hey. If he brings it down to like $100, and you want something to mess with, that's another story. Glad to help.
-N

 

[OhKay]

You can't easily upgrade OS X to the latest version. Apple offers OS X upgrades only for machines that are five years old or newer. This one is older than five years.