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Is a 2008 Mac Pro for $625 a good deal?

C

Chris27

Member
Work is shedding some old dev boxes and giving employees an opportunity to buy them.

The specs of the mac pro I am eyeing are:
2*2.8 ghz xeon harpertown quad cores
4 GB ecc ram
500 GB HDD
256mb ATI 2600xt

http://support.apple.com/kb/SP11

Also I can get a 2006 model for $375
2*2.66 ghz xeon woodcrest dual cores
4 GB ram
250 GB HDD
7300 gt

http://support.apple.com/kb/SP30

I don't really need another computer... but this is cheap for a Mac Pro right?
 
thats cheap. Problem is you need ddr2 ecc ram and 4gb aint a lot. You can grab more off crucial.com.

2009 and up are holding their values better but like i said thats really cheap. $625 is considered about right for the 2006 model.
 
Yeah that was a 2500 to 3000 dollar box in 2008, I'd grab it if I had the cash, dual quads will cook right along for a lot of purposes. Especially if you do any kind of virtualization, that machine will truck right through an entire lab setup, as long as you get the necessary RAM in it. Buddy at the office has the dual quad machine from 2009 ish i think, and it still kicks ass, I can't imagine his being much diff than the one you're eyeing.
 
Paperlantern said:
Yeah that was a 2500 to 3000 dollar box in 2008, I'd grab it if I had the cash, dual quads will cook right along for a lot of purposes. Especially if you do any kind of virtualization, that machine will truck right through an entire lab setup, as long as you get the necessary RAM in it. Buddy at the office has the dual quad machine from 2009 ish i think, and it still kicks ass, I can't imagine his being much diff than the one you're eyeing.
Click to expand...
2009 model has Nehalem, which is a massive performance boost.

Earlier models used DDR2 FB-DIMMs, so it's relatively pricey to upgrade the RAM.
 
That is pretty cheap. I paid almost 3 grand for mine when it was first released. I bet you could turn them around rather easily too 🙂
 
For 625$ I wouldn't even consider it a question.

Unless something drastic happens that renders future versions of OSX incompatible (which I find unlikely) then that's still a pretty future proof Mac. Sandy Bridge is obviously a faster architecture but Core 2 is still pretty far from obsolete for most use cases. Let alone with 8 cores.
 
Mr. President said:
For 625$ I wouldn't even consider it a question.

Unless something drastic happens that renders future versions of OSX incompatible (which I find unlikely) then that's still a pretty future proof Mac. Sandy Bridge is obviously a faster architecture but Core 2 is still pretty far from obsolete for most use cases. Let alone with 8 cores.
Click to expand...

Let me be the dissenting voice. It's too expensive to upgrade ECC RAM, impossible to upgrade the CPU more, too slow, and when a $1100 iMac ($950-ish with the right MacMall deals) is about as fast as this (and faster for non-highly-multithreaded apps, which are the vast majority), it's time to retire this. Add no warranty, low end graphics card, and a furnace-like design (do you live in the south?) -- it's time to move on. Awesome in its' day; surpassed by iMacs now.

I would just get an iMac.

I can't agree with the Mac mini comment, unless speaking of the i7 server version with a quad-core i7; the i5 dual-core version isn't as fast.
 
Also consider the electricity used as well. A Mac Pro is a BEAST of a machine compared to a mini or an iMac.
 
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