MacPro Specs help!

[Evan Butka]

So my roommate wants to sell me his old MacPro he got from work. We got it for free. His work striped out the graphic card, memory and hard drives, however my roommate replaced them for about $300. So for $300 the Mac is mine. The problem is he never took the time to boot it and install a OS for it. On the back, the it states

Model No.: A1186 EMC No.:2113
MAC PRO/3.0QX/4x512/7300GT/250/500/SD

Spec wise, its old. Assuming the processor is a 3.0Ghz Quad-Core Xeon? If I put in a SSD, a bunch of memory, a nice video card - good for editing?

Also, could I setup a Raid 0/1/5 via software? Or would I need to get a controller for that?

Thanks.

 

[Mike Halper]

http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_pro/specs/mac-pro-quad-3.0-specs.html

I wouldn't put much money into it. Even a current standard MacBook Pro will outperform that computer. It will work for some editing projects, but with the current software that's available it will struggle some.

 

[Evan Butka]

Gotcha. The computer I'm currently using is a MacBook Pro 2010, with i7 2.66Ghz, 16GB RAM and 512GB graphic. Compared to that, my MacBook is faster?

 

[Evan Butka]

So I've been looking into it. Looks like I can upgrade the processors for $300 to x5365 Xeons. Then I'd have 8 cores @ 3.0Ghz. Later on I can always get a better video card, depending on whats in there now.

Then for my Raid setup, 1 drive for boot, then 3+1 more in the 2nd optical bay, and now I have a Raid 5 set up.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Why bother? If I were you, I would thank your room mate and walk away. A current model Mac Mini will eat this system for lunch... Even after you upgrade the CPUs in that Mac Pro. The 667MHz memory bus and total lack of PCIe v2 slots and 64bit EFI support makes this system a non-starter. Forgive me, but $300 for this system is not a bargain, that's about what it's worth in the state you describe, possibly less. And if you go and put another $300+ into it, you're just throwing money away.

Your Macbook should be quite a bit faster for a lot of tasks. If your Macbook is a quad-core, it is for sure better. If it's a dual-core, the only areas the where this Mac Pro will have an advantage is on multi-threaded computational tasks that can be handled within the CPU caches. The memory bandwidth on your Macbook, depending on which config, is anywhere from 1.8X to 2.75X faster.

 

[Evan Butka]

Alright, thanks.