Early 2008 Mac Pro - worth bothering with?

Hi,
Someone in my building threw out an early 2008 Mac Pro with no hard drives.
I put in a spare that I have lying around and it seems ok -- but a bit slow. I'm now in the process of installing Mavericks on it.
I'm curious if this computer is worth bothering with? If so, what are some essential upgrades that would make this hum? I'm assuming an SSD? Should I bother finding extra ram for it (it has 4gb now).
What would be some good uses -- I already have an apple tv and a htpc in the living room.. I suppose I can use it in the bedroom? Can this be a functioning secondary computer for my wife who doesn't game but does use iPhoto/Word/Netflix etc? And if so what should I add?
Thanks everyone for your help!

alphaace wrote:
If my wife just watches netflix/browser/word etc --- no games -- but does do a heavy bit of photo editing -- should I upgrade the gpus?
And if so, what would everyone recommend?
Also, I need to buy some hard drive caddies (only one left in it) -- however, I need a converter to put in a ssd right (as they are 2.5")? Any recommendations on those?   
I have been able to find Mac Pro drive caddies on eBay. Here's one that would get you a set of 4:http://www.ebay.com/itm/Apple-Mac-Pro-Hard-Drive-Sled-Caddy-Complete-Set-1-4-Mac -Pro-2006-2008-/111386524693?pt=US_Drive_Bay_Caddies&hash=item19ef277c15. The screws appear to all be there.
In terms of adapters, this one was in my 2006 Mac Pro when I got it, and it seemed to work fine, although I didn't keep it in there very long:
http://www.amazon.com/Icy-Dock-EZConvert-2-5-Inch-Converter/dp/B002Z2QDNE
OWC sells a couple of 2.5" drive adapters also.
I wouldn't worry about upgrading the graphics until your wife has had a chance to do some photo editing on it. You may not need to upgrade the card for a while, if ever.

Similar Messages

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  • Early 2008 Mac Pro to run Yosemite?

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    Upgrading to Yosemite
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         Are my applications compatible?
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  • Compatible graphics cards for the early 2008 Mac Pro 3,1?

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  • Why are there so many problems with the early 2008 Mac Pro ???

    Hi everybody out there using Mac Pro's early 2008,
    I found out there is a lot of problems with the early 2008 Mac Pro.
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    go to a black screen after 15 minutes or a couple hours
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    1) Apple brand cards,
    2) "sold in the Apple store" cards, and
    3) "Mac Edition" cards ...
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    • NVIDIA Quadro 5000, about US$2500
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    • EVGA GTX 680 Mac Edition, about US$600
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  • With Boot Camp, should I install the 64 bit version of Windows 7 (Home Premium edition) OR the 32 bit version when installing onto an early 2008 Mac Pro operating OSX Lion with a 1 TByte internal HDD?

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  • Early 2008 Mac Pro wakes up from sleep with Mavericks.

    Ever since I upgraded to OSX Mavericks on Tuesday, my early 2008 Mac Pro keeps waking up from sleep mode every couple hours. It goes back to sleep again on its own though after a minute, so I'm thinking it's some kind of new automated feature that I'm not aware of. With the Mac Pro being fairly loud when it wakes up from sleep mode, it woke me up three times last night! Is there some kind of option in the system preferences that I'm not aware of that can deactivate this new behavior? I usually only shut down my computer once a week, and keep it in sleep mode when I'm not using it most of the time, but I'm going to have to start shutting it down every  night now to keep it from waking me up throughout the night...

    Hello MARl0,
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  • Need help with graphics card options for an early 2008 mac pro

    Hello,
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         3. If I can hold two cards what special accomidations would be needed in regards to final cut performance if any?
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      Rob

    The two main cards for mac pros are the apple versions of the  ATI Radeon 5770 and 5870.
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  • I need an "Open CL compatible graphics card for an early 2008 Mac Pro with 1 gig of V-Ram", any recommendations? Thanks.

    I need an "Open CL compatible graphics card for an early 2008 Mac Pro with 1 gig of V-Ram", any recommendations?
    Thanks.

    BlackList:
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  • I have an early 2008 Mac Pro, 8 gb ram with a Dell 27" display and a 42" LG TV. I am thinking about upgrading the stock ATI Radeon 2600 graphics card for better resolution, preferring 2 dvi outputs. Does anyone have any suggestions on the best card?

    I have an early 2008 Mac Pro, 8 gb ram with a Dell 27” display and a 42” LG TV. I am thinking about upgrading the stock ATI Radeon 2600 graphics card for better resolution, preferring 2 dvi outputs or 1 dvi and 1 vga vs 1 dvi and a mini. I don't do a lot of Final Cut Pro, gaming, etc. I am interested in best value for the graphics card.
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    I recommend you install nothing older than the Apple-firware 5770, about US$250.
    RE: Mac Pro Replacement Graphics cards
    1) Apple brand cards,
    2) "sold in the Apple store" cards, and
    3) "Mac Edition" cards ...
    ... show all the screens, including Boot up screens, Safe Mode, Installer, Recovery, debug screens, and Alt/Option boot screens. At this writing, these choices include:
    1) Apple brand cards:
    • Apple-firmware 5770, about US$250** works near full speed in every model Mac Pro, Drivers in 10.6.5
    • Apple-firmware 5870, about US$450
    2) "sold in the Apple store" cards
    • NVIDIA Quadro 4000, about US$1200
    • NVIDIA Quadro 5000, about US$2500
    3) "Mac Edition" cards -- REQUIRE 10.8.3 or later:
    • SAPPHIRE HD 7950 3GB GDDR5 MAC Edition, about US$480** Vendor recommends Mac Pro 4,1
    • EVGA GTX 680 Mac Edition, about US$600
    The cards above require no more than the provided two 6-pin aux power connectors provided in the Mac Pro through 2012 model. Aux cables may not be provided for third-party cards, but are readily available.
    If you are Meet ALL of these:
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    • don't care about "no boot screens" etc AND
    • can re-wire or otherwise "work out" the power cabling, THEN:
    You can use many more cards, even most "PC-only cards"

  • I have an early 2008 Mac Pro, which has re-booting problems. Also what does the spinning beach-ball indicate?

    Hi, I have an early 2008 Mac Pro which has re-booting problems.
    Processor speed is: 2.8
    Memory: 2GB 800 MHz DDR2 FB-DIMM
    2 x 28GHz Quad Core Intel Xeon
    I am running OSX Yosemite Version 10.10
    My Mac Pro keeps re-booting. Last year I had to replace my graphics card. My original card was the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT 255MB, and that is what I have now. At this precise moment my Mac Pro is running perfectly, except that it is slow and the spinning beach-ball keeps appearing. I have managed to do some work with the disk utilities, verifying, cleaning and partitioning. Some errors were found and when it was cleaned this seemed to help my Mac Pro to function properly. Although I am able to use my Mac Pro now, from day to day I still experience re-boot problems. Also quite unexpectedly my mac dictionary has an error, it closed itself down and will not open at all, I had the message to say that a report will be sent to Apple.
    I have tried starting my computer with an external hard drive fitted via a USB cable, I use for back-ups. This worked and I was able to wipe my hard drive clear and replace all info from the back up I had done only a few days ago.
    This worked for a few days and then the same problem started again.
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    When you have the beachball activity, note the exact time: hour, minute, second.  
    These instructions must be carried out as an administrator. If you have only one user account, you are the administrator.
    Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:
    ☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
    ☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
    ☞ Open LaunchPad and start typing the name.
    The title of the Console window should be All Messages. If it isn't, select
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    from the log list on the left. If you don't see that list, select
              View ▹ Show Log List
    from the menu bar at the top of the screen.
    Each message in the log begins with the date and time when it was entered. Scroll back to the time you noted above.
    Select the messages entered from then until the end of the episode, or until they start to repeat, whichever comes first.
    Copy the messages to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Paste into a reply to this message by pressing command-V.
    The log contains a vast amount of information, almost all of it useless for solving any particular problem. When posting a log extract, be selective. A few dozen lines are almost always more than enough.
    Please don't indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.
    Please don't post screenshots of log messages—post the text.
    Some private information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.

  • Early 2008 Mac Pro + ATI Radeon HD 4870 = Not working

    Just took delivery of my new HD 4870 video card today. I installed it in my Early 2008 Mac Pro and booted up. I got a picture no problem on one monitor, but nothing on the other. Furthermore, the display perfpane was missing a lot of controls, like Arrangement and Detect Displays and whatnot.
    I did a bunch of rebooting and swapping of cables, and determined that both the mini-display port and the standard DVI connection will drive a monitor. However, if both are plugged in, the only active display is the one plugged into the mini-display port, and there's no option to setup the secondary display.
    So I booted into bootcamp, and it automatically recognized both display ports, and mirrored my desktop on both monitors. I downloaded and installed the latest windows drivers, rebooted the machine into windows once more, and was able to configure a multiple monitor display with no problem.
    This tells me it's not the card and it's not the motherboard.
    Booting back into mac OS, I discovered that it doesn't even recognize that the card has video ram. It thought I had no video ram in the system.
    So, this all leads me to the conclusion that Apple shipped me a card that it has not yet provided driver support for.
    Hey Apple, can I have my 4870 display driver now?

    Hi again,
    It was funny to read all your answers on my iPhone while away from my computer. I could have reply on the iPhone but I preferred to wait to give you all the procedure I used to install the beta driver successfully this morning.
    To start, I found this link:
    http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=155477
    and followed the "4870 INSTRUCTIONS", starting like suggested by doing the "First, follow the 4850 INSTRUCTIONS above"... (See the link)
    I would like also to specify that I did this without having installed the card physically yet. So I kept my HD 2600 in the computer, followed all the steps excepted for the step 3:
    3. Reboot with -f -v (kextcache/verbose mode)
    There is no -f nor -v switches available for the reboot command at the shell prompt. I simply rebooted as usual "Pomme -> Redémarrer".
    After the reboot, all my software was still working as expected with my HD 2600 card, meaning that these steps are specific and active only for the HD 4870 when it's detected at boot-up.
    You may have to Google for the string "Kext" in order to get the application to install the file ATY_Motmot.kext. For your information, ATY_Motmot filename is the same string as the one found under "System Information ->PCI cards" under "Name".
    I get:
    ATI Radeon HD 4870:
    Name: ATY, Motmot
    The article is not clear regarding where to find the OpenGL.framework to backup before installing the downloaded one. I found mine under:
    /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.5.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/OpenGL.framework
    After having shutdown the computer, just after the reboot that proofed everything was ok, I removed the original HD 2600 card and put back the new HD 4870 and boot up...
    Then I check the "System Information" and found both "Quartz Extreme" and "Core image" supported!
    I launched Aperture, got it!
    I launched Final Cut Express, got it!
    I launched Starry Night Pro Plus, got it! Then I checked the OpenGL settings in Starry Night Pro PLus and activated both options:
    Use shaders where available
    Use AllSky shader (Not compatible with all hardware)
    When I was doing these actions with my original HD 2600 card, the software was giving me a warning that my hardware did not support these options and that it could crash.
    This time, with the HD 4870, it accepted my settings and give me back a very beautiful blue sky with much more shades!
    So in conclusion, it works very smoothtly with my system and I am writing this with two monitors, having bought the MiniDP to DVI adapter this afternoon
    I am happy!
    P.S.: A girl from Apple support called me back this afternoon regarding my problem. She was very happy two when I told her that I did apply the beta driver and that it was working very well...
    Good luck and best regards...

  • Early 2008 Mac Pro + nVidia 8800: Never going to work?

    This forum is littered with threads about early 2008 Mac Pros with the nVidia 8800 card - none of them positive.
    I was unfortunate enough to wait for Apple to release such a machine and buy it. Graphics performance is dire given the hardware available. The machine routinely crashes with the window manager hang problem (the user interface just locks up, yet network services etc. still work), in the way familiar to anyone blighted by this particular bug; just run the Folding@Home client on your machine if you want to experience the joy. Or screensavers, sometimes, so I've had to turn those off. And I've had to turn off monitor power saving too, because I too suffer from the 'monitors sometimes don't wake up' bug. And of course I can't sleep the machine either, because firmware upgrade or not, it's still not reliable. And after all this, still the machine crashes.
    SSH to the machine; try to restart cleanly; even 'sudo reboot' won't restart it. Apple have achieved something I've never seen out of any Unix or Unix-like operating system, ever; the kernel is unable to kill its own processes.
    There have been no indications from Apple that I've seen on these forums over several weeks that the problem is even being acknowledged, let alone tackled. Latest reports indicate that even the 1st gen Mac Pro owners are suffering if they install the 8800.
    http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1460752&tstart=0
    My machine rarely makes it through the day without a forced reboot due to the window manager hanging. I can't do any work on it. I can't rely on it. I can't enjoy it. I can't even use it for web browsing without fear of it hanging.
    There seem to be no facts about this at all. So all I can ask for is opinions. Does anyone have any offering of hope that early 2008 Mac Pros might ever work properly with 8800 cards? Y'know, little things, like actually being able to handle graphics? Or sleeping the monitors? Or, heaven forbid, sleeping the whole machine? Or should I just send it back as unfit for purpose?
    Yours, tired and exasperated... :-/

    I posted this in some other blog (forum), I should have posted this here also but I hope this gives you and all with these problems hope!! I also ran some fish tank test some else posted to get the folding problem to happen and I can not get it to happen at all now, and since my 8800 went in I get NO LOCKUPS, SCREEN FREEZES, shaky blurry video when I boot, so far NOTHING, IT JUST WORKS!!!!!!!!
    Now that I think about it the person who said to use the fish tank program had a bad 8800 and maybe you do also!! here is the link to that:
    http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6965475&#6965475
    I purchased my first mac pro early 08 2 months ago (amazon.com).
    2 quad core 2.8's, 2 gig apple 4 gig OWC total 6 gig ram,2-WD raptors (1st mac 2nd boot camp winxp 32 bit), apple care.
    I had all my problems with the ATI card (I always purchased ATI, never Nvidia, for all the PC's I built) a couple of times I bought the first ones out, these had all kinds of problems until good drivers that actually worked were released (usually 6-12 months after the release of the card).
    So I try not to buy routers, graphic cards, etc.. for at least 6-12 months, but back to my 2600 card!!
    When I received my mac the graphics would freeze, I did a lot of online reading only to find out the ATI 2600 was the problem, the cure was to hook up 2 monitors to the card (and that worked!!).
    Then they came out with the firmware update, now my main monitor would after 2 days on a reboot be scambled (samsung syncmaster 213t, NEVER had ANY problem with it before on any PC I had, so I knew it was not the monitor) to fix the problem I had to either turn power off to the syncmaster or resetting PRAM (worked for a couple more days, then the same problem).
    I called apple and they sent a tech out within days to replace the ATI card, the replacement did the same thing after a couple of days, so I called Apple back and they took a bunch of info from my computer (BTW not much at all loaded in the mac side) and said to call back in a week, so I called back a week later and they said they were going to exchange the card for either another ati 2600 or the Nvidia 8800, I said 8800 and a day later on a saturday I received it, swapped the card and NEVER HAD ANY PROBLEMS at all!!
    So I don't know if the ATI card has problems with certain monitors or they are just poorly made (maybe AMD is mad with Apple that Apple did not use AMD processors).
    I have read others that swapped with the 8800 and their problems went away also!!!!
    Maybe some have no problems with the 2600, but I would not recommend it to anyone, if you can avoid the 2600 GO WITH THE 8800, the drivers will get better (and the 8800 will eventually outperform the ATI)and you will not be sorry.
    Apple is awesome, they are 2nd to none, their is no other company like this anymore that I have dealt with in a long time (not just because they gave me a 8800), like I said in the beginning of this post I always purchased ATI cards and would have kept it if it would have worked but 2 doing the same, ATI [AMD] has lost my support until they prove otherwise.
    I recommend Mac's to everyone now!!
    good luck and let me know it any of this has helped!!!!!!!!!!

  • Where and what type of solid state drive should I buy for my early 2008 Mac Pro Desktop??

    where can I buy and what type of solid state drive should I use to upgrade my early 2008 Mac Pro Desktop??

    Rick,
    When you get a chance.... DSLReports is off line: their SQL server decided to take its indexes and access to data. Power. Not enough of the right kind of UPS. Same happened to StorageReview's "Drive Reliability Database" about 8-9 yrs ago.
    dslreports.com is offline
    Fri Apr 20 09:05:55 EDT 2012
    SSD: Loading CS5 plus other little monsters might matter.
    Lots of small I/Os
    latency of 1/100th where nanoseconds replace those "long" milliseconds
    System: Small and fast.
    DLLoyd even goes for short-stroking drives to get and maintain highest I/O
    The new 10k VRs hit 200MB/sec - I still use them and still find them useful, long lasting, feel responsive with whatever I ask of them. I know they get criticized and "cost too much"
    Just bought a new WD Black and yes it is better than the 2008 model I was using.
    600GB 10K $200 vs $150-220 for WD Black. your choice
    I can destroy a 7.2k drive, I have brought ever 10K drive back after a simple WD Extended Test in Lifeguard.
    I don't really care about $$/GB or I wouldn't have just bought Intel 128GB $149
    Database: the pros put the index in memory and page fix (virtual volumes in memory; cache; hold disk drive index in memory). Caching storage has been around for almost 40 yrs.
    Today you can use SSDs as front end cache to hold DB indexes and frequent data for web servers and such adn use slower secondary storage.
    SSD + SAS + 4TB storage
    Separating the system from data: #1 must
    Having data on array: been what I use
    I put a large photo library on 2 x 10K VRs vs SSD and couldn't tell much difference (SSD is soundless of course) But my WD Blacks make as much noise and run 15*C hotter than those 10K (not what you expect?)
    While 10K and 7.2K are in the 140-180MB/sec range, they are in 3.0 to 12.0 ms seeks, not  0.01 ms.
    People wonnder why shrink a drive to 2.5" (or why not go down to 1.8".
    How long does it take to reposition a disk head? how often? the 10K VR travels on outer tracks at 70 MPH. Really trying to fly off into space.
    It uses one step to find the "zip code" and then another DSP to find the "house."
    True of any high density perpendicular recording mechanism.
    And of course while the Raptor-X tried to find a home with famers, Cheetah buyers, the WD 10K line has more of a home where servers and small form factor drives - and 100s of them - can fit in a rackmount server I imagine.
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  • How do I fix my early 2008 mac pro boot hard disk. Lost everything when it crashed hard, can not reinstal via cd/dvd drive... are there any fix get it boot from dvd drive?

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    Disabled Veteran. 

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    ===========
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