NOPE! I opened it up and it's a fully loaded dual Xeon X5355 with a whopping 24GB of RAM and a Radeon HD 5850. Sadly, whomever discarded this thing was at least savvy enough to remove the hard disk which is identified on the back of the computer as shipping with an SSD.
This thing was absolutely caked with dust and I've spent all evening pulling the entire thing apart, wiping it down, and clearing it with compressed air.
While cleaning off the CPUs, I noticed that the user had also applied liquid metal to the processors. I've never seen this stuff first hand but it is very difficult to remove. It has the consistency of gold leaf (but silver in color) in a silver paste suspension. Because it doesn't readily absorb, cleaning it off is hard as it tends to just mush around and doesn't absorb into paper towels or to a q-tip and has to be removed very carefully.
Still working on it. Finally finished cleaning it up and now I have to reassemble it; a task I'm not looking forward to given the complexity of disassembly.
I don't own any Macs. Does anyone have any ideas for what I should do with it?
Goddamn that's a find. People are still asking $500+ for even the most basic 2006-9 models here.
Not quite sure what model that is from the specs you mentioned. If it can run them, i'd recommend OS/X 10.9 or 10.10 to avoid the steaming piles of bullshit they put in newer versions (10.8 if you don't care about browser updates.) Those things are beasts for creative work - video editing, rendering, music production, etc. It'd also make a fantastic Linux workstation if you don't want to run OS/X.
twitch.tv/oldskooljay - playing the obscure, forgotten & weird - most Tuesdays & Thursdays @ 6:30 PM PDT. Bonus streams elsewhen!
I didn't want to take any photos before cleaning it as it was full of dust. I'm actually highly allergic to dust such that if I were to kick enough up in the air I would actually come down with a sinus infection or worse within hours.
Most of my cleanup work is done with nitrile gloves and a dust mask but I got enough junk on my hands that I don't want to be touching my phone. I've sure you've all seem dusted up old computers so there wasn't really much to see.
At first glance I would say that the system was a pleasure to service with a single lever in the back to unlock the side panel, the easily removable hard disk bays on a horizontal backplane, and large daughter boards for memory which pulled out without any screws. But that's about all there was that I would consider easy. It would definitely have been "easy" for a layman to access all of the most common upgrades (memory, disk drives, 5.25" bay) but anything beyond that requires experience, great patience, and a service manual.
Removing the 5.25" bay isn't too bad but it slots in strangely and has a snake of cables that you have to be careful of. The power supply was even worse with its torx bolts on the userside and then slide-left-and-up mechanism and secondary pass-through that is hard to reach. The memory and fan cages on either side of the case are a nightmare to remove with all sorts of hidden clips and snaps. There are these plastic sections that sit inside the cages that are nearly impossible to remove but must be before before adjacent parts will come free. The very large heatsinks have difficult to access torx bolts that, without a special tool (available online) are very hard to unscrew. The motherboard has an impressive number of unique connectors all around the perimeter which have just enough slack to snake around the edge and attach, making removal and re-insertion hard.
Of note, I did not have all of the required torx bits in any one kit. I needed one from a 32-piece variety bit set, a 20-piece variety bit set, and one from a small torx allen key set (for the CPU bolts). So if you ever plan on working on one of these, I would recommend ordering a kit online with all the necessary tools beforehand or you might find yourself part of the way through only to be missing an important bit.
It took me hours to disassemble completely and I ended up with a pile of weirdly shaped parts that made up the entire system, all custom made for a specific purpose. In total, I think I worked on it for about three days between disassembly, cleaning, and reassembly. For comparison, I worked on a Dell PowerEdge 2900 from the same era (also dual processor and similar specs) which was an absolute treat to take apart with only a single screw and absolutely everything else being completely screwless. Say what you will about their PCs and laptops but Dell servers have always been top-notch and easily serviceable.
Good. Now it just needs an OS... and a hard drive.
Just another user that likes old OSes and videogames, nothing interesting to see here...
Other places to find me:
DraStic: http://drastic-ds.com (as dsattorney)
Still wrestling with this. I installed a hard disk with XP on it and confirmed that it booted fine. Made a bootable USB stick for MacOS 10.2 Sierra but it wouldn't boot. Made an ISO for Sierra and the same problem.
I connected the hard drive to a Macbook using a USB enclosure and ran the installer and installed Sierra to that disk. System rebooted and the OS was loading (on the Macbook). Pulled it from the enclosure and put it into the Mac Pro and it wouldn't boot. Both the OS partition and recovery partition appear when I enter the boot menu by holding down "left alt" but both remain at a grey screen at boot.
Going to try Snow Leopard on a DVD+R DL to see if I have better luck.
Going by the 'A number' (A1186) that's a 2006 model, which means it has a 32-bit EFI. More recent OSXes went "pure" 64-bit and won't boot on that. I think you're limited to 10.7 Lion?
Snow Leopard is a great OS, one of the best in the OS/X linup. A lot of software supported it until relatively recently, plus it still includes the PowerPC emulation layer.
twitch.tv/oldskooljay - playing the obscure, forgotten & weird - most Tuesdays & Thursdays @ 6:30 PM PDT. Bonus streams elsewhen!
You mentioned a 32-bit EFI. The processor is a dual Xeon X5355 which supports 64-bit. I'm still trying to get Snow Leopard on it but maybe I can upgrade it to 64-bit once I get something running?
Yep, Apple built their first run of 64-bit x86 machines with 32-bit boot firmware. Technically Snow Leopard & Lion are in hybrid mode when running on a 64-bit machine.
You could use something like MacPostFactor to install a newer 64-bit "pure" OS/X onto there. I've never tried it, but just tossing that out. It seems like you need an already running Mac in order to create the installer.
My advice is to give Snow Leopard or Lion a try and see if you need to update before messing around too much. Either of those would give you a great experience on that machine. 10.4-10.8 are the best of the breed anyway, IMHO - 10.9 is bloated & full of bugs, and everything after that is full of Apple's corporate lockouts & forced-obsolescence BS. Keep in mind Apple intentionally breaks support for older hardware in newer versions of their software - even if you get something newer to boot you'll likely have issues with things like wi-fi cards or other components where the drivers were removed.
twitch.tv/oldskooljay - playing the obscure, forgotten & weird - most Tuesdays & Thursdays @ 6:30 PM PDT. Bonus streams elsewhen!
I finally have Snow Leopard installing. I tried burning it to a DVD from a Macbook Pro running Yosemite. I don't know why but it refused to show up in the boot menu. I tried two different DVD drives with the same result.
I managed to get it working by writing the ISO to a USB drive as RAW using UltraISO on Windows.
I can understand why a Mac enthusiasts would throw this away if it was lagging so far behind OS updates. It's unfortunate that the Mac platform is so tightly coupled to the last few generations. This is truly planned obsolescence at its finest.
This is still an extremely capable machine. Toss in a new video card and it will sing even on modern games. It seems that the limiting factor past 10.11 is the requirement for the SSE 4.1 instruction.
It's incredible how something like to this can be relegated so easily to the literal garbage over the Apple's march in the name of "progress". I agree that anything past 10.9 has been a load of piss.
When I said that I didn't own a Mac, that's not exactly true. I keep a single Macbook Pro for when I need to test software. I bought it specifically because it had a GeForce in it years ago and I felt confident that with solid support for OpenGL it would have a long life. Then suddenly we "need" Metal. As if we can't even get a desktop experience without the latest graphics technology. 😠
Goddamn that's a find. People are still asking $500+ for even the most basic 2006-9 models here.
Not quite sure what model that is from the specs you mentioned. If it can run them, i'd recommend OS/X 10.9 or 10.10 to avoid the steaming piles of bullshit they put in newer versions (10.8 if you don't care about browser updates.) Those things are beasts for creative work - video editing, rendering, music production, etc. It'd also make a fantastic Linux workstation if you don't want to run OS/X.
10.8.x can run beta versions of Vivaldi 1.0 (Chromium-based power user browser). Furthermore, using Homebrew you can update 10.8.5 to use modern SSL and the like. In the end OS X is a Unix-like, after all...
I've updated my 2013 Macbook Pro (which is stuck on 10.8.5 due to a hardware issue) to be quite close to newer Mac OSes 😊 ...although I'm still looking into compiling a modern graphical browser locally.
I have a 2008 Aluminium MacBook (not pro) running El Capitan. OSX locks most older macs out as the installer checks model numbers (built in obsolescence), however Apple have always been quite liberal with the 2008 MacBook. I Don't know why o.0.
Yes Snow Leopard was the best (quite posibliy best computing experience with my MacBook that I had), Lion not too bad, although the start of badness... Mountain Lion... well... 🙁. I do like the flat style icons of Yosemite onwards, although its purely a 'fashion' thing. Glossy seems so dated now... Very Vista/7 🤣
The main problem I have with Mountain Lion is that the GUI often is slooooooooow. Waking from sleep is also a disaster, suspend to RAM sometimes works when a network connection is present, but most often not (very random). My 2005 PowerBook (Tiger 10.4.11) actually feels faster than my 2013 MacBook Pro, despite the latter being a maxed out 13" model with 8 times the RAM of the PowerBook. Of course it isn't, but the GUI is not a laggy mess.
