ive been collecting DVDs lately, and so ive been on marketplace and ebay alot. mostly just idly browsing/scrolling hoping i come across a deal on something i had been looking for (thank you random guy who had a DVD+Bluray box set of the first 6 starwars movies for 25 bucks). in any case, i found this thing! its not quite what i was looking for (a G5 PowerMac) but also i mostly just like them for the case, the powerpc-ness is kinda just a neat bonus so when i found this early 2008 Mac Pro with an apple cinema display including all the cables that they both need to work, i kinda just couldnt say "no".

originaly i had intended to keep it running MacOS, it came with OSX installed and ive heard thats like the good one. buuuuuut apple was gonna require me to create an account with them in order to even install the OS in the first place so... fuck that, fuck you apple, and now its running debian because i mean, did you really think i was gonna pick something more interesting? x3 i had definitely considered like "oh well maybe its finally time i try gentoo, i mean its a desktop and needs to be plugged in all the time anyway." buuuut nah :3 i think this guy is gonna run debian for me and be just a nice place to sit after work and work on projects like this website, not powerful enough to game (lie) doesnt have a stupid ass steering wheel mounted in front of it that makes it hard to type on, like my main PC. plus like i could barely be fucked to pull my dotfiles over to this thing, signing into all my accounts and stuff too? no way lmao

thats probably enough preamble, lemme get into specs.

• CPU: 1x Intel Xeon E5462
• GPU: AMD Radeon HD 2600 XT
• RAM: 10 GiB ECC DDR2
• Storage: 320 GB WD Caviar HDD + 1TB WD Blue HDD
• Display: 20" Apple Cinema Display 1680x1050 @ 60 Hz
• Drive Bay: 2x Apple (Pioneer) DVD-RW Drives

yes, unfortunately mine only came with 1 CPU. these did come standard with two of this CPU but optionally you could choose to downgrade to one, very very unforunate. but it makes the RAM situation somehow more interesting, since this would have come with 2 GiB of ECC DDR2 instead, meaning someone, at some point decided that their workload needed 10 GiB of ram but not more CPU horsepower. what were they doing on this thing? i have no clue. especially because it came with the cheapest of the video cards available. i was very excited to see the two DVD-RW drives up front, that would make ri- playing my DVD collection slightly faster than using the indecision with its one drive, unfortunately neither of them will open currently. when i first checked, the bottom one would try to open but would get jammed because it doesnt line up with the slot in the case (somehow) but the top one just doesnt open, i can hear it trying but it really just cant. i think the belt is just too old and worn out at this point. so eventually i will need to get in there and see what i can do about getting replacement belts, or maybe even different drives if parts are that hard to find.

performance wise, this thing keeps up suprisingly well, i mean i can technically run the most current version of minecraft at the time of writing. by technically i mean at seconds per frame, but it doesnt crash at least. installing an optimization modpack and playing at a 4 chunk render distance significantly improves frames, bringing me up to a blazingly fast 25 fps. at least its consistently 25 i couldnt seem to get it to drop much below that even generating new chunks which is honestly suprising. getting about 15% better than average passmark scores, likely just because im running a lighter OS than most. and i mean as much as i wish the "Measured CPU Speed" from the test were true i fear that this thing would be a puddle of slag on my floor if it were actually running that fast lmao

now i should probably take some pictures of this thing, but also that means i have to unplug the computer im writing this on currently so im just gonna upload this and then add the pics later :3

the rest of the pics will go in the gallery since i took way too many