Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MjnLKEz_dg
What’s Inside This Wonky 17 Year Old Mac Pro Might Impress You
Introduction
This Early 2008 Intel Mac Pro was a very kind donation to the channel - but unfortunately, it got a bit damaged in transit. I’ve never seen inside one of these before, so what better opportunity to tear it down and see what makes it tick, and also see if it works!
Script
This is an early 2008 Intel Mac Pro, known in the Apple world as a Mac Pro 3,1 - and that’s pretty much all I know about it. You see, I have zero experience whatsoever with these Mac Pros, and this was very generously donated to the channel by a chap called David off the back of my Intel Mac Mini series - so thank you ever so much to David for sending this to me, I’m certainly going to have a lot of fun getting to know this machine a bit better.
Now the trouble is, this was shipped a fair distance and it seems that the couriers weren’t very careful with it, so the bottom legs are quite bent. Now believe it or not, they have actually had some degree of straightening - I have already attacked this with a mallet - but I think it’s fair to say it’s going to need a little bit more before it is whole again.
But anyway, I’m sure it’s straight enough for our purposes today - so what I want to do in this video is get this torn down, get it cleaned out - obviously check there isn’t any internal damage as well - check out what the insides look like, from what I gather, this is basically a high end Xeon workstation PC inside so that’d be really interesting to check out - and also I think with it being 17 years old, the thermal compound on those CPUs is probably well past its best so we’ll get it repasted as well while we’re in there, get it all built back up and then hopefully by the end of the video fire it up and see if it actually works!
But first of course we need to work out how to get inside and I’m very pleased to report that even as someone who’s never opened up a Mac Pro before it really didn’t take me long to work out - so pop this handle on the back, and this panel pops off - and that’s it! Now I don’t think that the hardware tour is going to work particularly well with this camera setup so we’ll switch to the overhead camera and see where we go from there.
Ah yes, that is much easier - so let’s get this thing torn down. Now, first things first, I think we’ll start at the top here with these four drives - of course we are missing one of our caddies or sleds or whatever you want to call it - but these just slot out like so quite easily and these are just bog standard SATA or SATA drives I guess.
These are Seagate Barracudas, 250GB each - and the interesting thing about these and about this mechanism is that you’ll see here that there are these bars across here which also hold the side panel on the case, but when this is closed it also locks the drives into place - so that’s quite interesting I suppose.
Next up I think we will remove the graphics card - so we have these PCI Express slots at the back here and to be honest I’m not all that enamored with how these are actually held into place - so there’s this bracket here with the two screws in the bottom and then these are just kind of loose really, these blanking plates - there is one missing in this system so evidently there was something else installed in here - so yeah they just come out and then this just kind of flops around, I suppose. There’s a little catch on the bottom, as you get on some of these fancier slots, and that just pops out - and that is an ATI Radeon 2600 XT with 256MB on board.
So, yeah, probably the weakest part of this system, actually, considering the rest of the spec.
While we are up here at the top of the case, let’s just get this optical drive out of the way - so this is a DVD drive, I believe, and it’s just parallel ATA - so your good old fashioned IDE connector, quite a strange thing to see in a Mac, I think. But yeah, so evidently the drives are serial ATA, of course, but this is the old fashioned parallel ATA - so interesting to see that the motherboard was designed to support both. It was that very short lived era when we were using one for optical drives and the other for hard drives.
Now, I don’t really want to do anything with the power supply particularly, I’ll give it a blast out with some compressed air just to make sure there aren’t any dust bunnies nesting in there, but no real point removing that so I will leave it there for now - and speaking of air, speaking of airflow - good segue there Rees - this whole tunnel arrangement here is quite clever, so there are two fans in the front, two 120mm fans at the front here, and then there’s one at the back - and this is like- I mean, it’s not entirely sealed, but it’s essentially a tunnel.
So we have the CPUs just here, and we have the RAM just here - and the air is sucked in the front, blown across these, and out of the back - so really clever cooling solution here - and I know the earlier G5 PowerMacs actually had a liquid cooling system which did have its own fair share of problems so yeah, just quite a clever design - and speaking of the CPUs and the RAM, we’ll just remove this little cover here - I think this is just held on with magnets…
There we go!
Underneath here we have our two monster coolers for those Xeon CPUs - now the RAM is quite an interesting arrangement, I’ve never seen anything like this before but it’s on these two riser boards - so these support 32GB of RAM each and as we can see here this is fully populated with sticks - I believe this system has 20GB installed which back in 2008 would have been quite an impressive spec.
But yeah, they are the RAM riser boards there.
So this is the point where we need to get our screwdriver out - and there are just two screws here on this front fan shroud…
…and this should lift straight up - so here are those two 120mm fans - they are incredibly girthy boys, these, and they have a proprietary connector on them for the power as well which keeps everything nice and neat and tidy - I wouldn’t expect any less from Apple.
And to get access to the memory controller under here to repaste the heatsink, I’m also going to have to remove this RAM cage, and this is very fiddly - there are four screws which you can probably see there, nestled away underneath, and also two just here, but there’s also this fan to bear in mind - it’s actually impossible to manoeuvre this thing out with the fan in position - and it’s clipped in with two clips on the top and one on the bottom which you have to unclip, push it back inside the cage and then very carefully manoeuvre it out - but first we need to remove the screws.
…and also there is a cable underneath here which is the fan power cable - we need to unplug that as well.
Now, you will no doubt notice in this next shot that these CPU heatsinks have mysteriously vanished - despite the fact that I haven’t shown the removal process as part of this video - and you may be wondering why this thing is so suspiciously clean inside, or perhaps even pondering how I seem to know my way around it so well despite the fact that I’ve never taken one of these apart before.
And, yeah, I have a bit of a confession to make - so all three of those facts are indeed connected, and it’s to do with what happened yesterday. You see, yesterday I recorded an entire teardown for you of a very, very filthy Mac Pro - and I also recorded the cleaning process and removing these heatsinks and cleaning off all of the original thermal compound, which I’m sure you can imagine had gone rock solid and was absolutely disgusting - and I left the studio feeling very pleased with myself.
…until today when I arrived here and realized that none of that footage had actually saved - so I had to re-record a load of this video completely out of sequence, starting with that repasting, building the whole thing back up, and then tearing it all down again with the running commentary.
So hopefully this will all come together into some kind of coherent whole, but you may notice one or two continuity errors.
Yeah, so, anyway, at least now we’re at this point, we can get a good look at our motherboard here, and at least it’s nice and shiny and clean this time around - so we’ll start at the top - as previously mentioned, we have these four SATA or SATA connectors - I’ll stick with SATA, that’s the British pronunciation - for those hard drive caddies or sleds, which we saw at the beginning of this video - and just moving down from those, we have our WiFi card here - so this is the Apple Airport card, if you like, in a miniPCIe slot - mini PCI Express, and just below that is the Bluetooth module, apparently, and this is a proprietary module to this motherboard, which apparently connects via the USB controller - and while we are in this area, I suppose it’s worth pointing out these connectors just here - so we have a couple of extra SATA connectors on the board here, not quite sure what you would use those for? A couple of extra internal drives, somewhere maybe?
But perhaps more interestingly, we have these two six pin headers just here - now, these are actually for a GPU - so in a PC, you would usually have a power cable going from the power supply to the GPU, potentially up to two of those and potentially up to eight pins each - I think, I’m not fully up to date on these things, maybe they’ve added more pins in recent years - but that’s exactly what these are - so there is a proprietary cable as you might expect with Apple, and that plugs right into here - and of course you can have up to two of these - if it’ll go in! There we go.
So that is your GPU power connector on there - so if and when I upgrade the GPU in this system, that should come in very handy - and while we’re on the topic of GPUs and PCIe and all of that wonderful stuff, I’m sure you’ve no doubt spotted the four PCI Express slots here in the top corner - so we have two X4 slots at the top here, and two X16 slots, and as you can probably see, the bottom slot has a bit of extra space above it so if you’ve got one of those big, fat, chunky graphics cards that takes up two external slots that fits quite nicely in there - and the other thing that Apple actually considered, which I thought was quite smart, is that when you have that whole cooling tunnel arrangement in place, which of course we’ve already taken out, it’s designed so the graphics card actually sits on top of that, so it actually takes the weight of the card, so you don’t end up with a saggy graphics card.
…and that brings us to the actual brains behind the operation - so here are our two CPUs: they’re both Intel Xeons, quad core 2.8GHz - so this is an 8-core 2.8GHz system - which I don’t know about you, but I think that it’s quite an impressive spec for 2008 - and you could have actually taken it a little bit further as well - this will support up to 3.2GHz CPUs, so maybe I’ll keep an eye out for some of those, see if I can pick some up at a reasonable price, depending on what I do with this system in the future of course. I haven’t quite decided yet - and on that note, if you do want to see further updates on this system and all of my other projects, please do make sure you are subscribed to the channel.
Another interesting thing about these that I spotted is that one of them is actually rotated 90 degrees compared to the other one - not quite sure if that is typical for these dual CPU systems, I must admit I don’t really have much experience of them, but quite an interesting design choice there.
And they are hooked up to this Intel P5400 memory controller - so this supports up to 128GB of RAM, and I think in this configuration, as far as Apple are concerned, they decided that 64 was actually enough, apparently, so as we’ve seen previously in this video, the RAM comes in the form of these two riser cards and they support up to 32GB each.
Of course, this being YouTube, I have to be careful that I’m applying the correct amount and also in the correct configuration as well - lest I get any mean comments - I’ve already made one too many mistakes in this video after all.
…right, so after all that effort, I think it’s about time we found out whether this thing even works - so yeah, here goes nothing.
…okay, that’s promising.
Ah, ha, ha, ha! Very good!
It’s a lot quieter than I expected.
Okay, so we have an OS X login screen here - this time is definitely wrong, so I probably should have changed the battery while I was in there - I can do that, that’s fine, it won’t take a second, but yeah, we have David’s account on here which I don’t have the credentials for, and to be honest I don’t want to go poking around his files anyway, but thankfully there is an option for a Guest User - so let’s see what this is all about.
“System clock is incorrect.” Yes, well, we knew that. This mouse is really slow. But anyway…
“About This Mac.”
Okay, so we’re running OS X El Capitan, which apparently is version 10.11.6 - this is indeed a Mac Pro, we’ve got those two 2.8GHz quad core Intel Xeons - lovely eight core beast of a system - 20GB of RAM, very cool. DDR2, wow - and the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT 256MB graphics card - so that’s confirmed all of the specs and the operating system version - and indeed it’s also working! Very, very good.
So there we go - one happy Mac Pro, always good to see - all cleaned out, repasted and ready for action - so I’m not quite sure what the longer term plan is going to be for this machine just yet, I just wanted to get it sorted out and then we’ll see where we go from here. Of course, being an Intel Mac Pro, it can run Windows natively, it can run various different versions of Linux natively, and of course there are projects like OCLP as well, OpenCore Legacy Patcher, which will allow it to run much newer versions of macOS than it was ever designed to run as well - and it’s quite a beefy spec, so I guess the world is your oyster - and that’s before we even get into stuff like ATX conversions - we could convert it to take a modern PC motherboard, although to be honest, I don’t think I’m keen to go down that route, this case is a bit kind of bruised and battered and I quite like to keep stuff as original as I can.
So yeah, if you have any suggestions as to what I could do with this - probably not “chuck it in the bin,” I’m sure that’s probably what a few of you are thinking out there - but if you have any suggestions, do let me know down in the comments. If you enjoyed the video, give it a little thumbs up - and of course, if you want to see future escapades with this machine and everything else I’ve covered on my channel, make sure you are subscribed.
But that’s all I have for you for this video - so a big thank you, as always, to my supporters on Patreon, Ko-Fi, and also my YouTube Channel Members of course, they get videos a little bit early, ad-free, and they also get some exclusive behind the scenes content as well.
But most of all, a big thank you to you for watching, and I’ll hopefully see you in the next one.
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