07-20-2007, 08:03 PM

I just bought a project Mac Pro. It's a Mac Pro Dual Xeon 3ghz, but it's missing the video card, ram, hard drive, and super drive. It was water damaged on the lower inch or two of the mother board and lower memory board. The original owner said that Apple was able to get it to boot, but it had a few issues in the hardware test. Now I've dealt with electronics like this getting wet and usually with a good disassembly and through cleaning, computers can be revived. I bought it for parts, but I have a feeling with a bit of work I'll bring it back to life. It's a December 2006 system and I only paid $250 for the entire chassis including the 3ghz processors which are still good and could sell for much more than $250. I bought a new Pioneer DVD-RW, 8gb Memory, and I have a 250gb WD SATA-II drive to install. My last purchase will be an X1900XT 512mb Video Card that I'll reflash using the available ROM on the 'net to make it work with the Mac Pro. I'd pay the $367 for the OEM X1900XT with my EPP discount, but it's back ordered for over a month and I can't wait that long cause I'm just too darn curious.

Anyhow, since I needed memory I was set to buy a couple 2gb kits of Crucial from Newegg. I'm going to buy a Mac Pro so all of these parts are important anyhow, but I'd love to have a sub $1,000 Mac Pro 3ghz! In the process of buying parts I stumbled onto a VERY nice deal for 1gb sticks of Techworks Mac Pro memory. They are FB-DIMMS with heatsinks and state they are 100% certified. They are $39.99 per stick, so I got 8gb for $320 versus 4gb of Crucial for $310. I didn't see this deal mentioned and since a lot of people feel that $150 for 2gb is a good deal, I figured $80 for 2gb of Apple certified FB-DIMM was even better. It's $80 on Techworks website, so Newegg has it for half that price. Sorry if this is old news.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820998031

07-20-2007, 09:01 PM

Outstanding - what a deal. Glad to hear it found a good home!

07-28-2007, 03:37 AM

I received my water damaged Mac Pro today. Using the Apple Service Manual, I disassembled the machine to the bare chassis. I took all of the parts into the shower and Simple Greened and scrubbed them a bit with a soft old toothbrush. I then blew everything off with compressed air before baking everything in the oven at about 175 degrees for about 90 minutes to remove all moisture. I then reinstalled the 3.0ghz Xeon processors with new thermal grease and rebuilt the system. I only noted one component that looked burnt, and it was on the lower memory board. It's a 1.0UH choke and with that board installed in the machine, it will not power on. However with the other working board, I can use either memory slot in the board. I'll order a 1.0UH choke and replace it with some quick desoldering/soldering. Even the speaker and fans still work! Heck I'm typing this post from it!

Now here's what I've spent on my Mac Pro.

1. Mac Pro Quad Core 3.0ghz Machine, less Memory, Superdrive, Video Card, Hard Drive: $250
2. Western Digital Raptor X 150gb: $159
3. ATI X1900XTX PCI-E Video Card, 512mb (Flash to EFI): $179
4. Six Pin Power Cable for X1900XTX: $35
5. Pioneer DVR-112D DVD-RW: $32
6. 8 x 1gb Techworks Memory: $320

Add in some tax and I'm about $1030 into this system. Price out the above on Apple's site and it's well north of $4,000.

All diagnostics passed with another memory board from another Mac Pro btw. Oh yeah and you HAVE to LOVE Ebay!

07-28-2007, 10:28 AM

Awesome, glad that machine found its way into competent hands. Do you have access to an SMD workstation to replace that choke - or isn't it surface mounted?

07-28-2007, 11:50 AM

I don't have access to a full SMD workstation, but I can manage with the equipment I have here at home. I've done other SMD work before and pulled off replacing much smaller components. The component is about 1/4" square so for SMD, it's not exactly small. I should be able to desolder it fairly easily. I am just having a hard time finding a cross reference for the part. It's numbers are 0624RK 1.0UH and on another card the part is shown as 0713RD 1.0UH. I have not been able to come up with anything yet. I'm quite pleased though - the machine is still running strong. It took water 4 inches up the motherboard just above the top most memory card while powered on, and everything still works except that lower memory board that was not populated.

07-28-2007, 05:29 PM

nice job !

07-29-2007, 07:45 PM

Thanks. Two days so far of encoding and such, no problems at all. The previous owner was very surprised when I informed them that my $250 purchase turned into quite a good investment. Now I need to order up a couple 750gb Western Digital drives. I may switch to SATA DVD-RW drives though to gain rip speed performance, since I can only run a single drive on IDE, where as with SATA I could do two rips/burns at the same time without loss of performance.

07-30-2007, 07:53 AM

Out of curiosity, how did you get an Apple Service Manual? I didn't think they sold these to the general public. How much did it cost?

07-30-2007, 01:27 PM

Originally Posted by daveinpoway

Out of curiosity, how did you get an Apple Service Manual? I didn't think they sold these to the general public. How much did it cost?

$7 on Ebay. It's handy for basic disassembly and I just needed a bit of help with the whole heatsink cover removal process. I just didn't want to bend anything and with the manual it was a simple process. I cannot remember the last time I needed a manual for a piece of computer hardware, but I figured since I had only spent $250 on the machine, another $7 wasn't going to hurt me. Once I got the heatsink cover off, the rest was common sense stuff.

07-31-2007, 02:28 PM

Thanks.