Worth buying a Mac Pro from work or get a 27" iMac?

[Irish_Tom]

Lo all,

Bit of an odd question here: My machine at work is a Mac Pro 1,1 with 2 x 2.66 Dual core Xeons, 3GB of 667MHz DDR2 (512x6 sticks) 250GB HDD and ATI Radeon X1900 XT. It originally came with Tiger but we've since installed SL on it and it's running fine.

We've just bought our web developer a 21" iMac and were musing about possibly upgrading the Mac Pros in the studio to the latest 27" iMacs.

I suggested that if we did it in the near future, I'd be tempted to buy the Mac Pro I'm currently using from the company.

A quick look on Mac2Sell suggests it's worth about £700. I'd want to stuff it full of RAM and probably replace the X1900. I'd also want to stick a RAID card in there and fill it full of HDDs so the total cost would probably be about the same as a new 27" iMac anyway. The only advantage the Mac Pro would have would be the additional storage space.

I'm not sure what we'd do with the Mac Pros if no one in the office wanted them. I think it would have to be a fair bit less than £700 to make it worth while.
What would you do in this situation? Is it worth getting a 3 year old MP over a brand new iMac?

Panzer

 

[Irish_Tom]

Cheers for the input guys.

Something I've been musing over:

I had intended to get a Drobo Pro but if I got this MP I could RAID it up good and proper. Essentially saving even more money (Drobo Pro + iMac 27" Vs. this MP + upgrades).

However, I'm not sure how versatile a MP RAID Array would be compared to the Drobo. I quite liked the idea of just being able to shove in any-old HDD - is there any way to achieve this functionality with a normal computer?

I think the MP would been faster at accessing the data over a network than a Drobo Pro and it would mean I wouldn't need two devices to do the same thing.