Restoring A Filthy Mac Pro... From A School Bin!

I recently received the trash picked Mac Pro from a private college not too far from me my friend said that it was quite dirty and I must say it definitely is does it work and was there a reason it was thrown out well let's take a look and here is the very Mac that was sitting in a private school's waist bin and from afar it doesn't look all that bad and on the outside it's not even very dirty but there are signs that it's sat in the rain we've got plant matter in the power connector and white powdery corrosion forming around the DVI connector how tasty and here's the moment I've Been Waiting For What on earth does it have inside and lifting the hatch on the back the side panel then easily comes off revealing a mostly complete unit and a decent amount of corrosion that at the very least seems to be absent from the circuitry itself and without looking at the specification plate on the back you can immediately tell this is probably a 4-1 or a 5-1 Mac Pro since it has a processor and RAM card that you can pull out and inside is definitely more Dusty I can fill my lungs is getting clogged up already now I'm wondering if this Mac will fire up at all and hopefully any rain that fell in hadn't made its way inside and I just couldn't help myself from taking the processor card out and upon closer inspection it has eight gigabytes of DDR3 memory this looks like someone left it by the Sea for a few months and what else is in the sea fish and if you're tired of not catching any fish well do I have the perfect game for you thanks to fishing Clash you can travel around the world and fish in different locations all from the comfort of your mobile device I've been an avid Fisher for most of my life as you can see and you can also upgrade your rods and lures to compete with other fishes in order to catch the biggest fish once you're in the game choose your favorite lure cast your line and hook onto a fish by chiming your inputs just right you can reel in your catch faster and increase the combo multiplier and be careful not to let there be too little or too much tension which could snap your line unlock new and exciting lures by defeating the boss fish to help you catch many other species and give yourself the Competitive Edge with various power-ups along the way there are also Daily challenges to help you score new lures and prizes use my gift code piece of writer get an awesome 20 value reward for free that includes a unique Avatar a mythical lure card 50 lure power-ups and 30 weight power ups helping you catch bigger fish download fishing Clash via the QR code on screen or using the link below and be sure to use my code P sifri big thanks to fishing Clash for supporting my channel and tell me what you think of the game in the pinned comment below the surface of this board will require a good cleaning as it honestly looks horrible and honestly in hindsight I probably should have cleaned off the board before trying to turn it on but I didn't want to invest too much time before knowing if it was functional at all to begin with which it seems as if it is but it is missing a hard disk these Mac Pros have room for four SATA drives which fit onto these metal sleds and I happen to have an adapter I pulled from another Mac Pro it adapts a smaller 2.5 inch SATA drive to line up with the connector directly on the logic board then powered up again I thought I would try ejecting the optical disk tray somehow this was covered in dust as well and unsurprisingly the tray door didn't like to close easily this seems to be a common occurrence on these old Mac Pros but anyway the Mac quickly detected my installer USB it also detected the 480 gigabyte SSD I installed I then went ahead and installed an operating system about 30 minutes later it was up and running Mac OS given the specifications I can confirm this is one of the cheaper 2009 models sold and now is a good time to strip the Mac down and give it a much needed cleaning the exterior isn't that bad and at the very least the handles aren't bent and if you ever have one of these shipped to you make sure that it is wrapped securely ideally in the original Box 41 pounds of computer dropped on concrete never ends well and this sticker is still a bit stubborn suggesting this Mac was used as a server at one point in its life a better sticker remover worked well to get it off some eucalyptus oil helped remove any remaining Gunk with ease I then gave the rest of the casing a wipe down with a damp cloth and some more eucalyptus oil to begin the cleaning of the corroded casing I poured some white vinegar and with a toothbrush I scrubbed the problem areas I'm pretty sure this happened due to it being rained on while in the electronic waste bin and I would suggest doing this in a well ventilated area as vinegar has a very strong scent and not a lot of fun to breathe in and finally I wipe down the door with a damp cloth a definite Improvement once again I removed the processor tray which makes CPU and RAM upgrades incredibly easy removable storage like this will hopefully remain in the next Mac Pro but I wouldn't be holding my breath next to come out is the optical drive which took a bit of wiggling to release it's incredibly Dusty a heap of airflows through here to the power supply and there's a trick to releasing the PCI slot lock first you've got to remove the two screws holding this fan in place and now the locking mechanism will move freely and after the PCI bracket holder is removed the old graphics card comes out with a bit of effort thanks to the corrosion holding the backing plate to the frame itself The Next Step was unplugging the front and rear fans along with the little built-in speaker there are several screws that double as guy guides for the processor card that need to be removed along with several Phillips head screws attached to the back wall of the system and with the fans pulled inwards the whole assembly lifts out the power supply wasn't as obvious when it came to its removal the connector attached to the logic board is hidden behind this thin metal plate and pushing the tabs on either side it disconnects with ease four screws hold the power supply itself to the frame and as you remove the power supply feed the connector through the Gap behind the fan and with a maximum output of 980 Watts it's a beefy unit and there are signs of water droplets on the very dusty exterior which is not a good thing to see many screws held the main board onto the case and I made note of their location on an iFixit magnetic mat and a bit of wiggling later I was able to get it out the board has several areas with minor corrosion I applied some white vinegar then cleaned off the areas with some isopropyl alcohol there doesn't appear to be any damage to the tracer's chips or solder joints thankfully the worst area was definitely near the ports which makes sense as the side was likely pointed up towards sky but once again not too bad and the board does actually function overall the corrosion is merely superficial on the logic board and with the case free of most of the electronics I began cleaning it off water pooling around the rubber gasket of the side door would have caused this and a bit of vinegar and a toothbrush once again helps clean it off there was also evidence of standing water underneath the power supply nice and the very dirty case could now be dusted out and this took many attempts as there was lots of debris and dust crammed into the tight spaces I even saw the little red plant debris that falls off of bottlebrush trees so the e-west spin must have had one overhead or nearby and the spare PCR slot covers could also do with the cleaning they're experiencing a bit of corrosion themselves and I've always found Ajax spray and wipe does a pretty good job of cleaning these parts and while I've got the spray and wipe in hand I thought The Grubby looking Cider Drive caddies could also deal with a clean now on to the fun stuff the very dusty heatsink this large blank area would have been populated with a second processor and heatsink in the higher end models meaning you could have equipped your Mac Pro with two 2.93 gigahertz quad-core Xeon processors back in 2009 which would not have been cheap the system here is the lowest and 2.66 gigahertz quad-core processor which does have eight threads and in 2009 would have been very decent and with all five of the Torx T15 screws loosened off the large heat sink lifted off just to the right of the processor you can see a bit of the red bottle brush plant debris I mentioned earlier I then removed the old thermal paste with some isopropyl alcohol and you can purchase better Xeon processors very cheap online just be sure whatever you choose is compatible and your Mac might also require a firmware upgrade the heatsink surface itself also requires a clean with some isopropyl alcohol the next component to clean up is the graphics card and I do realize it would be a good idea to upgrade from this card but oh man our Mac compatible graphics cards expensive trying to buy one on its own wouldn't easily cost more than this system is worth so for the sake of this video I'll simply clean off this battle hardened corroded Beast I'm pretty certain this faced the sky as I can only imagine rain would cause this to corrode in such a way that there was also a tiny patch of the stuff on the back of the card for some reason localized in a very uniform area and after removing a few screws on the back the cover comes off revealing lots of yummy dust digging in further requires the removal of the spring tension mounting screws off the heatsink and there's the GPU die and 512 megabytes of graphical memory chips these cards for some reason still sell for upwards of 50 Australian dollars online but honestly I can't imagine why someone would purchase one perhaps to make a first gen Mac Pro less unusable and after soaking for a while the backing plate doesn't look as bad a definite improvement with less dust rust as well as corrosion our next patient is the optical dryer very dusty as you can see there was so much air being forced through to the power supply behind that dust even made its way onto the disc tray itself there may also be lots of dust inside the drive itself but I don't really feel like going to the effort of opening it up I already had lots of dust to remove from the fan blades and most of this dust was caked on requiring brushing simply blowing the dust off wouldn't have been effective and I can't believe how much there is on nearly every surface that would have been facing upwards during this machine's operational life although this shouldn't be too surprising since a lot of airflow is blown through these large fans and since the power supply is working I simply blew any dust out that I could opening it up looked like a pain since there are pcbs on both sides plus the risk of electric shock while outside I also blew out anything remaining in the case itself and the last item that required dusting offer was the main board new thermal paste was then applied and if you're unhappy with the method or amount of paste applied please send your very much wanted opinion to the email address on screen now and being sure that the heatsink was aligned properly I placed it back on we now get our last look at the cleared out case before all of the components could be placed back inside the modularity and upgradability of these Macs has definitely extended their life span but what can you do with this nearly stock 2009 base model here in 2023 first of all does it still work it chimed and booted but only three of the four RAM sticks were detected and to remedy this I simply took them out and put them back in again this time it let me know all sticks were correctly seated you'll know if a stick is having issues a small LED light will illuminate next to the problem slot so we're back to 8 gigabytes once again without firmware or CPU upgrades this Mac Pro will natively support 10.11 High Sierra but it is possible to take this machine all the way to 10.14 and Beyond with a slightly newer operating system installed let's see just what it's capable of first something pretty light old school RuneScape it runs very well on this system a fun game you can play on basically any platform even mobile next up is CS go while the 40-ish frames per second seems all right on paper there's weird input lag or Mouse control issues this could be worsened by the mouse acceleration that's enabled on Mac OS by default either way this is unplayable Terraria is a game that does run well on here it's able to maintain 60 frames per second and it's a whole lot of fun definitely worth giving a try if you haven't before Minecraft takes advantage of the strong CPU and is decent on this Mac if you want to run the latest versions 1.17 onwards you'll need to be running a newer version of Mac oesto web browsing was also good on here 1080p YouTube playback was no problem at all the main drawback of these Macs is that they use a heap of electricity aren't very quiet and aren't compatible with the latest versions of Mac OS and while they have good expandability they're big as well as heavy but what other uses do they have maybe as a chair just don't leave it out in the sun for too long because they get pretty hot if you've got a pair of them they do make for a good table some industrial Furniture is a good outcome for these aging towers and last of all I hope you like my new office I love the design of these Mac Pros it's just a shame that they're becoming less usable as time goes on thanks for watching and also a big thanks to fishing Clash for sponsoring this video be sure to try it out for yourself so there we have it thank you very much for watching it's honestly quite surprising to see another Mac Pro being thrown out these things are pretty much just big paperweights now especially the earlier models unless you are into some Homebrew sort of software or you really like tinkering with old Macs anyway thank you very much for watching I'll see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Psivewri

Views: 212,323

Keywords: psivewri, 4k, eucalyptus, oil, australia, tech, free, apple, trash, find, mac, pro, 2009, desktop, bin, restoration, cleaning, rust, corrosion, gt, 120, nvidia, steve, jobs, garbage, e-waste, found, computer, cleaned

Id: CW3A5f8zHII

Length: 12min 50sec (770 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 11 2023