Well-designed and fast, built to last.

This is a well designed, super fast computer. It is built like a battleship, ultra quiet and very easy to add hard disks and memory. I bought it to use as a digital audio workstation (DAW) and I can have live microphones in the same room with no problems with fan noise. As far as comparisons with other macs, this is probably the fastest of the macs (for now, anyway). Compared to PC's I can't really say. It came with OS 10.6 and it's a great computer. Glad I bought it.

Good by for the price, and good performance.

Being a used system that I bought a few months back to replace a Mac Mini, it's a big step up for its value. When I got the computer, I had two immediate concerns, however. The hardware configuration was as it was new, BUT the operating system was updated from Mac OS Leopard to Snow Leopard, and the stock video card isn't supported under the snow leopard OS. Getting a video card for the system was easy. The RAM took a bit of researching to locate for this system being that it is PC6400 ECC memory. Found it on new egg.com and was able to get it. Overall, the computer was still a great buy, and I have more memory and RAM than I really need. My advice is to always research what you buy to make sure everything you want to upgrade is available, because some things may be "discontinued".

It's an Apple. It just WORKS.

Needed a powerful Intel Mac to keep up with required (for my profession) software. As a Mac Junkie, an Apple machine was a no-brainer. This 2008 8-core was powerful, expandable, and a LOT less money than a new one. I have more peripherals than Carter has pills, so the expandability was a must. There was only a small sacrifice in power/features compared to a new model (which hasn't been updated in quite some time as it is), and the savings/sacrifice ratio was uber-favorable.

This machine is relatively easy to update/expand, although as easy as it should be, pulling out the HD drawers, and removing most everything to get to the motherboard's extra SATA connections, for example, took a lot more force than would be ultimately desirable.

As for comparison to other models, surely there are newer and faster machines - both Apple and PCs. This model represents an excellent value compared with other, newer, Apple Mac Pros, with little sacrifice. Compared to PCs - and I am EXTREMELY biased - I will take even a 5 year old Mac Pro before I would even think of the torture of any PC. They just work - and for a really long time!

Excellent deal on a like new Mac Pro Desktop.

I bought the Mac Pro used and it well worth the price. I was able to upgrade allot in the system already. It's running Lion, nine Terabytes of hard drives, and sixteen gigabytes of memory. I had upgraded the video card to the ATI Radeon HD 5770 and have had no problems what so ever.

Your best bet on installing lion though is to do it as a clean install. Lion recognizes my two terabyte hard drive with no problem.

Fantastic

Great Value. I needed to move on from the old Power PC days My old G5 gave up the ghost and I could not run the newer software.

This thing was just right. Plenty of memory and 4 Intel cores to work with without the hefty price of buying new.

For those of you who want a good Intel Mac with some horsepower without the huge price of new macs this is what I recommend.

Cheers.