Good morning all,
I was able to buy a 2007 "8-core" Mac Pro 3.0 GHz from a guy on Craigslist for only $80. Of course, there's a catch--the system has no ram or hard drives and is not guaranteed to be functional.
Luckily, the diagnostic LEDs 2 through 5, which would indicate a problem with the CPUs, remained off when the DIAG_LED button was pressed. The lights for trickle power and power supply were appropriately lit as well.
So, I so far have a case, a good power supply, a graphics card, and good CPUs and logic board (?).
I powered on the system with no ram and it flashed the power LED on the front indefinitely, which I understood to signify that the system couldn't boot due to a lack of RAM. I'd also purchased some no-name FB-DIMMs from Fry's to test it out--the Mac seemed to not even recognize they were there when I installed them, continuing to flash all the red LEDs on the RAM caddies when powering on.
Here are the DIMMs I tried:
http://www.frys.com/product/7963870?...H:MAIN_RSLT_PG
So, finally, here are my questions:
Is it more likely that the RAM is bad or incompatible or that the RAM caddy itself has a faulty connection? I'm suspicious of the fact that the RAM was stripped at all--the seller said the Mac was from his office, but why would it have been stripped in such a way unless there was something wrong with the logic board?
Which brings me to my next question: if I was able to get positive feedback from the diagnostic LEDs, does that mean that I can rule out the logic board being bad?
Any other advice on how to proceed would be greatly appreciated. Also, if anyone has extra Mac Pro drive caddies they'd be willing to sell me, I'd greatly appreciate it.