Apple Mac Pro 1.1 is it still useable in 2016?

Hello and welcome at another post,

Last week I've purchased a Mac Pro 1.1 and it performs without any problems, at least for my needs but in this post I will let you guys know if its still powerful enough for professional photo and video-editing.

First of lets start with the boot time. The boot time is around one minute, maybe a bit more, maybe a bit less but thats with a standard hard drive. A Mac Pro 1.1 has the support for a SSD but keep in mind that when your owning a Mac Pro or thinking of buying one this Mac doesn't use the most expensive SSD to its full capability. The current model iMac is going to have much faster read and write with the same SSD because of the newer and improved SATA connections. So if you can buy the most speedy SSD on the market for your Mac Pro, but the Mac doesn't even use the maximal capability's why won't you buy something cheaper, and be sure your Mac Pro can get the most out of the product. And to be honest, even with the hard drive the Mac Pro isn't very slow but when your used of using a SSD you really notice the speed difference.

The original graphics card in the original Mac Pro is just crap. The NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT is really outdated by todays standard, and it can barely play GTA IV on low settings with a maximum frame rate of 24 FPS, and GTA IV is a game from 2008. I am using the stock card for now but I'm probably going to upgrade the original card to an AMD Radeon R7 240 with two gigabytes of DDR3 RAM next month, and if you have an older Mac Pro with stock graphics card you are really going to notice the difference in performance, and if you really want to you can even put OS X 10.11 on your Mac Pro. Upgrading from OS X 10.7.5 isn't possible with the NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT so if you already own a Mac Pro and you want to upgrade your OS you will have to change your graphics card!

The most current supported operating system for the Mac Pro 1.1 is 10.7.5 Lion, but this can be upgraded with a better graphics card and some more RAM if you have less then 4 gigabytes. OS X Lion is still very useable, and I don't want to upgrade for now because its runs flawlessly on the Mac Pro. A lot of applications are still available for OS X Lion and even for OS X 10.6. But if you own a Mac Pro already and OS X Lion isn't good enough for you your able to upgrade to OS X 10.10 Yosemite or 10.11 El Capitan with some changes to your boot.efi for example.

The Mac Pro 1.1 isn't expensive these days. I've picked mine up for 130 euro's and it came with an Apple keyboard, mouse, OS X Snow Leopard, OS X Lion and the original box and powercable. Its just a very useful computer still to this day, and I won't see myself upgrading soon because it handles everything I throw at it.

This was todays post. Thanks for reading and until the next one!