# Score! The Spinning Ball Of Death is no more!

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/score-the-spinning-ball-of-death-is-no-more/613114>\
**Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\
**Created:** [February 17, 2012, 7:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/score-the-spinning-ball-of-death-is-no-more/613114 "2012-02-17T07:37:28Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Stoid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/stoid/32/272_2.png) [@Stoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stoid)\
**Post date:** [February 17, 2012, 7:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/score-the-spinning-ball-of-death-is-no-more/613114/1 "2012-02-17T07:37:28Z")

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I’ve been obsessively checking Ebay every half hour for two weeks trying to find the Mac Pro 2.26 8 Core at a good price. The lowest I saw it sell for was $2200, and that was stripped. I came thisclose to giving up and going for the higher price, thinking I’d never catch a steal.

I’m so glad I hung on.  
I got mine today for…$1,450!!! WOO! HOO! With an extra video card, no less!

Add 24g RAM, 160SSD, 2nd optical with Lightscribe, RAID card (no enclosure or drives figured out yeat, though) Magic Trackpad and I am out the door for $1850!!

I dont’ have my memory yet, it’s only got 4gigs but I was still blown away by how fast eveyrthing opened. Once the SSD and the RAM are in… sweet. The Spinning Ball of Death DIES!!!

Now I have to sell all the equipment I have lying around to offset as much of that as possible. I have a silly list of things:

2.66 quad core with 13 gigs (current machine)  
G5 (the last before it went away)  
G5 imac A  
G5 imac B  
Macbook A  
Macbook B  
iphone 3g  
iPod Touch 1st Gen 8g  
iPod Touch 1st Gen 16g  
G4 Blue  
G4 Cube  
iBook

Bunch of memory of all kinds.

Most of it isn’t worth much, but if I can sell it all I think I’ll pretty much cover the new machine, maybe with enough left over to cover the RAID enclosure and drives. Sigh… thank god. The spinning ball of death has been torturing me.

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**Author:** ![kushiel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/bbce88/32.png) [@kushiel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kushiel)\
**Post date:** [February 17, 2012, 6:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/score-the-spinning-ball-of-death-is-no-more/613114/2 "2012-02-17T18:14:24Z")

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May I ask what you do to need 24GB of RAM? Video rendering? But the SSD would indicate not.

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**Author:** ![Stoid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/stoid/32/272_2.png) [@Stoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stoid)\
**Post date:** [February 17, 2012, 6:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/score-the-spinning-ball-of-death-is-no-more/613114/3 "2012-02-17T18:32:40Z")

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> [@kushiel](#):
>
> May I ask what you do to need 24GB of RAM? Video rendering? But the SSD would indicate not.

Yes, exactly. The SSD doesn’t undo that.

I am just trying to come at the speed issue from every possible angle. In addition to video, I just by nature tend to push the hell out of my system by running lots of things simultaneously so I need room to do that.