I’ve been a long term fan of using second hand macs - this mac would be the fastest mac I’ve ever used and, having just found one for $250 online, you’ve got me thinking...
Great machine. I still have a 2006 Mac Pro 1,1, just for the sake of upgrading it. It's not my main machine, but I've upgraded the GPU, put in dual 3.00 GHz Quad Xeons, 32 GB RAM (it can handle 64!) and an SSD with 3 TB hard drives for backups and RAID. Of course, it's limited to El Capitan, but it has plenty of power to spare.
@Ishtiaque Walid The 2010 model (and the models that have the same design) is the original cheese grater. The new cheese grater is just it's high cost speed talker of a younger brother with a bad case of acne.
That’s a wonderful computer you have. I am shocked you haven’t gone to Mojave as that’s a speed boost for sure. Wait you have an nVidia card. Makes sense why you haven’t updated. How long do you plan to keep yours?
I bought my Mac Pro 5,1 for £250 in 2013 from a studio in London. I upgraded the RAM from 8GB to 64GB, the CPU from a quad-core 2.66GHz to a six-core X5680, and replaced the 640GB SATA HDD with a pair of 500GB SATA SSDs. I'm currently waiting for my 1TB NVMe drive to arrive from Amazon.
why did you install the NVMe PCIe extension above the GPU instead of in the top slot, this will cause 2 issues, one the heat from the GPU will heat up the NVMe PCIe extension which can actually prevent the m.2s from being properly cooled especially when both the GPU and storage drives are underload and two, this will also cause your GPU to have less room to breath and could cause potential heating issues.
lol - I mean we're getting new Mac Pros at work, and I'm CUCKOO FOR COCOAPUFFS with anticipation, lol, but I'm going to be buying a used one of these now to do this too.
Forget that card which makes raid 0 or 1 in a direct way ,is only for sequential and not good enough. If you want a trully performer to sature the PCI-E x8 2.0 bus, put an Areca 1884 raid controller card with 4 or 8GB DDR4 cache with a pile of SSD SLC. And you will get 5GB/s seq read and write, and 600MB/s random read/write at 4k 😁.
It is but if I recall I read that -in certain circumstances- APFS isn’t recommended and I remember that, for my build, it was strongly advised not to use APFS.
I think the 12 core 3.46 with an added nvme ssd and newer videocard Is almost as fast as the base 8 core $6k unit for about 1k Plus you have all the.memory slots 4 HD bays 2 uhd CD DVD bays can be used for ssds or hd
I have this machine. My plan is to just use this for storage, I need a list of possible PCIE cards to consider, considerably cheaper than the $400 you spent. What do you recommend?
My bottleneck for work-at-home is - no gigabit ethernet. Everything else is fine on a decade-old machine! These upgrades look awesome until you notice that the latest Mac MINI is 50% faster cpu than my 5,1 3ghz *12core*... just upgrading drives like in this video would cost almost as much, with no cpu boost ( I render 3d ) - makes it a damn difficult decision
My Mac Pro is similar but I barely use it now thanks to not being able to upgrade the OS and therefore use the software I want (Photoshop and Final Cut) without a lot of hassle. Watching to find out what I can do...
I bought a 2008 mac pro and put in a sata SSD in it and it works very well but recently I bought a HP z230 with a zeon processor and it is a hackintosk and boots in mac OS and windows and boy does it work extremely well. It came with 256 sata SSD and a 500 gb WD hard drive. I paid only $170 for the machine and it really represents value for money. I have added another 2tb WD hard drive (2018) which I paid $20 and I am planning put in a samsung 500 gb NVMe which I paid $60 and $50 for the double SSD adapter. I find that the HP destroys the mac pro and powers my 4k monitor better than the mac pro. The HP has taught me that the mac pro is obsolete and it is a waste of money upgrading it.
Hi Hugh, very interesting...think about to do the same way.......a question, what exactly is the Geforce GTX card? Would you take it again oder would you take meanwhile another? thx for your answering...cheers
You should check the link speed on your PCIe slot for that card; you should be getting way more speed, even on PCIe 2.0. It’s probably stuck at 2.5GT/s, or your card is only using 4 lanes (x4), where 16 (x16) are available in Slot 2. The packaging for the adapter in your video claims it works at x16 lanes, but each NVMe will only use x4 each. System Profile-> PCIe will tell you lanes used and link speed. PCIe 2.0 @ 2.5GT/s = ~250MB/s * x8 lanes = 2000MB/s; @ 5.0GT/s = ~500MB/s * x8 lanes = 4000MB/s max (x16 = 8000MB/s max) , minus a tad for bit-conversion overhead. Your 970 EVO Plus are each capable of ~3750MB/s by ~3350MB/s seq. R/W Real World speeds; in RAID 0 you should easily see well over 7000MB/s by 6000MB/s on PCIe 2.0 x16 (with 4x SSD), even just two should saturate the x8 rating fully. You can adjust your link speed using a terminal command. A setting of 2.5GT/s is what you usually see on the 2009 4,1 models, even if flashed to 5,1; you will then need to create a startup daemon to boost the link speed to 5.0GT/s. Even my 3,1 can be set to 5.0GT/s, and my 4x NVMe 960 EVO RAID 0 destroys your results; as does my 12x 960 EVO [2.5”] RAID 0. HTH.
Great video! And such a beautiful machine. I have one myself, not as insane as yours :) One question, how do you manage the extra generated heat? This is a big deal with these machines. I use Macs Fan Control, but this is not a great solution. The Northbridge diode is particularly hot. So how do you manage your system overheating with all these insane specs? Thanks
Hi Hugh, I have that mac pro as well. Which display controller are you using? Could you recommend some good type-c USB 3.0 card for mac pro? Thanks for a great video from Beijing
I recently did this upgrade with the IO Crest card and Samsung Evo Plus blades. Just a heads up..... You have to put two blades in. At first, I only put one 1 tb blade in and I consistently got hard resets when running BlackMagic Disk Speed test after awhile. That was with the card in Slot 2. When I moved it to Slot 3 it wouldn't crash but read/write speeds were about 1500/1500 mbs. Popped in another blade and put it back in Slot two and it doesn't reset and I get expected speeds. FYI... Loving this classic Mac Pro more than ever. Dual 6 core 3.46 ghz Xeons, 128 gbs ram, AMD Radeon Vega 56 vid card (with Mac rom), Sonnet Tempo Pro SSD boot drive. I got the supplies to do the Pixlas power supply mod and will also put in a USB3 card. I have no interest in getting the overpriced new Mac Pro. Maybe in 5 years when the prices goes way down on the used market.
How did you get the Vega 56? The modified ones aren't for sale yet? I added usb 3 but removed it as it interfered with bluetooth as the antenna is next to the pci slots.
Hugh Jeffreys, yes the Vega 56 is available from macvidcards. I got it back in December. I’ve heard about the usb card issues but some cards apparently work better than others. Still researching on the best one....
Can’t do that very effectively because the good cards have a switch that is able to utilize more than 4 lanes per NVMe drive. The cheap cards only allow about 1.6 GB/s. Good cards closer to 6.4 GB/s
I'd love something like that for one of the dual Xeon 4+4 core 2008ish Mac Pros I have. I also plan to try and get an RX 580 to work on it - which will be interesting lol - even outside of Mac OS. I'd love Linux and maybe turn it into a server or Nas, but a gaming PC in one of those would be fuuuuuunnn....
I have a Mac Pro mid 2010 in repair shop to fix the temperature sensor If it goes well, it’s good to see how you’ve upgraded it. Question- the original specs says to use 1 or 2 TB Sata drives. Do you think 4 TB HDs are safe to use. When I replaced an old 2TB with Western Digital 4TB and dusted inside, that’s when the fans went out of control, very loud. I’ve replaced HDs before, and not sure if I did something wrong. Any thoughts welcome!
I've watched a few of these upgrade videos, I'm about to put in two new intel cards, but I'm only running Photoshop and Lightroom, would putting in this nvme PCIe card be worth it, or what I mean is do I need it, can you use this as a boot drive? Thanks for the video.
"This mac really need an upgrade" Me: wait a minute, i see 4 4tb hard drives and some kind of geforce gtx graphics card And yes this was in the begginin Also me: *laughs in intel core i5 and intel hd graphics*
Hi Mate, Just insert my 3TB WD Sata on my Macpro 2012 12 core... why is not showing 3TB , instead 355gb available only? i did reformatted couple of time with no luck. the 1TB inserted work no problem. cheers
You still have a PCI slot available.. Buy a two "7 Dollar" PCI card en Split the NVME SSD's over two slots... then you might have double the speed in Raid 0.. (you can buy a other 300 dollar PCI NVME card later if you want ;-) ).
hello hugh, what would be the best video card that can be upgraded on the mac pro, without making modifications, just connect, i currently have a 8gb rx 580 but i would like to upgrade it more. what do you recommend? really thanks.
Ok, you upgraded your disc to Nvme, and read and write speed are incredible, but... You still have an old USB 2.0, no Thunderbolt 3 ports. That is the question, why dou need so much speed, if your ports doesn’t support it.
LOL! You completely ignored temperatures. Not only you blocked the GPU from breathing by putting the largest card on top of it thus preventing the fan to get more air, but you installed the SSDs next to it, so both of them will get even hotter. Move the card at the top slot to let the GPU breath and put the short cards between them for better airflow.
I have a mac pro 5.1 with (Mid 2010) with 2 x 3.46 Ghz 6 core intel Xeon, 64Gb of RAM Radeon RX 580 8 GB graphic card and currently using OS High Sierra 10.13.6 Where and How can i upgrade to Majove ? I tried a patch and got this message : 1. MacOS Mojave Patcher Natively Supported Machine This machine is natively supported by Mojave; you do not need to use this patch. It can still be used to create a USB drive to be used on another machine. What do you suggest sir ? Thank you for your help.
6:00 I believe it's far more likely that you've maxed out the communication speed between the CPU - RAM - DRIVES, as all data must be transferred through a PC in some combination of that order. Given the slow clock speeds of the Xeons available at the time and the limited RAM compatability for them, 2.25 GB/s might just be all that they're capable of. As PCIE x4, which is what each drive is individually using, has a (theoretical) limit of 2GB/s for x4 Gen 2 and 3.95 GB/s for x4 Gen 3. So for 2 drives, you'd be looking at a max speed of 4GB/s or 7.9GB/s if you had no other bottlenecks in the machine. Obviously 2 drives would never be capable of this but the point is that it's not the PCIE bus speed slowing you down.
Almost correct. A good card will utilize all 16 lanes, so if you have two NVMe drives in RAID 0, you should be getting closer to 5, or 5.5 GB/s, or close to the max speed of the NVMe drives. We see that all the time in the MP forums. I think the limiting factor is software raid.
So the new Mac Pro starting at $6000+ here in the US....will be just as barely or un-updateable in 9 years ? If that is the case it only makes sense for a rich person.
hugh......the heat sink had therrmal pads for the NVMe ssds you didnt remove the stickers on the drives for better thermals please fix this my ocd is going crazy i have such a bad headache from this.
