Gaming On A Free Mac Pro... From 12 Years Ago! 

Thanks for watching! Have a nice day 👍

I edit 4K 50p 10bit 4:2:0 H265 on mine :) The video files play back perfectly but I have to transcode it because Final Cut Pro wont play it back right, it drops frames. Just briefly tested DaVinci Resolve 17 and it plays perfectly. Will have to do more testing but looks like I have a new editing software to learn. *For those wondering my specs are as follows:* 2 x 3.46 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon 64 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 Radeon RX 5700 XT 8 GB (Mac Flashed) NVMe + SATA 3 + SATA 2 Drives (Totalling 16.75TB) Blu-ray Drive + DVD Drive MacOS Catalina + Windows 10

This is my daily workstation and driver - 12 core dual x5650s, GTX 780, 2tb NVME / 20tb spinning/solid SATA storage - a beautiful, timeless machine.

An 11 year old Mac Pro is better than my Gaming PC

Mac Edition GPUs are basically just VBIOS flashed models to be compatible with Apple's "things" (DSMOS). Mac edition cards typically can display preboot stuff, non Mac-edition ones just show black screen till it has booted. That's how I remember it being

Use it as a back-up editing machine. 32GB of RAM, 6 cores and a HD7950 are decent for a Final Cut Pro installation. The only shame is that Xeon lacks QuickSync.

This is impressive because it shows just how good an outdated Xeon still is. I imagine if you try to run Linux with a RX580 in that Mac Pro, you could even play something like Cyberpunk or VR games to put it to an extreme.

“This MAC was supposed to be upgradable” I wish they still were

These things are surprisingly capable after so long, my brother still uses my Mac Pro 1.1 for gaming to this day, though it's on Windows. It performs way better than what I had when I was his age.

Hugh x Psivewri. Best collab ever

Are you sure you don't want to setup yourself a recycle business, you seems really good at it!

Got one of these older 5.1 Mac Pro. I love it and use it as a main computer. I am using it with a 30" Cinema Display. Both are in mint condition. Planning to upgrade the CPU, RAM and GPU in the future. These are great computers and still can be very fast.

The case being intact is what is amazing. Cheese grater makes sill look good to this day. This was a nice score.

I seriously always look forward to watching your videos, so thank you for being my favorite source of content on here! Excellent job as always 👍

Lovely video. I will never get rid of my 2009 Mac Pro. Running Windows 10 and MacOS Catalina! Playing Cyberpunk 2077 and BF2042 @ High settings 3440x1440 60FPS steadily. It’s had it’s over heating problems… first the CPUs which ran much cooler after a repaste on upgrade. Then everything was overheating with one component sticking out… the Northbridge Diode. Repasted that bad boy recently and now the whole system is BULLETPROOF. Knock on wood!

That looks like a great machine! Good CPU, good GPU, good RAM, and good amount of storage bays. Shame they're all SATA 2 but hey, as the previous owner did, use a PCI SSD which would be faster.

Man, Steve Jobs knew what he was doing 12 years ago, only 12 years later for someone to game on it. That's hella cool!

Using a Burned Disc for install is definitely flaky. Right when you started having the issue I was reflecting on my PowerPC Flipping and Collecting days… 😌

I now understand why your videos are so chill. Eucalyptus has stress-relieving properties, especially when mixed with an aromatic herb, like spearmint.

Nice, very similar specs to my current PC too, I'm rocking a Dell T3500 tower that I got for free, with an upgraded Xeon W-3670 that I got on the cheap. In fact, it's getting treated to an upgrade today with a GTX 980 I got from a friend, but even with a lower end card, these old Xeons still run great all these years later.

I have this exact model as my daily driver and it never disappointed me

I've got one of these I used to use all the time when I upgraded mine last year. 29GB of ram with 12-core 3.31hz Xeon's (Parallel 2x X5680s), I used to use it with an RX5500xt 4gb and a PCIe adapter with an NVMe 500GB SSD. I patched it to Big Sur at first, and then to Monterey. It is amazing how nicely these work after all these years. Now I've taken on hackintoshing, but these classic Mac Pros are a great way to enter into modding macs.

I’d love to have an old iMac and Mac Pro ❤️❤️❤️ this is a great video, as always!

My current work computer, love that thing for audio👌🏻

Socket 1366 systems are great imo, nehalem/westmere still scale well and can yield great performance, even in 2021

I use this same Mac Pro as my gaming PC, except mine is dual X5680, I still don't feel the need to upgrade quite honestly...

This is a great machine. I'm currently using a similar Mac Pro. I'm running dual processors 6 core. I've upgraded to a bifurcated PCI card for the SSD NVME Speeds and I'm getting really fast read/write speeds. Additionally, I upgraded the video card to a 8 gig Radeon RX580. This is my main computer and running perfectly well on and open core version of Mac OS. I know I can run Big Sur on it with open core but I'm ready to go through that.

Dope Video. Im a mac Enthusiast and i bought one of these direct from Apple in 2011.. Slowly worked it up, ugraded to the dual CPU and runnning a RX580. great fun

I would love to own one of these. You could pretty much turn it into a full-size gaming pc with it being so upgradable.

I’m a long time cMP 5,1 owner. I can vouch for this machine and feel it’s the best machine Apple ever built. While my main machine is now a 2019 7,1 Mac Pro there are still lots of uses for the 5,1. BUT Only if you get one starting out cheaply it’s still worth investing in. Unfortunately the low cost of an M1 Mac mini makes it less attractive as an initial buy for many uses if not found cheap. Mine was upgraded slowly over the years as prices on hardware has come down. It’s still a great daily driver if wanted provided you’re capable of getting open core running with the proper guts. With that it will still run the latest MacOS and Windows 10. You’ll be hard pressed to find a machine with as many internal storage options and bays. The internal bays support raid and file transfer speeds are quick when writing to simultaneous drives even on spinning hard drives with redundancy being an option even on external drives via usb 3 by way of a cheap pci card. With that it makes a great flexible high capacity NAS, Plex server, or Time Machine host with dual gigabit Ethernet ports. I have considered installing mine in our coat closet for this purpose. Configured properly it will still transcode video, video edit, or as he’s shown play video games without a sweat. Currently mine has been upgraded to the highest dual CPU variant, 96gb of ram over 6 sticks as it actually performs better on 6 sticks due to addressing, and I upgraded to the RX580 before the GPU shortage for about $100. It’s currently in my 16yo son’s room as his main daily driver using two 24in Cinema Displays. He does everything from his 100% online schooling to playing some really heavy games on it. Even though it takes a bit more finagling than it did previously to update the operating systems the fact that it’s 12 years old she still hardly misses a beat!

Use to work on one at a company back in the day! Always liked the look and they were great then as they are now! Someday, I need to pick up one as a graphic/photo/video edit machine!

Wow the inside of the mac looks so easy to assemble and looks easy to remove

Luckily I did exactly what your talking about at the end of the video. Bought a used Mac Pro 5.1 added a NVME SSD via PCIe expansion card plus a SATA one for Windows 10 and finally put in the RX580 from Sapphire before the GPU prices went crazy. It is impressive how this old machine can hold up even in 2021 and especially when installing windows on it. Mine now runs with two 3,46 GHz XEONs and 48 GB of RAM in tripple channel, I also did a video series about the unboxing as well as the whole upgrading and installing process, was a really fun one. Greetings from germany!

I still use this computer for music production. It’s still great 🔥

Still more powerful than what I'm using, I'd be willing to fix the gpu

Got the same Mac with the dual CPU tray and 32GB RAM. Also have a 7950 but didn't expect you to get a new Mac Edition 7950 for free those cards costs a really pretty penny. Got Catalina and Windows 10 running on here and it runs very good. Definitely a good machine to have for the next few years, maybe even longer with the RX 580 and CPU upgrade

An incredibly handsome looking computer. There hasn't been anything like it before or since. I have an old G5 machine upstairs in my collection and frankly I just like looking at it XD

Such a timeless design

i had this mac pro and its fire it kept up with intensive coding, application benchmarks, application stress-testing, it ran multiple servers, it can do whatever you want, the trouble is flashing a modern OS on it because it cant boot from usb drives, but if u can get past that like i did, they sell for cheap, there still fast, and there hella reliable.

It would be interesting to see how this MacPro performs against a recent or current iMac.

A great video as always, but I wish you'd shown how well the first-gen Mac Pro handles gaming in Mac OS. I had a 2008 3,1 Mac Pro for several years, and it was a beast with most games, especially after I hacked it to Mojave and installed a 3GB Metal-capable R9 280x graphics card. Hades, SuperHot, INSIDE, Hollow Knight, Bioshock Infinite, Hitman: Absolution, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Return of the Obra Dinn and more all ran flawlessly on my Mac Pro. Sadly, my Mac Pro died in February 2021 (worsening kernel panics until it wouldn't even reliably turn on anymore), and I replaced it with an M1 Mac Mini, which I'm very happy with. Incidentally, I ran a 1TB 860 EVO SSD in my Mac Pro, and achieved SATA III speeds through a PCIe mounting card.

I have a 2009 Mac Pro, flashed up to 5,1; 2x 2.93 4-core (8-core); 48 GB RAM, Nvidia Titan Xp 12 GB Collectors Edition (Galactic Empire) flashed for MacOS; LG Curved Ultrawide Monitor, 3440x1440p, 34-inch; Harmaon Kardon / JBL Soundsticks 4 speakers; 2x DVD; Sierra boot drive; Win 7 boot drive. I use MacOS for desktop publishing, and Win 7 for games. Comfortable running Doom Eternal, RAGE 2, locked at 60 fps with all graphics settings maxed at 21:9 1440p. It's a great, stylish machine that makes working fun, and gaming even more so. I use Macs Fan Control on MacOS and Win 7 to boost the fans a bit and keep the Northbridge chip down to 65c even during heavy gaming load.

I have a 2010 Mac Pro. Bought it in 2015 for$400. Basically brand new, the used it to keep track of inventory in his store. Maxed out ram and he included 4 2tb hds. Best thing I’ve ever bought so far. I record music and edit video on still to this day.

Best computer I ever owned was my 1st gen dual Xeon Mac Pro. Bought mint in 2006. To this day I've never had a machine as stable, upgradable, or trustworthy. Also nobody is stealing it, it's like 90 pounds.

I have a 2006 MacPro 1,1 updated to 2,1...upgraded the processors, maxed out the RAM to 32 GB and put in a Radeon card...and even being 15 years old it still plays Steam titles that'll run under MacOS 10.11 pretty well.

the way you spread thermal paste made my heart drop for a sec

Hi! Can you please make a vid about using a 2006 MacPro 1.1 in 2021? Would be interesting IMO.

Howdy from Adelaide as well! I’ve just started my older max collection with a Mac Pro 3.1, always wanted one.

I’m still using a 2012 MacPro 5,1 for gaming. Upgraded the RAM, installed a 6 core Xeon instead of the quad core it came with, and put in an RX-570. Works well enough for now, and I only paid $80 for it along with a 2008 MacPro, and two older PowerMac G5s. Oh, and running windows 10. Still had Mojave on it, but I haven’t played around with the hacks to put Big Sur on yet.

I am still using this as my main computer 😂

Yesss! Another awesome vid!

The 4,1 and 5,1 Mac Pros are legendary. It can be maxed out with 12 cores with some upgrades it could compete and even outperform machines released several years later.

I've had one of these sitting around for about 10 years wating on inspiration to do some sort of modding project, one day!

Clean video, clean explanation. Top Class!

Great video! Thanks for sharing. You can even install Windows 10 on it and give it a couple of more years of light gaming :D

One of these is my main system. It’s a dual CPU though. Started out as a 2009 8 core, is now a 5,1 12 core. I play cyberpunk2077 on it.

I have a dual cpu 2010 one with 64GB of ECC DDR3 RAM. I replaced the dual quad core with dual 6 cores and upgraded it with a 580 Sapphire Pulse back in 2018. It has a USB-3.0 card which I hooked a Drobo-5C into to run as a kick ass Plex Server. At some point I plan on replacing mine with a second gen Apple Silicon mac mini. The power this machine consumes is enough to push me to replace it.

This is why apple is one of the best tech manufacture . You buy something and have it for a long time

This rescues, love it.

iMacs and macbooks are just insane! This mac is one the many that still works and performs well! I can understand that for certain softwares or power requests, a mac isn't the right choice... But everyone have to admit that these computers are solid! Being able to play games at 60fps after 12 years is awesome! Imagine the current M1 macs in 10 years... they'll be still good and reliable! I mean, some people still use the 2006's macbooks, when they still were white or black painted and made in plastic... They are expensive, but last for more than a decade! 2000€ for 10 years of use it's not much!

I'm running Windows 7 Ultimate on morden day AMD hardware. R5 2600 CPU, MSI Tomahawk Max MB, RX580 8GB OC GPU, 16GB 3200MHZ DDR4 RAM.

My favourite tower design of all time!

Watching you dismantle it certainly shows why the damned things were so expensive to begin with - the build quality and materials used looks (on the face of it) excellent - plus with it all compartmentalized and easy to dismantle/build shows a lot of thought went into the design/construction.

Nice find. I have 2009 flashed 5,1 too. I have OpenCore on it which let’s me be at Big Sure 11.6, and gives me the use of 32GB DIMMs. Current specs are 2 x X5680, 256GB DDR3 ECC 1333 MHz RAM (albeit running at 1066MHz since it is Quad Rank and not Dual Rank), 4 x 6TB WD Black HDD, 1TB WD RAID AiC SSD, flashed Titan Ridge TB3, LG Blu Ray drive, 1TB SATA SSD in the 2d Optical Drive, and a PowerColor Red Drago 5700 XT. Runs great to this day.

I love these old Mac Pro's but the reason I dumped mine was power usage. It was pretty insane. My M1 MBA uses a fraction of it.

I always loved this design. Gorgeous.

I have a dual processor 5,1. I have a AMD 380x in it and a regular SSD (no need for speed here). I only use this beast for Mac specific tasks (far and few now). I hate the 380x isn't flashed, but I have a single slot Apple branded Nvidia card for EFI tasks (again, far and few).

I love your every video Thanks alot to post alot of intresting videos

I would love to own one of these one day, at the moment my collection consists of: An iMac G3 (Summer Special 2001) An eMac G4 (700MHz) An iMac G5 (BROKEN, NEEDS NEW PSU) An Intel based iMac from 2006 (needs a new screen) And I used to have a Early 2009 white plastic MacBook 5,2 which I used for school from 2017, then I bought an Early 2015 MacBook Air 7,2 for around £550ish in 2018 and then in 2019 I bought a 2019 Lenovo IdeaPad 330-15ICH 81FK00BAUK for around £590 (on sale from £799) and then added around £500 of upgrades (RAM & SSD).

It is always satisfying to see yet another computer restored to working conditions. On a side note, while I am not sure about the case for the Mac Pro(s), Windows 7 should be installable onto PCIe / NVMe drives; I am currently running a PCIe SSD expansion on my desktop and Windows 7 runs pretty fine on it.

i always waiting for new Psivewri video...

Just an FYI, that will support the 5690 Xeon chip at 3.6 ghz. Somewhere there is a firmware update to support this. ( I did it on mine, dual 5690’s ). Also, make sure to update the motherboard firmware with the Mojave installer and it will increase the PCIe slots from 2.5x to 5x. ( don’t install Mojove, just run the first part of the installer to update the system firmware. One last note. Anyone who has a 4,1 that updates it to 5,1… if you buy a dual processor tray to upgrade, get the version your machine originally was and upgrade it from there. If you upgraded a 4,1 to a 5,1, buy a 4,1 processor tray and upgrade it to 5,1. If you don’t, the fans will run on full all the time.

I rock a G5 PowerMac but I wish I had one of these old Mac Pros laying around

put a mixture of eucalyptus oil and CLP to remove the rust

I picked one up for free that was by default the 5,1 model. I actually put a thunderbolt card in mine which took about a week to figure out but It works both in windows 10 and mac os 14. It runs my thunderbolt interfaces like a champ in logic pro X with the lowest latency

1:38 i have been lughing at that mouse for a solid minute

I mean, xbox did use Powermac G5’s as e3 demo kiosks before the 360 launched. They even used em as dev kits for the 360

4:10 The joys of burning dvd’s 😩 I once bought 100 burnable discs and the drive hated that specific brand.

I'd personnally install Windows from a device that is already registered as having a valid product key... this way, free license, and then you put the drive in the Mac Pro and install any missing driver! This device should be able to run up to Monterey (newest), this more or less only depends on the graphics card! On the Windows side, this can run Windows 11 no problem! Although a registry hack to recover the full context menu as well as setting the task bar to the left side is definitely a must!

Boot straight to the windows 10 installer via w10 USB using ALT on startup / don’t need to bother with bootcamp 😃💪 boot your installed windows 10 the same way using ALT on startup. You will not be stuck with w7 and don’t have to bother with bootcamp

A BenQ RL2455HM. Just like the one i'm looking at right now!

I have a 2010 5,1 Mac Pro on MacOS High Sierra I use for gaming and I haven't upgraded it yet so it still uses the Original 1TB hard disc and it performs well

I picked up one of these to run the latest logic and after having to shell out on a RX580 I thought I may as well try it for PC gaming,as a pc gaming novice I had no idea how powerful the spec needed to be but knew it was overpowered for just making music,I bought a dual tray with 64gb memory included from eBay for cheap and am very happy to say I’m playing the likes metro exodus/RE Village/crash 4 and sekiro on ultra settings this mac is very capable and can be bought on eBay fully upgraded for what I assume is a fraction of what it seems to be able to achieve easily But I’m no gaming pc expert I only went this route because I had to pay out so much for my gpu I thought I may as well game on it if I can Very very happy with it

I've been using a dual socket one daily since 2009 (bought the base model with educational discount back then). Upgraded the CPU's, memory and graphics ±5 years ago. It still feels faster in use than a modern MacBook Pro. The only reason I'm considering replacing it, is Apple no longer supporting it with updates for Mac OS... Can't use the newest XCode and release apps to the App store with it.

I’m jealous.. He gave it to you!!!! Wow!!

What a beautiful and thoughtful design! Truly deserves the 'Pro' moniker, unlike the upcoming 'trashcan' or expensive and somewhat proprietary 2019 version.

15 degrees cooler changing the thermal paste... 😆 The liquid residue you had on the CPU board is coming from the heat pad that goes on the CPU mosfets and will leave residue overtime. It doesn't seem to be conductive though.

I got a mac pro 3.1 with an octa core 3.4 ghz, i put an rx 580 in it and 40gbs of ram, ssd bracket mount and holy moly it goes

I believe I know someone with that model, beauty of the time, sadly stopped getting update so he stopped using it

Hugh has a 2010 Mac Pro and apple discontinued os updates for the desktop. But he was able to get around that with a new card. Old isn’t always bad.

I found a 2010 Mac Pro 5,1 at a dumpster. The case looked great! It was a single cpu version with a Xeon W3565 (4 cores 8 threads). It sadly had no ram and gpu. Now I have upgraded it to a dual socket board with dual Xeon X5690s (6 cores 12 threads each) and 48gb of ram for now. I also put an RX580 8Gb and got everything working with opencore. Luckily due to the flu shortage being gone, it’s much cheaper now. By the way, you said you can’t use a PCIe Nvme SSD. You actually can, I did. However I think you need to upgrade the firmware to do so. It really is a great machine. It highly outperforms my father’s 2017 i7 MacBook pro and works seamlessly with Windows 10 on parallels desktop in hybrid mode with MacOS.

I don't understand any words you say, because i speak spanish but i still like to see your videos, and i translated all this by google

Another great video! Cheers from Brazil!

Here I am, sitting in front of my 14 year old iMac, watching this Video 😅.

I almost got one of these at a thrift store, for $50! I had never seen one before, I thought it was the coolest computer I'd ever seen. But someone else bought it before I could get back to the store. $2500 new! Lucky you!

This 11 years old Mac seem to be launch in the future. Impressive...

well, i can now finally go to my relative"s place in australia as i hope its snowing there

I received the dual processor version free, too, about three years ago and am still using it today for my photo and video editing: the four HDD bays with 1TB each, a SATA SSD in the second DVD bay, 32GB of 1066 MHz RAM, and a somewhat upgraded 2GB MSI GPU for my three monitors. Still a solid computer for the basics, although very outdated on macOS 10.13.

They sure don't make graphics cards like they use to. Man that 7950 looks amazing. At least from the front.

I had a Powermac G5 dual and my dream was having Mac Pro back then in 2008