Here's why the Cheesegrater Mac Pro is still the best 

I ended up getting the (Mid-2012) Mac Pro from my local surplus store for $135 recently. A surprisingly good machine! I look forward to upgrading it as the months go by.

That late 2000's Mac Pro is my childhood. You have a subscriber.

I’ve been using my 2010 cheese greater for 7 years. Logic X, Final Cut Pro, Motion, Compressor, Photoshop, I have 8 tb hard drive and 2 tb sod’s, 3 gb sapphire made for Mac Pro video card. I won’t be replacing it soon.

2:08 "the grate, the glorious"

You YT channel is very underrated. Your videos are very interesting and well done. Keep on doing them. Thank you!

Yup, I've got two of the old (5.1) 2013 cheesegrater. Love it (them). And I'm still upgrading ! 64 gig RAM, 4 x 1tb SSD's. Great products.

Looking forward to the rest of your upgrade videos in this series. I love my 2012 mac pro.

I love the layout of this machine. Great video!

Great idea for a little video series. I have a 5,1 which I’ve upgraded to the best I can. X5690’s 128GB of ram (only 6 modules installed for better performance @96GB) installed a 970 evo along with a Vega 64 card. All in all this Mac Pro still packs a punch. Look forward to seeing what you do.

I do think this is a fine idea for some users. Ironically though, when you're finished you won't have an upgradable mac.

Luke Miani: too bad that don’t exist 2nd Luke: It totally does exist 2013 Mac Pro 2nd Luke: no not that one Me: lmfao I love the commentary

When I went to an iMac from my cheese grater Mac Pro my power bill went down $30 a month. Not kidding. $30*12 months = $360 $360* 4 year useful life= $1,440. Worth considering if you are super value-conscious.

Hi Luke nice to see more people jumping into the old cheese grader Macs. They are fun to tinker with. I personally went with a 2009 4,1 model and took on the challenge of doing the firmware hack to force the system to a 5,1. it isn't easy but worth it as you gain quite a bit of knowledge as far as the system OS functionality. I replaced the stock 4 core with a 6 core xeon 3.46 ghz processor. I didn't delid it so I cant say what difference I'm getting as a result. I purchased cable end adapters to plug in a radeon rx 580. so far nothing has overheated or exploded so don't be nervous about upgrading to a beefier GPU. also I purchased a second daughterboard with twin cpu's as you've shown here and I want to change out both processors just to see what the system will give me. I'm currently booting off a 500 gb SSD so you can imagine how fast it is. look into that as well. I'll fill in the other drive slots with enterprise rated helium filled HDD's and be done with that aspect. it should net me 26-30+ terabytes of storage. I think that will be plenty. I stream from my iTunes movie collection through a Sony 4k television or the LG 32" Ultra Fine HDR IPS LED 4kUHD monitor. either display is a treat. it lets the rx 580 flex its muscles a bit. my point is these things are built like tanks and will let you have fun while you learn. I'll keep my eyes on your build as who knows you may fine a processor combo I don't know about and I can begin the upgrade process.........Again. Anyway sorry for the novel and thanks for post😎

Can’t wait to see the finished results, I’ve been thinking about buying one in upgrading it

That's great !! Can't wait to see the final results !! Looking forward that :D

I love watching your videos. So thorough and so informative.

i love your videos, they helped a great deal on upgrading my 2012 mac pro

I remember as a teen going to my step dads newspaper and they had 2-3 of these towers for the designers, it was amazing how good it look then and still like the look now

This sounds great. Thank you for linking your resources, that'll definitely make things easier for us haha

If you can, I'd love to see a head to head test between your 2009 Pro and a 2018 Mac Mini crunching video.

I run a 2010 Mac Pro with: * X5690 Xeon * MacVidCards Nvidia GTX 980 - runs with the power from the standard system. * Kingston HyperX Predator PCIe 480GB SSDs.

Great video Luke. Will be following your progress.

Thank you for doing these Mac Pro videos.

I just subbed! Can't wait for this series. Spare no expense and make it future proof!

Awesome. Can’t wait to watch the following videos

Can’t wait to see the end product this is going to be awesome

Really love the detailed videos... One of the top reviews on mac for sure ♥️♥️

Now that's what I call a subscription worth video... Intrigued. Waiting for the next videos in the series.

Great creative presentation Luke - will be a keen follower interested to witness the end results too what is the best Mac Pro ever built - 5,1. Keep up the great work!

Luke, I love your videos. As a serious nightlife and entertainment photographer as well as someone who often records/edits multitrack audio I was really frustrated by the various windows laptops I was trying to get by with, and started my trek into the darkside (macOS) with an older macbook that pleasantly integrated perfectly out of the box with my iphone and ipad. I needed more horsepower, on a budget, with simple redundancy and backup solutions. Hence, the Cheesegrater. I was able to score a 4,1 2009 cMP with 16GB ram and a 5770 for under $300 including tax and shipping on eBay. I flashed it to 5,1 and scored a great deal on a pair of 6 core 3.46ghz westmeres for $225 upgraded to 96GB RAM, 802.11n/BT 4.0 , USB 3.0 , 1TB SSD, and a Sapphire Radeon Pulse 8GB along with 4x 4TB WD red drives in Raid 10, a USB 3.0 SD card reader, and a USB 3.0 8TB external HD for onsite backup (backblaze for off-site backup). I've also got a 240GB SSD installed for a scratch drive that also contains the macOS Catalina install app patched in case I ever need it for recovery. I's using dosdude1's Catalina patcher to run macOS Catalina unsupported, but it worked fine in Mojave anyway. Total cost was less than $1500, and this system actually is quite fast. No boot screen, but it definitely meets my post production needs for Lightroom Classic and PhotoshopClassic, it runs multitrack audio I/O with Reaper very well - as many as 24 tracks with no latency or hiccups so far, and I've started messing around with Premier for video. It's heavy, but in a special case it's portable enough to move to 3 different locations I work from. In one of these locations it runs 2x 55" screens in extended desktop feeding one screen into my entertainment complex while the other runs the virtual mixing board for reaper - simultaneously! I liked it so well I built another cMP for backup/redundancy/plex server. I scored a 8 core 2.8ghz 2008 cMP 3,1 for $28 on eBay ($70 with tax & ship), upgraded to 64 GB RAM, USB 3.0, 802.11n USB dongle and BT 4.0 USB dongle, installed the 5770 video card from my other cMP (kept the GT 8800 in case I ever need a boot screen for recovery on my other cMP), 2x HGST He8 4TB drives in Raid 0, and an 8TB WD external hard drive for on site backup. (no offsite backup for this one) This one is running macOS Sierra with the server.app (with dosdude1's Sierra patcher), as Sierra was the last macOS version where server.app ran full featured. It hosts a mirror of my professional photo archive - both raw and processed photos, syncronized mirrors of my icloud, google drive, and microsoft onedrive contents for local network access, sonar, radar, and my local/external network available plex server that has run as many as 9 streams transcoding simultaneously without hiccups nor buffering. This backup cMP, even though older, still runs current versions of Lightroom classic and Photoshop classic - so I can edit on it if the other cMP ever fails, and the freefilesync software keeps the phot archive directories updated across both machines. I've got both cMPs up on a gigabit local network attached to gigabit Fios internet, and the whole ecosystem works together seemlessly - 2 cMPs, macbook, 3 iphones, ipad, and even various windows laptops and smart tvs. It was through your videos I first got interested macOS and in in buying and upgrading an old Mac Pro to solve my post production problems in the first place. Next step I'm stalking ebay for a 2012 27" imac for a dedicated, compact editing and post production station. Likely it will just screenshare the pair of cMPs running headless, but I'd probably still upgrade it according to the recommendations in your imac videos in case it needed to do anything more intensive. Thanks for your great videos and for your enthusiasm for finding value in upgrades to older hardware. Kelli

I was expecting satisfying “click” sound when you put each modules back to the case

Excelente... acá en chile tienes un suscriptor contento y esperando los siguientes capítulos de este nuevo renacer del MacPro 5.1... Saludos desde Chile!!!!

Your videos are really good. I enjoy the content and the quality-

"I have this Mac Pro but I'm not going to do anything in this video but tell you that I'm going to do stuff with it later" You go man. You go do that. Let me know when it's already done.

Cant wait for more videos on this!!!

This will be a great series

Right 👍 It is the best. Figured out just today to install catalina on the Mac Pro5,1 running very smooth for a beta. Continue the great work. Waiting for the next videos

Because of your video, I bought a MacPro 5.1 2012 2x2.4 Ghz, 24 Gb ram, 240 Gb SSD, 500 HDD, 640 Gb HDD, ATI Radeon HD 5770 1Gb, for 2000 DDK(about $183). I have installed a USB3 PCI . On another 256 Gb SSD with Win 10 Pro. Bought and install a RX 590 8Gb GPU and install Mojave.

It's surprising how much processors have stopped evolving since everyone started focusing on peripheral speed instead, these machines are still running great to this day and are neck and neck with similar options, I desperately needed a new intel Mac and it was either a 4.1 dual cpu or a newer Mac mini (2018 i3, couldn't find any i5s for a price less than the new m1) got the 4.1 and I couldn't be happier with Logic Pro X and pro tools running great, and with a flash that took 7 minutes and a some upgrades it can stay way above any 1000+ euro imac sold here used where I live (from my experience anything with a passmark score of 4000-4500 is way more than enough for my work) and I love the I/o expansion.

I never been so excited for something on RU-vid in my whole life! Awesome vid.

Great idea Luke. I always wondered how far this thing can be pushed, even if I'm somewhat skeptical about it

Good video, thank you ! Which is the latest OS that can we install to this machine ?

Yeah, this is going to be interesting. I'm excited.

Still on a 2010 8core x 2.4ghz with 26 gigs of ram . You think updating the graphic card will allow me to edit 4K60p at 100mbs with no hiccups in premiere pro ? Or what you guys think ?

Awesome... already wanna watch the other videos!!!!

You are the best. I want to see the final result :D

Great video. I’ve been upgrading my mid-2012 Mac Pro over the years and it still runs great.

Well done! Credible, authentic, informative... Thanks

Great project! Along the way it would be great if you compared each configuration to other Macs like iMacs, iMac Pros, and minis.

So beautiful. So timeless. Given the necessary upgrades over the years, they could've been selling this thing ever since it's inception and continue doing so for a good while. Everybody would've been happy and Apple wouldn't have lost countless major studios to the PC. Oh my.

Thank you. I am "in" and just subscribed. I have a 2009 Mac Pro still working perfectly but struggling with 4K video editing and Premier Pro. I was about to buy a PC Tower but your video intrigues me. Please let us know what your timeline is to complete the project and the nature of complexity for those who are inexperienced with this kind of work. I would pay more to buy new but I hear you saying it's better to be in a position to upgrade over time. Thanks for the terrific work!!!

I’m excited to see what you do Luke. I hope you post a video comparing what you find when going from those 2.4 Dual Xeon chips to the 3.0+ Xeon chips. I would like to see this especially in a 4K editing set up. Oh and will you be trying dual GPUs or a single very powerful GPU?

Sold mine early 2008 8-Core Mac Pro a few years ago since Apple stop macOS update for it and it was getting slow even with SSD/RAMS/Graphics Card update.

Still using my maxed-out 2012 MacPro. 12 cores at 3.46 GHz.... Well, not totally maxed out, since I only have 64 GB RAM, not 128. All SSD... I love it -- my favorite computer ever. Latest upgrade was a Radeon RX-580 card

I just bought a 2008 Mac Pro Quad Core 3.0Ghz earlier this week for $125. I’m going to throw a good $500 into upgrades. I always wanted another cheese grater since my PowerPC G5!

Hi Luke, many thanks for your fabulous videos, with the assistance of them I successfully upgraded my 2010 Mac Pro 5,1 and its been working like a dream for several weeks, sadly a couple days it will not power on anymore, not even light above the power switch, followed many articles and no luck, i've had 2 Mac Pro the past 10+ years and have replaced motherboards every 5 years (not happy) do you have any suggestions to breath life back into my much loved 5,1? cheers

I love going to socialblade and seeing the rise in views and subs! Great work!

Hi Luke. Congratulations on your videos. I have two Mac Pro (one early 2008 and the other early 2009). I upgraded with SSD for the operating system. Can you suggest which video cards I can use in the two computers to enhance them for video processing? Thank you

I recently bought an almost new 7,1 , but I am keeping my best 5,1 and its similar to where luke went with this one.... and I can tell youthat running catalina its no slouch either. Its still a very good machine in 2023 as long as you are happy with dosdude catalina. My experiences with opencore persuaded me to get a newer machine to run ventura !

I was watching the livestream this mac was bought in , perfect timing now for a video since the new Mac Pro is out

I’ve got the same 2nd hand Mac Pro 2010 earlier this year and I have upgraded it to 2 x 3.33GHz Xeon 5680, 64GB 1333Mhz Ram, MSI Randell RX580-8GB and 1TB SSD. I am very happy about the performance. I don’t mind to continue to pay some extra to increase the performance. Please suggest. Thank you for the great video and instruction.

Luke, you are so lucky you cannot even imagine. I cannot have the same cMP in France at the same price and despite all my searches I cannot find one at 500 boxes. This is so frustrating because I agree with you, the 5.1 is still a solid option and will help people like me to work for years. So frustrating, really but please, keep doing what you do and I will continue to,watch your videos and ... dream 🥴

Huh what a coincidence, i was just talking about going all out on upgrading my dad's 5,1 mac pro. This is going to prove very useful indeed.

Looking forward to see how this turn out

My Macpro 3.1 2008 still rocking.

Great Video man, huge respect !!!

Was thinking about getting 5,1 Mac Pro, but the used market in Australia is nuts and it looks like Apple will not give it Native support in MacOS 10.15. hopefully dosdude1 also creates a patcher for 10.15 as well.

Best Project ever , subscribed!

Will you put in M.2 SSDs with a PCIe Adapter? Throw alle the Hardrives out and use 4 Sata SSDS in Raid4 with softraid? Really curious what you gonna do... Should have kept mine... BTW this video got me to subscribe :)

Thanks for your fantastic videos!

Most favorite RU-vidr of Macs info

great video! those macs were the best and they still are great

Can’t wait for these videos

Love the star wipe!!

Hey Luke, love your videos I watch them all :) I was considering selling my mid 2012 5,1 because Apple won’t be supporting it from an OS standpoint anymore. I’m not super interested in some workaround for the os, should I keep this machine? Will you be addressing that in future videos from this series? Thanks man keep up the good work 🙌🏼

At least you qualified your title with 'for a lot of people'. Fact is....The 12 Core Trashcan is the best machine for my needs. Small, silent, no thermal throttling and second hand prices make it a good deal...regardless of your last 'Review'. It's a keeper. I suspect they will become more sort after now (since 2019 prices have been indicated). Just as the 5,1 will get a boost in popularity.

How many desktops can boot directly into 4 different operating systems? My 3.1 runs Sierra, XP64, Linux and WIN11 - selectable at boot. All 4 are fast and stable. It even boots directly from the USB slots, which allows for easy wipes. cloning, etc. It's a wonderfully versatile machine and amazingly reliable.

What would you suggest if you have a perfectly fine 4,1 sitting in a closet? I am jazzed to haul that out and upgrade it, but I don't know where to start. I'm not expecting you to take time to give me the in's and out's, just maybe point me in a direction? LOVE your videos.

I can’t wait to watch this series, could you throw in some benchmark comparisons vs new iMacs, MacBook Pros? It would be great. Thanks

Luke, love your videos! Whom makes your watch? What model is it? Also where would you recommend purchasing a iMac 27” for photography?

Could you install Catalina beta in your MP 5.1? I heard that could be tricky

I have five 2010 Mac Pros, each running 96 GB Ram, Catalina 10.15.3, and Sapphire RX580 Pulse and Nitro+ cards (boot efi were recently upgraded by mac vid cards) and they do NOT need any modification to the power supplies, they have been working perfectly with the RX580 cards, and before that RX280 cards for many years now just using the motherboard power plugs. I connect a minimum of two 30 and/or 34 and/or 24 inch Dell monitors via display port on each machine and all have have USB3 and/or USB-C PCI cards as well as all boot from both 2TB Samsung NVME and SATA SSDs also on PCI card adapters and each tower has four 6TB WD Black HDDs. No problem with powering all of that! Performance is outstanding considering the approx. $1500 cost for assembling each system. Only "downside " is lack of thunderbolt 3 and SATA to the HDDS is the 2010 version. The SATA SSDs on the PCI cards run at about 550 mB/s and the NVME at about 1450 mB/s

Hopefully grabbing one in the next few days so this is pretty sweet....

The absolute best Mac Pro ever made!

My problem is 4 K/ 43 inch monitor connected to MacPro and screen is displaying the tiny letters/symbols/windows. (Icons are no problem.) Just words like menu options in any app, file names,password entry window, etc. The browser content also does not display properly : the text is in the middle like in a column and then there are two huge empty white areas to the left of it and to the right of it. The content has to naturally spread over in a landscape layout, but instead I am only getting the "portrait" look. How do you enlarge the fonts on tabs, menus etc? How do you enlarge the password window? How do you enlarge the System Preference window and the like? Some ppl say you have to deal with system fonts. I am not familiar with that at all. I have used all features in System Preferences windows, even lowered the resolution.I do wish to work in high resolution. And I absolutely hate the zoom-in. It is so bothersome, especially for the program I am using which is Finale, the music notation software. How do I figure this out? I believe it could be done. Again, don't want to opt to low rez, don't want to zoom in/out, maxed out all the features in System Preferences( going from value 12 to value 16 doesn't do anything for a 43 inch screen) This is MacPro 5.1, 2012 built, highly customized running OS 10.14.6, Nvidia Quadro 5000. The screen is connected via DP port, display is beautiful otherwise.Lower resolutions do enlarge everything mentioned above, but the browser window still looks awful. Apple no longer supports this unit. I am very frustrated and upset.Please, help. Thank you

Is it a problem that the newest macOS is not officially supported any more in this Mac Pro?

Interesting project.... looking forward to see more videos; May the force be with you Luke... subscribed just now!

at least he protected it, I'm sure we've all had things come from eBay broken rattling around unprotected in a box.

I have 2 cheesegraters, a 3.1 and a 4.1, both are twin processors. I got the 3.1 to develop my apps by the 4.1 was just out of love for the thing. When I get some time I want to flash the firmware to 5.1 and upgrade to max specs.

7:55 hehe ‘to the macs’

I bought a 4,1 mac pro that'd been 2010 firmware flashed and had its CPU tray also replaced with the single 6-core one from a 2010 or 2012 and had had an x5690 installed on it, along with 32gB of memory. Pop in an rx570 I already had, a second SSD, 120gB and a random 500gB hard drive I had lying around, to compliment the 240gB SSD and 640gB HD that was already in it and this is now my main machine. I love it to pieces (best computer I've ever owned). Every Mac claims that this model won't support Catalina, but I have faith that Dosdude1 or perhaps someone else will easily get around that problem and we can enjoy these iconic, legendary machines for even more years to come. I know I have many years of upgrades left for mine.

Awesome video and plan. Are you going to buy a Radeon VII?? Is that the best GPU available?

Thanks for the vids! Been considering getting an older mac pro but having trouble on which 5,1 iteration I should consider. I intend to max out all upgradable peripherals...

very nice machine i would love this for Linux once Apple drops support - great video

Hey, thx for that video! I also wanna buy one of these. Where you bought it? Greatz outta Germany

Great Videos!!!

I have the Mac Pro 1,1, but am still interested in how far you can take yours

Good video, thank you. Can I upgrade my Mac Pro early 2008 3.1?

Still have one of those. With a new SSD it’s still a fabulously fast computer.

What could I get a 4,1 cheese grater up to? Be good to run an eGPU and also maybe VMWare 12.2? Before I wrestle with the hard ware? Be good to know if possible?