I put a Radeon VII in my 2010 Mac Pro... Was it a good idea? 

Hey guys thanks for watching, I hope you've enjoyed the informal upgrade videos! I'll be posting the final video on June 20th at 3pm EST, make sure to watch! I don't meant to shamelessly plug my own content but RU-vid really values initial clickthrough from Subscribers so when you guys tune in on the first day it helps me out a lot, and help get my videos recommended to new people. It's kinda crazy, I can pretty much predict how a video will do from the first 5 hours of subscriber views. Anyway, I'd really appreciate if you all tune in to see how this project has turned out!

Me: Hears skillshare Also me: aggressivley double tapping right side of the screen.

I suggest you lower the ram to 96GB so you can have Triple channel enabled. That's gonna boost your performance considerably

You're really doing a great job lately Luke! Easily one of the best up and coming tech channels :)

probs most underrated channel on YT. can’t get enough

Dude I love your channel. I'm working on upgrading my 2010 mac pro. But first i have to get it to boot lol. Your videos are a blessing to all Mac lovers.

The card was made for the Mac Pro. Perfect match

Great video, Luke. I am excited to see what you are able to do with that Radeon 7. I plan to finalize the old 5.1 as well with more RAM, 8GB GPU, and those dual 6 Core Xeon CPUs as well. Again, thank you for the update.

Bro, I could hang out with you all day. You mac pro geek...I love it!!

Not a true Mac fan, but have enjoyed your videos considerably. Keep up this level of quality.

Loving this series! Keep up the good work, Luke. Been following for over a year now.

Part 5: Flashing my Radeon VII to get the EFI Boot Screen!

Great videos. Really hankering after a 2010 Mac Pro now. :)

“Oooooh mama, this is looking spicy!” 😂😂😂

Great stuff! Have been wanting to do the Pixlas mod on my late 2012 Mac Pro for a while, and also swap out the tray and CPUs for dual quad core 3.46GHz goodness… just been too damn busy with work! Great video, thanks for sharing it with us.

Thank you for inspiring me to get a Mac Pro 4,1 and really push it as far as my budget allowed! It's an absolute workhorse and I can't thank you enough. I love your content, and am looking forward to being inspired even more by your channel in the future.

Thanks for those videos. It is like a dream with my eyes open. What a fantastic cMP you are doing. What a lovely beast

Great stuff. You are sooo good at this stuff and present impeccably. Well done!

Luke Miani is super cool and provides the best content available online.

I'd do it too, just because I could. There's something fun about seeing really old hardware kick the butt of brand-new stuff.

Your unbridled excitement for the System Report window was heartwarming. That's a HELL of a computer, my dude.

1st - love your videos; great production value. 2nd - I picked up a 5,1 a couple months ago and been patiently watching a bunch of videos on how to upgrade it. I used your links to get the NVME SSD and adapter. Bought an RX580 to upgrade the stock 5870. Thanks for the help!

i just bought this card for my mac mini (radeon 7). i m planning to use it for macOS since it's supported by default and also to do some gaming. my only problem is with the lack of support of machine learning frameworks like tensor flow which requires Nvidia's cuda cores.

Nice. I opted for the Radeon 7950 from OWC, which may not be _quite_ up to the 7's benchmarks, but it was close, supported metal out of the box, and came with proper power cabling for the Mac Pro 5,1. I also upgraded my Ram from them, trading in my 64 GB for 128, but the Ram does have heatsinks on each card. I'm using a 4K High-Def Pavillion display, and I am a happy camper...:)

And don't forget to upgrade the WiFi/Bluetooth card so you can have all the nice features with the Apple Watch and iPhone ;)

Just bought a 2010 Mac Pro on eBay today for £330 which came with 2.8Ghz Quad-Core, a Radeon 5870 and 8GB ram. Great video Luke!

That Mac Pro is a dream, dude, good job

You are crazy dude, I'm gonna love this video!

I find your videos entertaining and educational (I almost want to purchase a Mac Pro 5,1 2010) I am so glad I found and subscribed to your channel. Keep it up Luke!

Thank you for your work documenting and showing one of the last nicely done machines made by Apple.

I know it’s been 11 months but I was wondering wether you would suggest an RX 5700 XT now instead of a Radeon VII that is discontinued...

You should have mentioned that Apple has declared it is dropping official support for cheese-grater Macs in the upcoming Catalina version of Macos, and I have not seen anybody talking about yet in the forums about workarounds...

I'm finding myself in May of 2021 considering an upgrade to my 4,1-flashed-to-5,1 MacPro and am SHOCKED at how expensive these old video cards are. IDK if it's mining operations or what, but the $600 card in stalled here is scarcely available for less than $1500. And the rest of the Metal-compatible cards are no different. Though woefully underpowered by current standards, they still command $300-$1000 price premiums on all.

I'm not sure if you're still using this build but if so, make sure to use Opencore. I installed the Radeon VII after watching this video and noticed the performance was really wonky compared to my old Nvidia-it's because AMD Hardware Acceleration is not enabled on the standard OS. But if you run Opencore it unlocks AMD hardware acceleration and it's smooth as butter. The most noticeable performance issue you'll see without installing opencore (and it's a huge one) is H264 decoding. Before installing opencore I couldn't even play back 4k web videos at full framerate. And I had a few H264 masters in a Premiere timeline as well (cutting a reel). After installing Opencore these operations are smooth as butter. TL:DR - If you install a Radeon VII in a CMP, USE OPENCORE. Check out this watch number 7wWfU3AlFPk

My man. This is what we’ve all been waiting for, but the Best natively supported card in the machine and see what happens! You about got me ready to sell my maxed out 2015 5K iMac and build one of these.

Great Video, can you show the performance of FCPX in one of our next videos pls? Keep up the great Work!

Love your videos as always! Would you consider posting the before and after specs side by side for easy comparison? Having a split screen for the before and after graphic visuals would also be helpful.

Great video with explanations of possible hurdles

God, imagine being able to buy a video card that isn't >€1000 + already used for a year or more for sh*tcoin mining. 2019 was the end of the halcyon days...

“This is going to be the perfect macOS running Mac Pro” 3:42

Love the 12“ PowerBook in the background :D

Put a VII in a Hackintosh, it's a beast. Got an RX580 for the MacPro, works out of the box.

I get 130000 compute on an RX580 8GB on my 4,1 flashed to 5,1

Luke congrats on 60k you where on of my RU-vid inspirations I like you work ethic and believe in your self .... I’m at 635 hope to be at 1k by end of the year ....

I just updated my 5,1 to a Vega 56 without the power supply mod and it has been awesome!

Very interesting and entertaining videos about this upgraded mac pro. I hope it will not affect the prices on these old workhorses.

Video editing test 🙏

So, no boot screen, but no startup chime either?

I’d suggest putting a RX 580 in since it’s only like 150 to 200 bucks and it has 8 GB of storage. I got like 131k with Geekbench 4 on windows.

You're halfway to a hackintosh...

Is it possible to simply plug the Radeon VII (directly into) a PSU or must the PSU be a Pixlas mod only? Love your videos & page, ps!!

Hi Luke, I value your knowledge and opinion highly and I base my Apple purchases on your videos. Will you provide a full specs list after you have finished the upgrade? I would like to purchase a Mac pro 2010.

coming up on 60k Subs!!!! Love your channel Btw!!

Should have been a bit more patient and gone with a 5700 XT... same performance, but a 200w TDP, so no need for auxilliary PCIe power delivery... still, it's amazing how relevant one of these machines still is, when properly upgraded and the Radeon VII is still a mighty graphics card.

mcavidcards just announced they will be selling flashed RX 580s and more newer AMD cards to come. You will be able to send them a card to have them flash it for boot screen or buy direct from them. That being said I am currently stuck in High Sierra with my flashed 980ti.

This machine is like a tribute to Steve Jobs

Good video, looks like a pretty great upgrade. It would have been nice to see more than 2 synthetic benchmarks to see how it improved the system. Also the mac pro 4,1 and 5,1's do not have logic/mother boards, they have a backplane board(where you plug your drives and pcie cards into) and then they have the CPU board that plugs into the backplane board. Thanks for the video, ive been wondering about how to improve my own 5,1.

I bought my 5,1 Mac Pro last year when the prices were stupid low off a guy that thought his computer was broken (and I thought I could fix it... turned out to be a bad power cable... yeah... like the one that plugs into the wall) for a mear $500. It was a worthy investment as the computing power this thing has is just next level. That being said... I have a GTX1070 and have been looking to switching to a Radeon card because of the aforementioned driver issues. So these videos are very welcome to see. To anyone wondering... I did manage to get Mojave installed despite having a GTX1070... but there is no hardware acceleration so it is running off the original Radeon 5770 that's still in my machine... this makes using OSX almost impossible as it is so incredibly slow... I don't recommend doing this.

I love this kind of projects. please make more.

I have decided to change out my nvidia titan x graphics card for the Radeon VII you installed so i can update the OS level to a more recent level., great videos!

“We’ll do some games, some benchmarks” You sure are fun uncle Luke 🤓

It goes great with the mac color wise

What worries me the most is if that 9 year old power supply cant keep supplying the power that it was rated for when it rolled off the belt at the factory. Apple uses their own power supplies so you cant just buy a corsair or enermax and do a straight swap one for one. Ive mentioned this in your previous video so i dont know if you read it. Radeon VII - will exceed 300w if you push it really hard = 300w 2x X5690 average about 105-110w but go as high as 130w = 210-260w RAM - you have 8 modules that use between 2-3w each = 16-24w hard drives - 6.5-9w = you have 4 = 26w (give or take - maybe you put an SSD in) Would mean that it requires around 600w and thats not counting stuff like case fans or other things that might be powered externally like USB hard drives or mobile phones. While the proprietary powersupply is rated at 980w you'd probably be pushing it awfully close to its limits with the power draw. Theres no telling if the rails on the power supply will hold up if you really put that some pressure on the system. You might find that it would explode and blow up everything with it.

Any major performance increases since this video got uploaded?

Love these vids bro

Looks interesting... would love to see a video on flashing that Radeon VII next. I am still using my 12-core 2009 5,1 with a flashed GTX 1080 card running High Sierra. I dual boot to Win 10 for gaming in Battlefield 1 running on high at 3440x1440. This machine still does really well and can can hit 60-80fps with this game on high settings. On the macOS side I mostly use this rig for Lightroom/Photoshop and Final cut Pro X work. I would like to get to Mojave or Catalina so I am interested in the path to Radeon VII and the Pixalas mod at some point later this year (assuming Apple doesn't add Nvidia support). Peace!

Great video series!

THANK YOU FOR POSTING THIS!!!!

I've just installed a Radeon Pro VII, but I'm getting a loud high pitch squeal. Found this video, which led me to the psu mod. I'm going to do that and hope it fixes the squeal

I've been running a Mac Pro 2010 with a Xeon 5690, MacVidCard GTX980, HyperX Predator PCIe SSDs, 32GB of RAM and I play a lot of games on it. All my games are on MacOS, except for GTA5, which I run bootcamp for. I do have a boot screen, but it can't run on Mojave only High Sierra, until Apple and Nvidia make up. MacVidCard's support has been really good. The GTX980 runs on the standard power in the case, no mods needed.

Now this was a great attempt Luke! Can you try installing Windows in this Mac Pro so you can do gaming??

I like these videos I even watch all the ads without skipping

The card looks sharp! I'd love to see how well it runs CS:GO

Very Nice Luke..

you should take out 2 ram boards from your system... if every ram slot is filled , your computer actually accesses ram slower. The last 2 slots are cross linked to hte other ram, so it reduced the ram band width....

Thanks for your videos my man. You definitely know how to get the best out of a Mac without having to buy the latest and greatest. Personally, Im looking a new Mac (DAW) for my music studio so it been hectic trying to figure out if it worth getting something new me used. It leaning in the base model iMac 27” but maybe I can get a used elder model it get more for the money.

Great content as always Luke! But in this vid (and you might have changed your stance by now) but I have to disagree with you (to a certain degree) about the cpu bottleneck when running PCIe v3 cards. I run a Sonnet Fusion 4X card with two of the NVMe's in a RAID 0 config and you WILL get MINIMUM 5k R/W speeds from using it (in the 16X slot of course). CPU has nothing to do with it when the card needs no bifurcation supported MB. THAT is the key. Pricey card but worth every penny to me with my work. But thanks for being a cMP geek like me and for sharing your info.

these cards are $2k on ebay now. unless you want a burned out one for $600

2019 Luke Miani: "This is the most expensive graphics card I've ever bought" Me: *Laughs in $2,800 RTX 3090*

How much money would this project cost today? How would it compare to a new Mac pro? Can you put stronger cpu's in it? Can you do 4k and or 8k editing with it? What would you do to make an older Mac Pro outperform a new Mac Pro?(great video. Thanks for your response if you have time.)

what did you get in cinebench r15 ogl ???

You need to show the connection toons at the back of the graphics card.

Heya! thanks for the upload, out of curiosity i ran a geekbench and got 210609 OpenCL Score, using a 1080ti, 32 RAM, one x5690 and High Sierra.

Luke, I have the exact setup (CPUs, RAM, NVMne boot drive). Except I have a RX Vega 64 FE. Love to compare score with you. Thanks! Love your videos... big reason I got into the Mac Pro 5,1.

I have the same card with in eGPU with MacBook Pro. Very solid. But in your system the CPU can hold it back sometimes. You should use triple channel memory for an extra 5% system performance. Don't waste time with Geekbench on the Mac. They are giving lower and lower scores nearly every month. I think Geekbench is reducing the scores on the server side. Windows version of Unigene uses Direct X. Mac version uses old OpenGL. Another waste of time benchmark. Only use optimised Metal tests.

Hey Luke, I can verify that something went wrong with the Compute Benchmark in Geekbench 4. I can even pinpoint the vicinity of when that happened. On April 18th 2019 I received 176,083 on my Vega Frontier edition card in Open CL in MacOS Mojave. My highest score ever was 187,624 but that was on the previous MacOS back in Sept 2018. There is a little performance loss from Metal running the desktop in the background so I take that as acceptable. However on June 4rth I suddenly started seeing 136,285 and scores like it after one of the Mojave point updates. So thats 40,000 points lost. That is still the case as of today 7-18-19 as I just ran a test at 132,088. So I can 100% confirm that something is wrong with the calculation in Geekbench 4 that happened somewhere between April and June in point updates of MacOS. Note I boot Windows 10 (that took some effort) on a different drive and I receive 206,891 in OpenCL on the same machine. My highest score in Windows is 216,682 as different patches of Windows 10 and AMD drivers also impact the performance. Note your actually damaging your performance running 128 GB as that chipset was designed for Tripple Memory support. So you should be running 3 sticks of ram in each of the 2 packages. Thus 96GB of ram for full speed Tripple Channel Ram support. Try pulling slot 4 and 8 and doing some benchmarks in Tripple Channel mode and see what you think as your memory will switch from dual channel to triple channel mode. Your card should push 270,000+ in OpenCL in MacOS btw if that compute was running right. I just fired up Heaven Extreme just as you did and I also am running twin 3.46GHZ Xeons but with 96GB and a PCIE Samsung NVME for MacOS. I pulled 75.7 FPS with a 1907 Score in Heaven 4.0 Vega Frontier Edition. Update: One of the Catlina updates corrected geek-bench numeric plunge. I am now running the final edition of Catalina before Big Sur. I am also messing with Open core. Hit me up if you want to compare notes.

Awesome mod. I have one of this gen Mac Pro and I’m torn between using a patcher to upgrade or just buying an i7 Mac Mini which supposed has better cpu performance....

I would love to see someone share their experience using Radeon Pro cards on 5,1 specifically when doing vector graphics.

I have multiple 2010 Mac Pros and using the stock Radeon 5770 cards did not prevent me from installing Mojave. You lose Metal features, but Metal isn't a requirement.

God damn it! These are going for £1,300 now PRE OWNED! Disgusting prices

For info, a Kfa2 1080 is 190 000 (not the fastest) a base 1070Ti is teh same, this card is not that good, sure best option for the oldies, but I would go for a 5000 series now of NVIDIA custom drivers.

Compute would be affected by the PCI and it's also DDR3 RAM which may slow down texture uploads. The biggest issue is definitely the immaturity of the drivers. Looking at upgrading to a Mini with 32GB with an R7 in the eGPU (it's bottleneck is the TB3). The double floating point performance of the R7 blows away the Vega series.

I have thunderbolt hack titan ridge on my 5.1 so I will throw this in my razor and see what happens. You should try it too. I did a speed test with my 12 terabyte owc thunderbolt HD and was getting just over 20g per second. So I hope the bottle neck is not to bad. If it is I will just put it internal.

This is actually the best MAC you can have. For any price. Because, remeber Luke, the Mac pro and the Radeon Pro Vega II, are not on the market ATM (and for a lot of months)

Thanks for sharing your experiences about maxing out a MacPro! As a long term mac user, one of my main reasons using this brand is mainly because of reliability. Working in media professionally, the need to meet deadlines is crucial; therefore a mac never let me down ever the last 20 years! How reliably is your maxed out MacPro, what would you say? Would you trust your system working on a very important project with a tough deadline, where a greater amount of money (or better responsibility!) is involved? (I am thinking e.g. about the way getting power to your Radeon VII, which I read seems not healthy damaging the wires?!) How would you rate your system on a "reliability scale"?

Hey Luke, thank you very much for this series. I really enjoyed your work and I can't wait to catch a 5,1 at ebay. I'd like to ask you for two things in the final video of this series: Can you do a real life comparison between the 5,1 and contemporary Mac? Let's say a FC Pro comparison? I would be also interested in a future outlook. Will this 5,1 be able to run Catalina? If not is there a way to make Catalina run on it anyhow? Thanks and cheers Oliver

Think you could do a video about your modded PSU? Don’t think I’ve ever seen good videos on it before in the past.

Hey Luke! Basically brought a 2010 mac pro because I have been watching you video, so appropriate that, awesome videos! do you know if a MSI 970 gtx 4gb (white tiger) metal compatible? thanks

If you want to use any system patches for compatibility with future OS make sure you can see the open source code otherwise you can get malware installed.

I wanna see gaming on this machine. Some Star Wars Battlefront 2 2017, Call of Duty WW2, something like that :) I know mac's are not for gaming, but that is pretty good hardware, you should test it :)