One correction that needs to be addressed: You said you put the SSD PCIe adapter card in the x16 lane slot to maximize performance. However, the card only has a x1 PCIe connector, so your limited to that bus speed using that card. You can safely move that card to either of the x4 lane slots and you would not see any performance loss. That would also leave you with an open x16 lane slot for future use.
Love the vid! That Mac Pro is beast mode! On a side note, take it easy on the jump cuts. As someone who get motion sick, this video made me a wee bit nauseas. Still awesome vid!
I have a 2008 8 core mac pro. As much as I love this machine. ( its the faster computer I have ever owned) I originally was not going to put any upgrade money into beyond a HD5770 (for final cut pro) it in favor of saving for a new(er) computer. Well it looks like money is going to tight(er) for a while longer so I recently decided to toss an SSD into it. IT HAS MADE A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE!!! Now I may keep this computer just because I can
+rdsii64 How much did you spend on the SSD? Are you running the latest OS X El Capitan? I just updated my stock 2008 mac pro to OS X El Capitan and now it' runs sluggish. I'm planning to add some memory first which should help but I don't want to pour to much money into it since it is old.
+N Holt I can't remember how much I paid but it was well worth the money. If you get one just large enough for your OS and apps you can keep the cost down. Large capacity ssd's are still pretty spendy.
I own a Mac Pro 2008, have used it for a decade now(!) and I can assure you that switching to (any) SSD for a startup disk is a *huge* speed improvement. They cost around $/€ 50 for 120 GB now. Remember that without a special card, the SSD will be used at single/orginal speed SATA so it's no use to spend extra for a SATA II or III without an eSATA card. Unless you plan to use it in another machine later.
At least an SSD is still much faster than a mechanical drive, even directly in your SATA port, but it is nice using a PCIe lane of course. There are weird things that can happen BTW with your OS through a PCIe card, especially if you're running bootcamp (you may not see OS X once it's time to switch out of Windows). I have SSDs on both original SATA and through PCIe.
Yeah, as I said to someone else, replacing the CPUs isn't necessarily very difficult, but it is _more_ difficult than what I did. Also kind of low on the bang-for-the-buck scale.
I bet you could use that SSD adaptor PCI Express card on a normal PC, great to save space putting in extra SSD without having to search for space on smaller PC cases. Never knew they made those, nice to know.
@@robertmartin1116 I just watched the whole vid. I didn't notice any bad editing.. was actually fascinated by how easy this guy makes everything work. Then I come down to comments page to see all the armchair critics! LOL indeed!
I haven't run any whole-system benchmarks since completing the upgrades, partly because I'm not really finished. For some reason, I thought I had ordered the new SATA cable but only just realized I hadn't. So, no, the 2nd SSD is still "mounted" via the velcro cable tie. Of course, it's not in danger of going anywhere. Touching both of them today to feel for temperature, the drive mounted in the PCI card was warm to the touch, the velcro-strapped one cool. Well, the first one is sitting right on top of the graphics card. Unfortunately, I'm running into problems with CPU speed. Turns out that Adobe Illustrator does not use graphics acceleration on the Mac. It only just got that capability in the Windows version. Also, I had to upgrade to the latest version of Illustrator to take advantage of the RAM upgrade. My old CS4 version was 32 bit and could only address 2 GB of RAM. With the new version today, it was using over 12 GB at one point. I'm seriously considering upgrading the CPUs, from 2.8 to 3.2 GHz. It can be done for less than $200 (vs $1600 when I bought the Mac). It would provide a modest benefit, but probably worth it. I'll post updates.
Lol, the editing didn’t bother me at all. Nice upgrade👍 I’m a windows guy but these apple computers fascinate me so much. I might convert to Apple because my blood pressure has skyrocketed ever since windows 10 came out. However, one thing that worries me is air flow in this build.
Great !!!!..... I have a Mac Pro 3.1 and I'm ready to update it. I hope I do not have any problem, if something important comes up I will contact you. Thank you
Hello, good vídeo. Question: if I have my original ATI vídeo caes damage, I can put the vídeo caes that You use with out aditional drivers before to put the NEw vídeo card? I así because I don't have vídeo card Yet and I want ti Buy that One You use to upgrade. Tks in advance! Max
I did exactly this on a 2008 3,1. Do it if you can get an 8 core model (or a newer mac pro) cheap and know what you're doing-If you didn't already or get a M1 machine haha
@@willm5032 I did go out and buy one. It is a beautiful machine. Problem is it heated the room and made it very uncomfortable to be in. I did buy a M1 MacBook Air and love it now. The funny thing is the specs of both computers are very similar. Both have 8 cores, 16 GB of ram, and 2 TB hard drives.
@@a4e69636b Yeah, I'm using a 2008 mac pro because I needed a cheap work machine due to Covid 19, I only had £200 at the time for it and my Imac died catastrophically so I needed a fast replacement. Its a beauty and was a steal- even came with a cine display and I got a bluetooth upgrade and my own GPU inside of the budget but the heating thing is a pain, so is power consumption. However in the UK i can JUST about handle the heat. I'll replace it with an M1 mac mini when I feel like it or need to. Probably gonna get the latest version in a year or 2. Specs of the new M1 macs are insane. Even the base level mini is a formidable machine from what I've seen
1. So many complaints about the editing, bah humbug! Give the guy a break. I’ve been watching several of these videos on upgrading an early 2008, and this is the first to mention needing to do Arch Linux style config edits to files. 2. This is slow enough that anyone that has never cracked open the case could get a good feel for what to expect. 3. Back to point one; I wish there were more details on what files to edit and the exact commands. I was gifted a 2008 3,1 from a TV station editor after he upgraded his home machine, thanks 2020 working from home. And I have no clue of anything Mac, as my personal and professional computer time as been all Windows and Linux.
Did you need anything specific for the 4TB hard drive to work? The only reason I ask is Because several people I talked to, said I needed to add something to make it work. My apologies if it sounds crazy as I know nothing about computers. Thanks
It was as easy as it looks in the video. Now, it's possible that you could get an HDD that was capable of throughput rates greater than the SATA bus on your computer can manage. That's why I got the adapter card for the SSD. In any case, at the risk of telling you what you already know, do your research to make sure you get a drive that is known to work in your computer.
Nice work. Did you have to do anything software-wise to get the Geforce GTX 760 to work? And also, when I look on eBay there are lots of different versions, i.e. PNY, EVGA Nvidia, Asus, etc. Is there any difference I should consider between them? Thanks in advance.
+Lewis Cooper The card I bought was the just about the only version that wasn't "over clocked" and didn't therefore require more power than I could easily access inside my box. That is, I had to find one that only required two _6-pin_ connectors, and not, say, one 6-pin and one 8-pin connector.
Software-wise: There were a couple of command-line things, and I showed that in the video. I'm not sure those commands were necessary... Otherwise, nothing. It's been smooth operation.
Frank O'Neill. I did finally get the right cable to connect the second SSD to the Apricorn card, but that's it. It's been pretty trouble-free. Places to buy: NewEgg and Amazon, whichever was cheaper; Dell for the monitor.
geomorphdog Not too involved, similar to normal PC's but there is a good tutorial on it, I have the LINK to the page. I found it on the emac? website page
geomorphdog Getting the heat sinks off is probably the most daunting and having to remove a few other items just to get access to the processors. If you like I can send you the link to the page, I just saved it the other day. I was trying to find a "cheap" Mac Pro from 2006 to 2010 since I see they can also run El Capitan? OS X even if Apple doesn't "officially" support it or at least Mavericks which I have seen others saying it handles no problems.
I have the 2006 mac pro a1186 and I'm stuck on Lion 10.7.5 so it's useless. What hardware should I upgrade to be able to get up to El Capitan OS or newer? Is it just the processor? Thank you!
geomorphdog...I am looking for those new cables you connected from the mother board to your graphics card...Is it possible to get part numbers to locate what I need?
I don't have part numbers, but here's the info I gave my purchasing guy to get them from Amazon: Tangcao NEW Mini-PCIe 6Pin Mac-Pro G5 to PCI-Express 6-Pin Video Card Power Cable ($8 ea.)
Wow, that's a lot spent on that machine! Enjoy that beast! BTW, I heard of issues where that adapter card causes the boot manager to not work. Now, I don't care, since my non-flashed card doesn't even display boot screens or the drive selector; however, that leaves the question as to whether or not the Mac will detect that SSD on the adapter as the MAIN boot drive. I'm hoping to just plug my current boot SSD into one of these adapters and have the Mac boot from it right away. (I also am hoping that the drive is detected as a normal one and not an external one.) Is it realistic to assume that?
+maccollectorZ (Commenting Account) I don't recall there being any trouble with the Mac seeing the SSD as a normal drive or with making it the boot drive.
+migui8850 It wasn't programming, exactly, but just a few line commands. Can't remember where I read that they were needed. I think the deal was getting the computer to use the graphics card, or to use it effectively. It's possible it was an issue with Mavericks.
Can you boot and run OSX 10.6.8 using only the samsung 4tb SSD and no other old rotational drive? (Running Mac Pro 3,1 and stuck in snow leopard due to a old program i'm using. My original WD 320gb drive is almost toast and I'm looking for an upgrade/replacement. Not sure if hardware is compatible w the operating system. Also not sure if you can run SSD only leaving the top 4 HD slots empty.)
Please, Tell me, e5462 tô x5482.... Haver much Very much diference tô work???? Can u give me example, how much.... Tô me see, If i buy x5482 or not..... X5482 is the best for Mac pro 2008 right???? Im from Brazil, Sorry bad english
Hi, I just got myself a 2008 Mac Pro 8-Core 3.2ghz 56gb of ram and it benchmarks fine except with the GPU, I have a NVidia GTX 980 Ti but yet I only get around 490fps, any ideas?? I am running Sierra and the latest NVidia Web driver.
That's a card with some serious octane! But sorry, I wouldn't know what to tell you, except to check around on the various message boards, user forums, etc. That's what I did to figure out what things would work and what I needed to do to make them work.
I got the same Mac Pro owned it for awhile when I first got it i knocked it up to 16gb of ram, Then later put a 240gb sandisk SSD in it and a 1tb hard drive that I used before still in it. I've also added a USB 3.0 card. Also while back when I upgraded the graphics card in my PC to a AMD r9 290 I put my old GTX 560 TI in the Mac pro. Only other upgrade I'll want to do with it one day is add a Blu Ray burner. I think my Mac Pro will do me fine like this till Apple tills me there not going to support it anymore and I can't upgrade my OS..... Even tho these macs will still kick the shit out of every other Mac's entry level point sold today, expect the new Mac Pro.... Who knows if ram ever go's very cheap on these machines I may knock my Ram up one more time for the hell of it. more less greed!
Actually it looks like RAM prices are increasing for these 3,1 models, economies of scale and all that. I should have bought more when it was cheaper :( Not a lot of places even sell it any more. OWC was the only place I could find
Was not aware the prices gone up on the ram. When I upgraded this Mac Pro from 8gb to 16gb I bought it from a seller on Ebay. But if the prices are only getting higher then its not likely to see another upgrade unless if I find an amazing deal. It also annoys me that these Mac Pro's are no longer supported on the new OS they have coming out,,,, Even tho this mac has more power then allot of new macs sold today.... There may be a questionable hack around to make it work but then I take the risk of loosing functionality.
Yeah my Mac Pro runs El Capitan great! My 2008 17inch Macbook Pro dogged down big time tho when it got upgraded... Its maxed out on 6gb of ram, no SSD just hard drive... don't know if SSD would help.... but likely its shows how much more demanding or unoptimized El Capitan was... Gee.... both my Macs are from 2008 lol..
+ravi bhandari Do you mean graphics cards? What's sold changes so quickly, so I wouldn't be able to give you a specific card. What I did: 1) Decide on a price point. 2) Find a couple of chipsets that fall within your price range. 3) Do a search to find whether someone has successfully installed a card with those chipsets in a Mac Pro 3,1. 4) If so, then find a card that the 3,1 can power. For me, this last step was pretty time-consuming. Most cards had one 6-pin and one 8-pin power connectors. For the Mac Pro 3,1, you need a card with two 6-pin connectors. For me, that requirement eliminated almost every card on the market at my price point. I finally found one, and that was the PNY one shown in the video. You should be aware that using a non-Mac card has one effect that you can see: You won't get the usual gray-screen with mac logo on boot-up. You might be alarmed by the initially black screen when you boot up. Be patient, and don't panic; it won't stay black.
I have one of these machines and can no longer upgrade tho the latest OS's that available as of Dec 13th, 2019. If I do these same upgrades will this allow me to upgrade the OS?
JerMarMusicGroup I haven't looked into that at all. If I find that not having Thunderbolt lowers my quality of life, then I'll look into it. At this point, though, I'll probably get a new computer before another round of upgrades.
BlueJudySuite no you can probably buy a chip with Bluetooth and WiFi on it to replace the Bluetooth card already in there. If not then you can get a pci card
I have the same 3.1 Mac Pro 8 Core. What's the best all around graphics card to roll with? I have 8Gb ram but I am going up to 32. I have an 840 evo ssd, 7 usb 3.0's in an expansion port. I run Ableton and Komplete 10 for music production but I also want to be able to play games like X- Plane. I'm thinking maybe Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 3GB DDR5 HDMI but I don't know. Any advice?
Bryan Aikens There are so many cards out there and such a range of price points... I chose mine based on price range and power requirements. It was a challenge to find one that only needed two 6-pin power connections. If you're really handy, you could probably figure out how to pull power from the second optical drive bay. I didn't want to do that kind of tinkering to get it to work. Just make sure you know you'll be able to power the card before you drop a bunch of cash on a top-of-the-line card.
What RAM did you get.. I mean which brand? The reason I say that, I've bought 4 - 2gigs sticks.. 2 are not working.. I am bumed out.. also I want to do a bit like you, because I use my Mac Pro 3.1 to do Music and video editing ' Logic Pro X and Final Cut Pro X 2.2.. I do appreciate your video, it gives me hope :)
+Ronaldo Richard I thought I'd replied to this, sorry! I don't remember the brand. I also don't remember whether I got the cheapest memory available. I just found some memory sold specifically for the Mac Pro 3,1 on Amazon. I think I spent a bit more than I could have, because some reviews of the cheap stuff mentioned quality control problems. I've had no problems so far.
I didn't absolutely have to, and I did have one of them plugged into one of the SATA drive slots for a while, until I got the right connecting cable to plug it into the second slot on the PCI express card.
Did u edit it on a vhs online tape? Lot of cut and an unprofessional way of show us you great update. Dissolves and lot of cuts man. Try to re edit properly you video and use After Effects for post and graphics. Great update, use it with a better edition.
Hi i do have a mac pro early 2008 and i im running with two monitors, i like to use three but i tried before did not work, i am using the " ATI Radeon HD 5770 1024 MB" do you know if this will work and what kind monitor adapter did you use for the third monitor ? do you have any pictures of the set up by the cpu ? Thank you , James
Would you know how to Diagnose Slot 1 in a MacPro 2008? I get power but I can't seem to get video, i have zapped the pram, nvram, etc. I have tried 2 of the original cards that came with the device, they are working cards and work fine in slot 2 but I can't seem to get video in slot 1 no matter what I do. Any suggestions?
My guess would be that you're trying to use a card that requires a greater width than the slot provides. The different card slots have different widths: not physical width but bus width, e.g., 1x, 2x, and 4x. Video cards usually need the greater widths.
Mine works fine. I'm looking at the box: It says, "PCI Express 3.0 support" under "key features." Under "minimum system requirements," it says, "PCI Express-compliant motherboard with one dual-width x16 graphics slot." So, it supports, but doesn't require, 3.0.
I know this is an old video but how have the upgrades held up over time? Also do you have a boot screen with this card? I replaced the stock card in my 2008 mac pro with a windows HD5770 It works well but no boot screen. I was afraid to try a hacked card.
Still going strong. Any problems I've had with sluggishness have turned out to be problems with OS X, not hardware or hardware compatibility issues. Still no boot screen, but who cares? No reason to mess around with hacking the card.
rdsii64 There are a couple of daemons that would take over the CPU, and I'd have to kill them to temporarily fix the problem. I think the problem was related to AquaMacs, the Mac port of Emacs. I haven't had the problem in a while, so the updates may have fixed it. I've also gotten into the habit of actually quitting AquaMacs when I'm done with it.
Did you have to do anything out of the ordinary to get all three inputs working for 3 monitors. It looks like my current 3.1 is going to be soldering on for a while with the price tags of the new stuff. thanks in advance.
rdsii64 I just had to get the right cables and deal with cable lengths vs desired monitor placement. And arrange the monitors in system settings to correspond to their physical arrangement.
WTFShelley those are not heat sinks. That is the RAM. on those Macs, the memory modules are, essentially daughtercards with RAM DIMMs sticking out of them. The 4,1 and 5,1 Mac Pros have the processor on the RAM board and giant heat sinks there. The RAM packages do not have the daughterboard-ram extension, so they don’t look like fins. The Cheese Grater Mac Pros have very good cooling, assuming the fans all work and you are not running the computer in a tropical environment with 99% humidity.
I have a MacPro2,1, Quad-Core Intel Xeon 2007, 8 GB Ram, I have Yosemite running now and I've put a graphics card GForce GT740 NVIDIA. Nothing but trouble ! Really bad, I guess compatibilty problem,,, I still have the original NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT 256 MB. Do you know which card would be best in the 200$ range ? (For multimedia and a little bit of gaming) Thanks !
+MoyzeVid I can't remember which online forum it was, but I found a list of cards that had been successfully installed in someones Mac Pro 3,1. As you probably know, the cards in the list are basically chipsets, e.g., the Nvidia GeForce GT740 is sold under a number of different maker's marks. After finding a chipset that had been found to work in my Mac, I had to find a specific maker's card with power requirements that my Mac could satisfy. On the Mac Pro 3,1, there are two 6-pin power sockets available for the graphics card. For my chosen chipset (which I believe had a price point similar to yours), I literally found only one card (made by PNY) with matching power plugs. Almost all the cards on the market at the time were "over-clocked" and required more power (and different power connections) than my Mac could provide. If you really wanted or needed to install a card with greater power requirements than can be met by the two 6-pin plugs, you could divert power from the second optical drive bay, for example, but now we're talking another degree of complication. And finding enough power sockets is still no guarantee that your Mac's power supply will be able to meet the card's peak requirements. That is, a card might tool along most of the time doing just fine until it is truly pushed to its maximum capability and power demand. I don't know for sure what happens when a card tries to draw more power than the power supply can provide. In general, any "load" causes the voltage level on the supply to drop, bigger loads cause greater drops, and a load that's too big will cause the supply voltage to drop below what those loads need to function properly. If we're lucky, then software (or firmware) recognizes that the power demand has exceeded the power supply's ability to provide that power and reduces the demand accordingly. Your problems could be due to a driver problem, i.e., the OS's ability to talk to the graphics card, but it could also, I speculate, be due to clumsy power management. If you can rule out driver issues, then maybe power is the issue. You might also check into the whether you might need to change any environment settings. I used a couple of command lines to change settings so that the OS would do a better job of using the card (at least according to what I read online; in reality, who knows?).
+geomorphdog First of all thanks for your detailed response !! I haven't thought about power issue..I have written to the company for info on the drivers,, if it's not the problem,,, i will check the power issue.. Thanks
+MoyzeVid It can also be the Issue that your 2.1 has a EFI 32 Bit Bus and Yosemite is conflicting as well. I know you had to change the Boot file. But Good luck with that. I hope you get a work around.
Great video .. in the sense of information but the jump cut edits were terrible .. most annoying thing I've ever seen. Sorry for the negative comment but that drives me nuts lol
I just think it's so funny how many Mac pro owners think that just cuase they plug Into the x16 slot that it means they get more speed. I see this in so many videos of people upgrading. That card has only so many connectors. It is one lane. Pci-e x1. It will never use more than one lane. 4x, 8x, 16x, doesn't matter. The card itself is limited to one lane.
bro I'm sorry but this editing makes your video unwatchable. Before putting your video online I would let my family and friends watch the video to see what they think about the video and how it can be improved upon.
