Upgrading a 2009 Mac Pro in 2019 

If you have a Mac Pro there is no need to fight with PC. As many other we still have our 2009 Mac Pro running now 5,1 under Catalina. Our next step is CPU upgraded (not the easiest step...). But will try. Thanks for your video. and sorry for our bad english. L'équipe de Canal 29

Congrats on your upgrade. A couple observations, based on my own (very similar) system. The most robust video card that still can run solely of the two mini-6 port sata to 8 port power source is now the RX590 variant, and the best fit is a card that only uses two PCI slot spacing, as opposed to 2.2, which IMHO eats up too many expansion slots. Also, the best performance for I/O (by an ENORMOUS amount!) comes from NVMe M.2 drives in a PCI expansion slot using a RAID. This results in legit I/O of over 5,000Mb per second, which is pretty handy for video. FWIW here is my config: MacPro 4,1 flashed to 5,1, single CPU tray replaced by dual tray dual X5690 3.46GHz cpus 64GB of 1333Mhz ECC RAM (2Rx4) 8GB x 8 sticks PCIe slot 1 (16x) Highpoint 7101 A PCIe RAID card: One 1TB Sabrent Rocket NVMe M.2 2280 3rd Gen SSD (boot drive Mojave 10.14.6) Two 512GB Sabrent Rocket NVMe M.2 2280 3rd Gen SSD (striped into RAID 0 Content Drive) One 512GB Sabrent Rocket NVMe M.2 2280 3rd Gen SSD (scratch/cache drive) PCIe slot 2 (16x) Sapphire RX590 Pulse GPU 8GB w/ two mini 6 pin sata to one 8pin power cable adapter (2x slot width; blocks slot 3) PCIe slot 4 (4x) Ableconn USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type C (1) and Type A (1) PCIe x4 Host Adapter Card Four SATA2 Hard Disc Drives: 4TB, 2TB, 2TB, 1TB

Dosdude1 patcher will help support these machines for years to come. Let's hope. I have 2009 with 2X 2.93, 32 GB RAM, SSD in PCIe slot with flashed 7970 GPU. I love it.

I think we'll see these machines in use 10 years from now. Maybe not as Computers, but they make a great NAS. Pop in 4 or even 6 14TB hard drives and they hold a ton of data for what you pay for the machine.

I have two upgraded Mac Pro 2009's, but I have not seen any Geekbench 4.0 scores in multi-core as high as 30K as you mentioned. My 3.33GHz system comes in at 26382, and my 3.0GHz comes in at 25000. Both have 32GB RAM. If you can pick up a 2009 up at a good price, it is well worth upgrading. BTW, the new Mac Mini 2018 i7 scores in the same range on Geekbench 4, but when using Geekbench 5 it scores lower and of course goes for $1500 plus depending on options.....

I have 2 Mac Pros 1-2012 & 1-2009 both flashed at 5,1 with the Dual 3.46Ghz CPUs - 12 Core, 64GB of 1300Mhz ECC RAM, the Radeon Pulse RX 580, Syba Contoller, HighPoint Controller & Angelbird Wings Controllers spread out over the 2 machines with Samsung 970EVO NVMe Blades installed in all the controllers. The ABW Card gives me 1500MBs Read & 1450MBs Write in Slot 3 of my Mac Pro 2012. The HighPoint in Slot 2 gives me 2500MBs Write & 2900MBs Read for my OS Mojave Blade and 5500MBS & 4700MBs for the other 3 NVMe Blades in Raid 0 in the Mac Pro 2012. The Syba gives me 2500MBs Write & 2900MBs Read with each of the 2 NVMe Blades that are installed with one for the OS and the other for storage on my Mac Pro 2009. Both the 2012 Mac (Had it for years) & the 2009 Mac (Recently purchased for my editing room 2) do everything you would want a computer to give you for Video Editing in FCP X, Music Production in Logic Pro X and Graphics Editing in Photoshop. These are Server Quality Computers that are built to last. They will run OS Mojave natively and if you decide to go to Catalina, then it's simple to patch these computers.

I have the same machine and did the vice method for the cpus which was super easy if you ever wanted to go back and delid them.

I also have 2012. 2012 let's you output audio HDMI via graphics card. FYI. I won't be doing any 8k so I love these old computers. You can flash the 2009 to 5.1 also.

Thanks for the insights! On the info text, I think one of your links needs a fix. The link you show for the GPU is actually to a ASUS ThunderboltEX card.

Well done. Very helpful video.

If you use lidded CPUs in a 4,1, the connectors on the heatsinks will not connect to the motherboard, therefore the motherboard will have no CPU fan connection and temperature data and the rest of the fans will run at 100%... you didn't mention how you connected those connectors... did you? I also have a 4,1 Mac Pro, but went to buy delidded CPUs. No need for washers or anything that would risk breaking things by overtightening... I recommend this route to everyone willing to engage in such a thing :) You could have gone into details on what other cards you added. I am having a hard time finding a USB3 card that would allow using more than 1 port or would correctly sleep a hard drive connected to it.

did you pay for the stand of the Monitor or was it included

you should get that AMD Vii gpu 16gb That graphics card will fix some of the problems with the cpu so video editing will be much better and export and import times will be much better it is the upgrade worth One of my friends have done and it is amazing how much perform can easily handle 4k videos many plugins and effect and you should also put in a nvme ssd m.2 pice and you wil get speed up to 1500 read and write speed Have a good day or night

Excellent video.I have two 2009 Mac Pros so I found your video interesting. Mine are fairly standard issue except for the video card in the one I'm using, which is an 8 core 2.93GHz running High Sierra. I think I'm at the end of the line with these machines as far as upgrading the OS goes. Do you know of a way to go higher?

I have the 2 2.66 GHz version with a rx580 and 32 gigs of RAM. It's not put together yet but is the higher end cpu needed? I only plan on doing logic pro with it. I have a gaming computer with a 1070 for my gaming needs. I wasn't sure if higher clock rate was needed for music production.

Hi man, Im actually near Vancouver . i have a friend with a G5 and i would love to get it up and running, it still boots and works ok, he complains its slow(im suspecting a HDD) and i think im going to snatch him off of it, any ideas on how i can upgrade this on the cheap?

Hi, have you been experiencing some crashes with the x5690 cpus?

One question when you installed your ssd (Samsung 860 QVO 1TB Solid State Drive (MZ-76Q1T0) did you have problems with your Mac recognize the drive, reason why I'm asking because my 2010 mac pro won't recognize Samsung 860 QVO 1TB Solid State Drive (MZ-76Q1T0) at all?

How did you get your mac pro to recognize 64gb ram? I have a 2009 3.33 6-core w/1066 ram. I can only get it to recognize 3 sticks of 16. When I put in a 4th stick, it still maxes out at 48. Does the OS make a difference to how much ram can be recognized? I'm using High Sierra.

Will the specs you posted work with my Mac? My Mac Pro is a 2.66QCX/3X/1G/640/GT120/SD Model A1289. EMC 2314 100 Also, Can you post the model# of your computer?

how would it work with Logic Pro x? (for recording studio)