2006/2007 Mac Pro (1,1/2,1) and OS X El Capitan

[Tidon]

The PC flashed versions will work - unflashed they will work but not show a boot screen which isn't essential, but helpful. The HD5770 works well and is cheaper than the more powerful HD 7950. There are Mac versions of both these available if you don't have the ability to flash the PC version of the card. It depends on how much you wish to spend on this - the Mac cards have a premium price even now. Things to watch are the power leads - not all PC cards have the same pins (6/8) so may need an adapter cable.

Botting screen is not a problem for me.
Thanks for the reply.so no real difference between mac version and flashed ones. Only the time needed for the flash procedure and the price of course.
I dont mind expending a bit more on the pc versions of 7750 and so and learn to flash.
Will the flashed versions work with bootcamp?
Is there any problem flashing some brands or any brand advice?

Thank you

 

[Ant3000]

On the 7950 there is a preference by some for 'reference' cards which seem to have the single fan - but there are several threads on here discussing this in more detail. Not sure on bootcamp as I have never used this. There may be other bottlenecks that restrict the speed of some of the high-end cards but some would work in newer Mac Pros so may have more life even after the Mac Pro1.1 is retired.

 

[fakedane]

I'll be darned! I got that thing to work. I honestly think it was a bad drive, even though the SMART scan said it was ok. I also switched to the boot.efi with the black background --would that have fixed it? Now that waiting around for the clean up to finish (may have pulled out the wrong drive and broken up a striped RAID), thought I'd ask here.... anybody got a recommendation for a GPU that'll help Adobe CS whateveritisnow fly? Mainly editing Red in Premiere.

You know, just as I was about to post this, something else happened. I updated the computer (including the OS) knowing that I'd need to go in and replace the boot.efi in those 2 spots. It rebooted to my old 10.7 drive. I replaced the boot.efi files, and then chose the startup disk, which, strangely, showed as a 10.7 drive. When my computer rebooted, it would get to the black screen with the apple, some code would flash on the screen, then it would reboot and continue in that cycle. I'll start searching this thread again!

 

[flyinmac]

The SMART status in Mac OS X doesn't show the truth. Unless perhaps the drive is actually dead.

I recently replaced a drive that had been giving me read errors for about a year.

The SMART status always said it was fine.

I was doing a backup recently, and one particular file was problematic.

I checked the SMART status, and it still said the drive was good.

After managing to get a full backup, I did an Internet search for a test program. And found that it could read the SMART status from the drive. The results from the drive's built-in log showed the status as Failing. And showed numerous read errors.

So having personally observed said errors, and seeing that the drive itself was saying it's status was bad, I retired the hard drive.

Apples disk utility and system info both still showed the drive as good. So don't trust the built-in Apple status monitor.

 

[fakedane]

Apples disk utility and system info both still showed the drive as good.

Lololol, of course. That being said -- do you have a tool that you'd recommend for checking drives and maybe even RAM? I'm wondering if my RAM is failing.

I've seen the same code flashing on screen and endless cycle of reboots with a couple of others in this thread -- one guy traced it to a 3rd party usb board, another to his RAM configuration. I've pulled out my 2nd graphics card, my Matrox IO card, and my esata card. That didn't do the trick. Just finished putting the 2 x 4BG RAM in bottom slot dimms 1 and 2, and switched the 2 x 2GB RAM to top slot dimms 3 and 4. Same thing keeps happening... I'll keep looking. The nice thing about this thread (among many) is that I'm pretty sure there are no new problems and they're all documented in here somewhere.

 

[Ant3000]

Did you follow the position of RAM modules printed on the inside of the side panel (or on the Apple website)? I think the positioning needs to be as they suggest or problems can arise. Is there an option to select the El Cap drive as your startup disk in System Prefs?

 

[azimuthal]

Hi all.

Like many of you I've been enjoying the longevity of my Mac Pro 1,1 due to the genius and hard work of many others. Thanks again for helping keep my old trusty 10 year old Mac Pro alive!!!

At this point I have done nearly everything I can to keep the machine working and working well but lately, especially since installing El Cap, I have noticed the system slowing down at times. I wanted to see if anyone else has noticed this behavior.

I have upgraded the following:

- Mac Pro 1,1 flashed to 1,2
- upgraded the CPUs to the quad core Xeons (from the dual core Xeons that were original)
- upgraded the RAM to max 32GB
- upgraded the boot drive to a 256GB Crucial SSD
- upgraded the graphics card to a flashed AMD Radeon HD 7950

All is running well, I have gone through several OS X updates but it seems that since installing El Cap, my system is slowing down significantly. Are we finally at the end of life performance wise of the Mac Pro running the latest OS from Apple? Am I just hitting bottleneck limitations? I used the Pikify3_1_v11 setup script to upgrade from Yosemite to El Capitan. Could my boot drive, crucial ssd, be the issue, the performance? How would I check to eliminate possibilities.

Any and all help is greatly appreciated. I sure would like to get another good year out of my mac.

Cheers and thanks!

Ali

 

[Ant3000]

I have about the same set of upgrades as you but with a Samsung 850EVO 1TB SSD + other spinning drives. I was on a Crucial MX200 SSD originally but 250gb was too small to comfortably fit everything and setting up as just a boot drive isn't without issues. My Mac seems to be OK and I have been on El Cap for many months now - 10.11.6 currently but never noticed any speed issues.
Where is it slowing down? Booting or general opening and using of apps? As I understand it SSDs can slow down but TRIM is supposed to stop perhaps along with garbage collection from the drive manufacturer. Is TRIM enabled on your Mac? How much free space do you have on the drive? Is your RAM OK and showing in system profiler? No lights on the riser boards if you take the side off to look?

 

[azimuthal]

I have about the same set of upgrades as you but with a Samsung 850EVO 1TB SSD + other spinning drives. I was on a Crucial MX200 SSD originally but 250gb was too small to comfortably fit everything and setting up as just a boot drive isn't without issues. My Mac seems to be OK and I have been on El Cap for many months now - 10.11.6 currently but never noticed any speed issues.
Where is it slowing down? Booting or general opening and using of apps? As I understand it SSDs can slow down but TRIM is supposed to stop perhaps along with garbage collection from the drive manufacturer. Is TRIM enabled on your Mac? How much free space do you have on the drive? Is your RAM OK and showing in system profiler? No lights on the riser boards if you take the side off to look?

Thanks for the reply.

As for the type of performance lag, it is things like notifications, very sluggish, sending and receiving messages on my mac pro vs my macbook pro is like night and day, i often get the spinning ball when I click in the text input to type in messages. So much slower on the mac pro.

As for the drive, the system profile shows that my SSD states TRIM Support: "No." Could this be the issue? I have about 100GB free on my boot SSD.

As for the RAM, they are all identical 4GB modules so there is no difference. They are all running fine and their status is all OK.

Thanks again!

Azi

 

[swampy50]

First glitch, Mac Pro 1,1 12 gigs ram El Cap 10.11.6, Nvidia GTX 620 2 gig.

After the Safari update last week Silverlight plug in no longer works or reinstalls. I use Safari only for Netflix. It still works in Firefox..

 

[flyinmac]

I get better performance with El Capitan on my 1,1 than I did with Lion. I don't observe any slowdowns anywhere. My specs are on my signature below.

Might be a software configuration issue. Or could be that you need to enable trim on your SSD.

 

[fakedane]

Post #2451 in this thread offered a lot of solutions. After trying them all (some multiple times), I realized I still had a usb hub plugged in on the back, along with an audio IO board. Pulled those both, replaced both boot.efi files for good measure, and the update went through like a charm. I seem to take a long time to boot now (the update bar on the black screen with white apple takes a loooong time to fill), BUT IT'S WORKING!!! I'll keep looking on here for an answer to that too.

Another thing that was important but took me awhile to figure out was that the keyboard needed to be plugged directly into the MP to boot into some of these different modes or reset PRAM. Live and learn.

It's kind of crazy, but this has brought me such an abnormal amount of happiness. Thanks to all those responsible. Never thought I'd be using a computer this old again.

 

[Ant3000]

Thanks for the reply.

As for the type of performance lag, it is things like notifications, very sluggish, sending and receiving messages on my mac pro vs my macbook pro is like night and day, i often get the spinning ball when I click in the text input to type in messages. So much slower on the mac pro.

As for the drive, the system profile shows that my SSD states TRIM Support: "No." Could this be the issue? I have about 100GB free on my boot SSD.

As for the RAM, they are all identical 4GB modules so there is no difference. They are all running fine and their status is all OK.

Thanks again!

Azi

There was a way to turn on TRIM support using Terminal in Yosemite and I assumed it was on automatically in El Capitan but perhaps not - or maybe your drive doesn't need it and uses it's own garbage collection. Worth looking into. I turned it on manually under Yosemite for the Crucial MX200 Drive but it was on automatically with the Samsung under El Capitan.

If you have a old HD installed is there anything still running on that that has to spin-up the drive to access - this could cause some lag if so.
My 2011 Macbook Pro (16gb RAM) if anything, seems slower than my Mac Pro not the other way around.
Have you checked nothing is hogging system resources in Activity Monitor? Have you tried unplugging other devices and HDs and running a bare system to see if anything changes. Have you reset SMC and PRAM etc?

 

[rthpjm]

Thanks for the reply.

As for the type of performance lag, it is things like notifications, very sluggish, sending and receiving messages on my mac pro vs my macbook pro is like night and day, i often get the spinning ball when I click in the text input to type in messages. So much slower on the mac pro.

As for the drive, the system profile shows that my SSD states TRIM Support: "No." Could this be the issue? I have about 100GB free on my boot SSD.

As for the RAM, they are all identical 4GB modules so there is no difference. They are all running fine and their status is all OK.

Thanks again!

Azi

I saw this type of lag a while back. It turned out to be a failing hard drive.

The TRIM function may be relevant. Here's an external discussion and it includes the command to enable TRIM
http://www.howtogeek.com/222077/how-to-enable-trim-for-third-party-ssds-on-mac-os-x/

 

[fakedane]

Installed a Geforce GT 730 in the bottom pcie 1.0 x16 slot. Can't seem to get it to power a display though. Updated the drivers before I switched this card in. Startup is still reaaaaal slow. Still can't seem to do run AHT because there's no recovery drive (I never could get that rthpjm method to work). To get a recovery drive, I'm going to have to wipe the drive and start over, right?

 

[Ant3000]

I assume it's a known good card? Does it have the correct power leads? I don't know that card but some AMD cards need two power leads - others just one. Does this card work under another OS?
Have you followed Apple's guidelines for position of RAM modules?

 

[fakedane]

I've updated my DIMMs to the correct slots for a 1,1 (I had them configured for a 4,1 I think). It is a tiny junky cheap card -- no power leads needed. It does seem to be supported under OS from what I can tell.

I finally pulled out the old graphics card in spite. That did it. Works great now using newest NVIDIA web drivers.

 

[rthpjm]

I never could get that rthpjm method to work

Everyone,

I've posted Version 12. It tries to solve what I believe are the common problems being reported by the last few users.

Page-56 post #1390

 

[pascalxvi]

hwojtek,

thank you for testing. As your mac didn't crash, the test give undecidable result to me (network conditioner didn't help me avoid the crash, too).

BTW, CET here too…

 

[hwojtek]

Pascal, did you test both Ethernet ports?

 

[fakedane]

Everyone,

I've posted Version 12. It tries to solve what I believe are the common problems being reported by the last few users.

Page-56 post #1390

Did a clean install of 10.7, and that v12 worked perfect! AND I've got a recovery drive! Thanks so much rthpjm!

 

[EGIprime]

First thanks to the folks who worked hard in making the boot.efi files.

My son and I began our project on a Mac Pro 1,1 with 5Gb of ram with a new installed Asus Nvidia GTX 950 2Gg video card that I got for $100 bucks last week. After much trial and error trying to install Yosemite. We could not get it to boot not sure why but probably didn't have the right files and drivers. We took the internal hard drive and connected it to my MacBook Pro installed the current version of El Capitan. Downloaded boot_grey.efi and then finally found the correct Cuda driver and WebDriver for the GTX 950. I connected the drive as an external drive and copied over the boot.efi files to their directories and it booted up. Success

For a few minutes. After a few minutes we tried to install some apps and he wanted to see if Steam would install and run. It seems that when we try to run more than 2 applications the screen goes black stays black for a minute then comes back on and says a system crash occurred and we have to reboot.

Not sure what's happening here. In System Preferences the Cuda panel says there is an update for Cuda driver not sure if we should install that.

Any advice or tips are welcome.

 

[sOwL]

Hey guys, doing this for one more Mac Pro scrub

Quick question because the instructions are a bit unclear and I can't remember.. If I'm using pike 3.1v3+, do I need to install Boot64 or CaptainPikeFix in order to survive updates? Or is it already done?

 

[rthpjm]

Hey guys, doing this for one more Mac Pro scrub

Quick question because the instructions are a bit unclear and I can't remember.. If I'm using pike 3.1v3+, do I need to install Boot64 or CaptainPikeFix in order to survive updates? Or is it already done?

You need to choose one and install it.
Pikify partly prepares the OS, but does not include the Boot64 nor CapitanPikeFix.
[doublepost=1475428713][/doublepost]

First thanks to the folks who worked hard in making the boot.efi files.

My son and I began our project on a Mac Pro 1,1 with 5Gb of ram with a new installed Asus Nvidia GTX 950 2Gg video card that I got for $100 bucks last week. After much trial and error trying to install Yosemite. We could not get it to boot not sure why but probably didn't have the right files and drivers. We took the internal hard drive and connected it to my MacBook Pro installed the current version of El Capitan. Downloaded boot_grey.efi and then finally found the correct Cuda driver and WebDriver for the GTX 950. I connected the drive as an external drive and copied over the boot.efi files to their directories and it booted up. Success

For a few minutes. After a few minutes we tried to install some apps and he wanted to see if Steam would install and run. It seems that when we try to run more than 2 applications the screen goes black stays black for a minute then comes back on and says a system crash occurred and we have to reboot.

Not sure what's happening here. In System Preferences the Cuda panel says there is an update for Cuda driver not sure if we should install that.

Any advice or tips are welcome.

Hello EGIprime,

El Capitan on MacPro 1,1 (or 2,1) does not "like" to work with 512Mb memory cards. Many users have reported system instability and random crashes. In all cases we have advised the removal of the 512Mb memory sticks.

You should also purchase some higher capacity memory sticks. The benefits of more memory with El Capitan are considerable.

Those users who have taken this advice always report back that their system has stabilised.

 

[sOwL]

You need to choose one and install it.
Pikify partly prepares the OS, but does not include the Boot64 nor CapitanPikeFix.

Thanks!