My 1,1 experience (Configuration testing using 2 macs)
Hey I just wanted to share my 1,1 experience so far.
So we had a spare 1,1 sitting around, and I got a great deal on a 16gig kit, so I decided to try out Yosemite.
I haven't found any threads that really deal with how far one can take the 1,1
or what the best performance components one can get to run on it.
The technique I used to get yosemite working in the 1,1 is different from the suggestions.
What I did is boot the Macpro in Target mode, used a macbookpro connected Via Firewire and used Carbon Copy Cloner Trial to copy a Yosemite image.
After I was finished with the clone, I used the finder, and the terminal to navigate around the cloned drive, rename and change the boot.efi in /user/standalone/i386 and /System/Library/CoreServices.
I didn't know the change flags command at that time so I dragged the one in core services into the trash, and pasted the pikes boot.efi
It worked the first time I tried booting with a stock PC geforce 210 card, blind boot up of course.
I decided to try the old nvidia 512 mb (forget the model cheap passive heatsink no 12 power needed). It would show the boot up process, and allow me to get to user login, but then the screen would just flicker when I put in my password and not go any further.
My advice to everyone trying this is, hold on to that basic card if you don't have a mac compatible video card, it'll help you see if you have the grey folder or the no supported os symbol.
I next went on to try an MSI GTX570 and it worked right away with the blind boot. Also able to get Nvidia Brand GTX760 and 970 working on the 1,1
The only issue I've noticed is no sound over HDMI, and a some high resolution 3d graphics will jerk. The Geeks3D GPU test does pretty good, the Unigene benchmark doesn't do as good as it does on PC, I'm guessing it has to do more with driver support than anything.
I'm very interested in trying some high end AMD video cards as I believe mac probably has better development with AMD at this point.
I wasn't aware of the pikes efi restore tool, and didn't install it accidentally let it install 10.10.2 Made my 1,1 unbootable, I'm assuming a Grey folder. I tried what I did before, editing the boot.efi in target mode, but I was trying to restore all the flags, chmod, and chown to root. That may have been part of my problem but I wasn't able to get it to boot. I re cloned with a virgin uninitialized yosemite still getting a grey folder. I'm not sure if there is something funny with the pikes mod listed at the top of this thread, but the permissions are set differently, stock is rw- r-- r-- the one on this thread is rwx r-x r-x. I'm not sure if this causes a problem with this compile of pikes? I originally downloaded from a page that had both pikes and tianmos linked together.
I did a third clone, of my yosemite, test booted it on my macbookpro grey folder, Something I did in the permissions wasn't right, so I recopied the boot.efi one more time (I wish I rememberd if I bothered to chown now I have to recheck the system when I get back to it) I think having the boot.efi set to executable may cause an issue for some reason. I will be playing with this again and make better notes, but I put on the pike efi restore tool, let it update to 10.10.12 and it works fine.
Currently the only issue I have is it doesn't seem to boot correctly with two monitors attached to the gforce gtx970, the screens will flicker on for a second like they have signal but no user login; however, it will automatically detect and use my second montior when I plug it in.
This maybe because I'm using the ASUS MX299 and have to use SwitchResX to set custom resolution? The second monitor is the old Mac 30" Cinema display.
This is my journey so far.
Current build 1,1 build:
x5355 dual quad core processor
16gigs
geforce gtx970
yosemite 10.10.2
(planning on adding usb3 pcie card.)
Questions:
What other mods are possible?
I've heard of people putting 3ghz dual quads, is it worth it?
I've seen the mac video card guy posting around has anyone been benchmarking and evaluating which video cards get the best performance in the macpro 1,1??
Does anyone make at least a thunderbolt 1 card for the MacPro pcie 1, I would assume that can handle that much bandwidth.
This has been a fun project, I'm impressed at how powerful this machine still is for being almost 10 years old.
