MP 1,1-5,1 Build Thread: 12 core 4,1 Video Editing Monster on a Budget

[ADDvanced]

Starting this post to document my 4,1 build, with a goal of being a very inexpensive, capable video editing platform.

I have a small youtube channel (I build cars/boats/vans/sleds/bikes) that has been growing so I've been doing a lot more editing this past year.

I had a heavily upgraded Mac Pro 2,1 since 2013, 2x3ghz, 32 gigs ram, SSDs, and mac vid cards 7970. It worked fine, but it made the whole room hot whenever it was running, thing was basically a space heater.

Build 1:
Mac Pro 2,1
Dual 3.0ghz Quads (8 core)
32 gigs ram
240gig SSD (El Captain)
240gig SSD (windows 7)
2x500gig hdd mirrored Raid Storage

Last summer I came across a really good deal on 5.1 3.33ghz Hexcore; wound up getting it for $300 delivered to my door which was awesome. I swapped my SSDs and 7970 into it, splurged on some NVME drives for a boot and scratch disk, and it's been a great, silent, powerful machine. I was running out of storage tho, so I was pricing HDs and hoping to find a deal on another mac pro that maybe came with more storage....

Build 2:

3.33 Hexcore 5.1
32 gigs Ram
Ati Radeon 7970
240 gig SSD (windows 10)
256 gig NVMe Boot
256 gig NVMe Scratch Disk
2x500 gig mirrored raid storage


So...last weekend, my FB alert popped up that a dual processor 4,1 was for sale, and woah, KILLER deal:

Existing 4.1, firmware already flashed to 5.1
Dual Quad 2.26
32 gigs ram
Ati Radeon 4850
1tb SSD
2 6tb HDDs
eSata Card
USB 3.0 card
BlackMagic 4k Capture Card
(no wifi card tho)

Only $400!!!!

It was listed 15 minutes earlier so I contacted the guy, made plans to get it, and drove 1.5 hours to pick it up. I wound up selling the black magic card for $150, so I splurged and picked up two x5680 3.33ghz hexcores for it off ebay, delidded of course, and swapped them into it last night.

Success! Geekbench 5 is reporting 6200+ in multicore, which is over double my single 5.1!!! I bought a Wifi/BT4.0 card/adaptor, but it hasn't arrived yet.

So... now I need to build a monster system out of both of these machines. Here's what I planning on at the moment:

12 Core 4.1 Build (current)
2x3.33ghz X5680
32 gigs Ram
256 gig NVMe Boot
256 gig NVMe Scratch Disk
240 gig SSD (windows 10)
6tb hdd (going to use the other one in an external backup)
USB 3.0 card

The question is the videocard and the OS... right now is a terrible time to build a machine right now, but really I'm just unclear on what direction I should head. The 7970 meets my needs just fine, but I've read that some people have hardware encoding on their videocards... and unfortunately my card doesn't have that enabled. It's too old. I can try without it for now.... but hardware encoding might be nice and even faster. I definitely need a boot screen to get into windows... but then nVidia cards aren't supported? What is the cheapest card that would get me H264 encoding? Super confused with all the video card variables.

Then there's the OS. Catalina requires open core which means even more vaiables in videocards... I know big sur is still in beta apparently that is possible too... what would you guys do?

 

[Flocarino]

I’m running the latest OS Big Sur release 11.2.2 with Ben Sova’s patcher on my Dual 5.1......before I had Catalina installed via Dos Dude‘s patcher......no need for Open Core.
just my 2 cents.

 

[NO_H2O]

Nice!

 

[ADDvanced]

Ok, updates!

Hardware changes:
- Swapped in my 7970
- Swapped in NVME ssd with Mojave on it.
- Installed usb 3.0 card

Two issues:

1. NVMe: It won't boot from my NVMe drive. I can see them on my desktop, and they even show up as an option when I am selecting myself startup disk, but it won't boot from them. It booted from them fine in my 5.1...

2. I reran geekbench 5... and my scored dropped. A significant margin. Last night with the processors freshly swapped, it scored 6200. Today, with the 7970 in, and the USB 3.0 card, and NVMEs, it scored 5500. Why would it drop 700 points? wtf? Edit: Ran it again and now it got 6000. Same boot cycle. No hardware changes. ?!

 

[ADDvanced]

HA! Double-checked my firmware, and it is not up to date. The guy flashed it to a 5.1 before I bought it so I just assumed it was up to date, that was dumb. Downloading Mojave now.

#1 is solved, can now boot from NVMe and running mojave

#2 is solved, booted mojave and ran geekbench again and now getting 6528 for multicore score. Decent!

The mystery now is if my videocard is capable of h264 encoding or not.... it's showing up as "AMD Radeon HD Tahiti XT prototype" in geekbench.

 

[ADDvanced]

Alright, so I just installed a Wifi/BT4.0 Card with the adaptor, and soldered up that extension cable to connect to the mobo near the original bluetooth card. However, I don't have an antenna extension. Looking around online, and most extensions are WAYYYYYY too long; does anybody know of a shorter antenna extension about the right length from the wifi to bt card? 6-8"?

 

[ADDvanced]

Update: Gave up on built in BT 4.0, it would just randomly quit working a few days after restarting. Purchased Asus BT400, plugged in, works great. Airdrop works fine. Idk why the built in card stopped working all hte time, the wifi would work fine but the BT would only work a short while and eventually just get greyed out. Whatever.

 

[h9826790]

Don't know why I completely missed your post, may be back in 2021, I was busying in something else.

Anyway, the 7970 has H264 hardware decoding ability, however, no such support in OSX / macOS for this card.

If you want H265 / HEVC HWAccel, you will need at least a RX460 in macOS Mojave or above.

For BT, if your internal card still connected, please try SMC reset when it stop working.