MP 1,1-5,1 cMP 5,1 2010 Mac Pro & Fans

[paulcons]

Want to verify something. I'm pretty sure I have read about how third party fans for the above machine are not what one thinks they are, in that you can find ones that fit where they need to go BUT they can NOT be controlled like the OEM fans are. Had something to do with a particular wire that was unique to this machine being part of the fan. Today, someone told me this isn't the case, that there ARE third party fans that can be dropped in that work just like the OEM fans. True?

 

[h9826790]

Mac Pro (4.1/5.1) aftermarket fans WITH automatic SMC control

I've been reading around this subject for a while as a pet peeve of mine is noisy computers. My normal workstations are entirely passively cooled and silence is bliss, but I do still use my cMPs when I need machines with a bit more power or more cores for testing virtual environments and the...

forums.macrumors.com

 

[paulcons]

Damn, I did do some searching but somehow didn't come across that one, thanks!

Just as a FYI, I started looking into this because my SP tray decided to die on me. I had a spare tray, so I swapped it in. The swap-in works great EXCEPT it seems all the fans run at top speed. Swapped boards a few times to determine the issue lies in the tray. Spoke to a tech who bemoaned the lack of schematics for the tray, said if I hauled the whole machine to him (THAT is a big issue for me, hauling around my cMP is very probematic especially at my age) he may or may not be able to find & fix the issue BUT he'd have to charge me with no guarantee and I figured it would cost me more than buying another tray. Damn, some folks are charging over 800 bucks for those trays... but I found one for 140. SOOO I was fretting over running all the fans at top speed for too much time, trying to keep my time on the machine to a minimum, so rather than looking for some highly customized solution, I was more concerned about a failed fan I needed to replace!

 

[KeesMacPro]

I had a spare tray, so I swapped it in. The swap-in works great EXCEPT it seems all the fans run at top speed.

Sounds like the Backplane SMC version and the CPU tray SMC version don't match.
The MP 4,1 (flashed or not) SMC version for the backplane and tray : 1.39f5
The MP 5,1 SMC version for the backplane and tray: 1.39f11

 

[paulcons]

Could it be that simple? Have a true 5.1. Both the OEM tray and both other ones seems to have the same "part" number, although they DO say 2009.

Is there a utility to tell me what each piece has? Is there any way to "update" one or the other?

OK, man you are one smart dood, big props. After doing some googling I found out (d/oh) that the hardware overview gives me the info... yup, system @1.39f11, tray @1.39f5. SOOO the question is can I upgrade the tray's SMC firmware (and how do I go about getting that done)?

OK, just found a post from

tsialex​

another trusted guy here...says there is no way to update the SMC... but the post was from last year so MAYBE something has been developed?

So, I MAY be in luck. According to MacTracker, the 2009 machines did NOT come with a 2.8G 4 core. The 2010 machine DID come with such a configuration. The tray I will get next week IS equipped with a 2.8G 4 core... so it MAY be a SMC match, cross fingers. The tray I currently have has a 2.66 4 core, also said CPU was only available on the 2009 machines but not the 2010 ones.

 

[KeesMacPro]

Hi Paul,

glad to be of some help!

As tsialex said:there's no way to update the SMC...

If you ordered a tray the seller should be so nice to tell you if it's a 4,1(2009) or a 5,1 (2010/2012).
In case of a 4,1 tray I'd cancel it.

The CPUs can be upgraded , and after flashing a 4,1 , CPUs are egually compatible to 4,1 and 5,1 so looking at the type of CPU isnt a fiable way to distinguish between both types of trays...

Flashing a MP4,1 to a 5,1 basically converts it into a 5,1 , except for e.g. the SMC versions of the backplane and CPU tray.

 

[paulcons]

You guys are why I want to stay in the macOS universe for as long as I can... the guy already shipped the tray. Yes I understand the CPU is easily upgraded, but I am kinda guessing that nobody would have taken out a 2.6 to put a 2.8 in there... but one never knows. The description says "2010" so if push comes to shove, ebay will back my getting a refund it it isn't.

Thanks so much again!

 

[KeesMacPro]

Fingers crossed

 

[paulcons]

MUST say, just having someone knowledgeable to talk things through with really alleviated most of the anxiety I was going through. I learned a lot here, someday I hope I can carry it forward.

Got that new tray... not only was it almost impeccably packaged, it was clean as a whistle, I mean not even a stray fingerprint on the PCB. Low & behold it has 4 sticks of OWC RAM for a total of 32G, buying that from OWC would be exactly the same price I paid for the tray plus RAM.

Now before my last tray blew up (I know one stick of ram went bad, think the cpu might have blown as well), I HAD been very concerned about the Northridge, it was running way too hot for my liking (82º plus). Took it to a local tech who blew all the crap out, re-thermaled both the NB and CPU. Still it was running too hot, so started using Macs Fan Control (a wonderful program btw). Got that NB to a max of about 74-75º. Wasn't overjoyed because running like that logic tells me it's being stressed and useful life would be a LOT more finite. Truth be told, since I got the machine it has put in a LOT of duty (there were years when it ran almost 24/7), including some pretty brutal summers in un-air conditioned rooms. 2 years ago I started having some odd issues and a friend pointed to the NB... said I needed to take it some someone post haste! After that, I paid MUCH more attention to it.

Lo and behold, my guess is this tray I got has sat doing nothing for a LONG time. Looking at my temps now, holy ****, at idle, CPU 35.5º, NB 51.8º. Saw it running a bit warmer playing WoW, set intake/exhaust to get the fans spinning between 50º and 58º, that seemed to get both fans up to around 1500. At idle, all fans spin at system default, 600 and 800.

Needless to say I am very happy now... I can hang onto my dual boot big hunk of aluminum I think for quite a while.

 

[KeesMacPro]

Good to hear you received an impeccable CPU tray + bonus RAM!

Reading about the Temps of the "new" tray, based on my experience i'd say these are normal .
Perhaps the blown tray was very dusty or the Northbridge rivets were broken or so...

I've spend quite some time (after getting recommendations by others here a while ago) in getting a nice balance between Temps and noise of the fans.
Based on that I'd like to share some general observations:

- The most critical Temp is the Northbridge diode .(personally i like to keep it under ~ 65 Celsius), all other Temps are controlled fine by the SMC (system) itself without any setting manually.
- If the difference between NB Heatsink and NB Diode exceeds ~12 degrees Celsius, check/replace the NB rivets and paste (rivets are plastic and can break after ~ 10 years).
- To achieve a low T for NB, the only fans that have a significant influence are: Intake and Boost A.
- Basically all other fans can be set to default (auto), they just increase noise level without lowering Temps significantly.
This way all Temps should stay within a normal and save range , if not something's wrong e.g. dust accumulation.


I attached a few screenshot of this setup on a single CPU and a Dual CPU MP 5,1 to get an idea.
Temps are under normal load.
Feel free to copy this and tweak it to your personal preferences and workload.

 

[paulcons]

Ah, the "blown" tray... one of these days I may track down what blew, but I NOW suspect it was the CPU. Back when I was looking for solutions to it's hot NB, I saw there was a huge disparity between the NB and it's heat sink, so everyone said unequivocally the heat sink had broken rivets even though a service tech said they were fine and put a new thermal pad on it. I popped the heatsink off it thinking of taking out the 3680 in there AND found the NB heatsink correctly installed, no broken rivets, had that tiny bit of play which is normal with the spring load it is under. Seems to be making proper contact.

So I have become through all this very interested in how hot things run... mostly because there really is no Mac that I'd really want to get right now. So I have become quite familiar with Macs Fan Control. I recall that it ran my 3680 over 60º and the same with my current 3530... more like 62º. Straight to Intel's page, hmmm, t-case is just under 68º. I set boosta to sensor vary to get it to around 58º... it ran the fan to around 2k, kinda not too bad noise level. BUT, while technically safe, not so overjoyed running it that hot, so I stopped folding. Most other intensive thing I do is playing WoW... and that gets the CPU up to around mid 40s... more than acceptable with no extra boost from the fans.

Funny, I never thought much about running any of the fans on Auto... always used the sensor variable. BUT I AM noticing that on auto, my pci fan runs up to 1000-1100 or so. Makes sense as I not only have a GTX980 BUT my boot volume is a pair of SATA SSDs on a pci card. Think I'll just set them all on Auto and see what temps I am getting at what fan speeds. Oh, what I am calling "idle" is just doing things like web browsing and email, so maybe I should say "normal load."

Oh, I have read that one DOES want to run the Exhaust fan kinda to match the Intake & BoostA fan the reason being that it was a part of the whole airflow from the front to being expelled from the machine. Of course, things will change when it gets to be summer next, room temp is now around 22.5, that will run up to 33ish at times during the summer. BUT I am very happy everything is running the way it is right now... wondering if I should tempt fate a bit and put a 3680 back in there.

 

[paulcons]

 

[KeesMacPro]

Just a short style post:

-the Temps you attached look very nice and cool!

-The NB heatsink should be attached to the die with thermal paste , not a heatpad.
I suppose this could cause a bigger delta T...


-One of the advantages of upgrading the CPU is a much more stable(= lower) CPU Temp under load.
Logically, the boost fan could be set depending on the CPU T , but normally on auto is sufficient.
Personally, if you consider an upgrade I'd recommend a 6-core Xeon e.g. a X5675/X5680/X 5690 to get a significant performance boost....e.g. during WoW
IMHO , it definitely is worth this small amount of money.


-The PCI fan on "auto" is controlled by the power draw from e.g. the GPU and the Temp of the PCI ambient.
In case of a GPU that runs hot, you could set the PCI fan controlled by PCI ambient (never tested a 980).
As you mentioned the T of the PCI-SATA card and drives could be a reason for setting the PCI fan manually too (especially in case of the SATA card directly above the GPU)..

-After testing a lot (and reading ) with the fans especially relation Intake/Exhaust I came to the conclusion (among many others) that (although it might seem logical to match the rpm of both fans) the Exhaust just works fine on auto , which in real life means it always stays on min rpm.
Apparently the airflow works better with a little bit of pressure ..

Note that the Temps in a DUAL are quite different from a Single CPU MP4,1/5,1:
On a single CPU e.g. the NB stays much cooler than on the DUAL .
I set the fans this way for the single CPU (similar to the DUAL) in case of real heavy load and , as you mentioned Summer Temps...
Generally speaking a single CPU stays well within save T range with all fans on auto.

You could test the influence of the Exhaust fan and see for yourself:
-match Exhaust with Intake : you will see no real difference in T, just more noise.
-set it to e.g.2000 rpm and watch what happens after 10 min: besides a tiny decrease of the RAM T , nothing else happens..

In case you'd like to read more about fan rpm, airflow and Temps:
There's a very interesting thread by @amedias , who invested an incredible amount of time in this topic:

Mac Pro (4.1/5.1) aftermarket fans WITH automatic SMC control

I've been reading around this subject for a while as a pet peeve of mine is noisy computers. My normal workstations are entirely passively cooled and silence is bliss, but I do still use my cMPs when I need machines with a bit more power or more cores for testing virtual environments and the...

forums.macrumors.com

 

[paulcons]

Wow, good stuff here! I get what you are saying about the exhaust fan, everything is so silent now, I can actually notice when fans spin up in the 2k range. I will go over that thread you linked, thanks. I'm pretty convinced that running my box hot without paying any attention to cooling for 8 years left those chips running hotter than typical.

2 questions... how come the X5680 over the W3680? "Auto" I see clearly does ramp up on that PCI fan... understandably so. I THINK the GPU effectively blocks the second 16 lane PCI slot, so I have that card with my boot volume at the top-most 4 lane slot. BUT has anyone sussed out when and how much they kick in under Auto (other than the PCI fan)?

Interesting tidbit, now that I feel my hardware is pretty solid, I got back into running win10 (doing that was what originally tipped me off that there was a hardware issue because going back to macOS did NOT show my boot volume!). Man, 2 and a half hours to make a few OS updates from about a year ago to now! I noticed that the CPU and NB did run 3-4 or so degrees hotter on that side, normal load.

 

[paulcons]

Think I figured out why the x5680 over the w3680. Even though it's a single cpu system, the x chip has a higher t-case, 78º vs 68º is that the only real reason?

 

[KeesMacPro]

Think I figured out why the x5680 over the w3680. Even though it's a single cpu system, the x chip has a higher t-case, 78º vs 68º is that the only real reason?

TBH i must have missed that part, assuming your MP was running with the new tray and the OEM CPU that came with it...sorry

Apart from a higher T, I dont think these CPUs are very different, so probably not worth it to replace .

About the PCI fan controlled by SMC (=auto):
I haven't found a clear definition anywhere about how exactly responds the SMC to the current draw from the GPU/other PCI slots and the PCI ambient T.

 

[h9826790]

That temperature limit difference is virtually nothing. The actual max diode temperature just about 3C difference, not 10C (something like 102C vs 105C, this number can be obtained from Intel Processor Diagnostic Tool).

The main difference between 5000 series and 3000 series is the multi CPU supportability. And 5000 series support much more memory.

in terms of thermal capability, you may consider there is no different between them. And SMC handle both in pretty much the same way anyway.

 

[paulcons]

Oh, I looked at the Intel data sheets for both processors, t-case was clearly listed at 10º higher for the 5000 series chip. AND they are pegged at 68º and 78º. The 102º-105º I recall was listed for the Northbridge chip.

Intel® Xeon® Processor W3680 (12M Cache, 3.33 GHz, 6.40 GT/s Intel® QPI) Product Specifications

Intel® Xeon® Processor W3680 (12M Cache, 3.33 GHz, 6.40 GT/s Intel® QPI) quick reference guide including specifications, features, pricing, compatibility, design documentation, ordering codes, spec codes and more.

ark.intel.com

Intel® Xeon® Processor X5680 (12M Cache, 3.33 GHz, 6.40 GT/s Intel® QPI) Product Specifications

Intel® Xeon® Processor X5680 (12M Cache, 3.33 GHz, 6.40 GT/s Intel® QPI) quick reference guide including specifications, features, pricing, compatibility, design documentation, ordering codes, spec codes and more.

ark.intel.com

Does one of their own tools show something very different from the spec sheets?

So if I ignore any thermal impact issues, we're talking a 3.3G 6 core vs a 2.8G 4 core. I wonder if that may have more impact running win10 than macOS (I DO notice my 2.8 does run a bit hotter on the win10 side, normal load)? For 50 bucks it may be a why not kind of thing!

I may be crazy, but I kinda have this feeling that my old tray was run way too hard, for way too long, in some at time brutal conditions (room temps) with nary a thought about cooling. Hence this "new" tray seems to run way cooler, especially in the Northbridge chip. Point being I NOW run Macs Fan Control to make sure it stays cool.

As for Auto, when I ran everything on Auto I did notice the PCI fan did ramp up, like I said, I do have a 980 and 2 SSDs on a card for my boot volume, so not surprising it gets some extra fan (typically runs 900-1100, but inaudible to me). It seems to keep the PCI ambient around 30º-31º which seems quite cool!

As always, I really appreciate y'all weighing in here!

 

[KeesMacPro]

So if I ignore any thermal impact issues, we're talking a 3.3G 6 core vs a 2.8G 4 core.

Ah, well that would be a big improvement in overall performance for a very small amount of money .
Since it's a single CPU i'd go for the X5690 (or W3690) , for ~ 100,- from a reliable seller e.g. on eBay.
Best bang for the buck may be the X5680 (or W3680) for ~ 50,-....

I never installed Windows, so I cant tell you how's the power/thermal management under Windows..

As for Auto, when I ran everything on Auto I did notice the PCI fan did ramp up, like I said, I do have a 980 and 2 SSDs on a card for my boot volume, so not surprising it gets some extra fan (typically runs 900-1100, but inaudible to me). It seems to keep the PCI ambient around 30º-31º which seems quite cool!

IMHO : perfect , nothing to do here!
In case of summer Temps , you could set the PCI fan depending on PCI ambient e.g. min 30 C max rpm at 50 C...

As always, I really appreciate y'all weighing in here!

My pleasure !

 

[paulcons]

So here is some interesting information I have gleaned from running win10. Apparently the temp of my GTX 980 CAN be read, I asked Macs Fan Control how come and got a "we don't do it." Which they certainly DO, their own app reads it AND the Ungine benchmarking apps can read it as well. My guess is it may be exposed by the nVidia drivers running over there. At normal/idle, the card runs around 45ºish. Under full load running the graphics benchmarking apps it runs about 80º. One hot chip... but no unexpected. BUT it seem the PCI ambient is not elevated all that much, my guess is because of the fan on that GPU. My Plan B if my array goes belly up MAY advance to "why not" as I can get the same T drive for under 150 bucks that goes twice as fast as my array (they have some very interesting cooling systems for M2s, heat pipes, water cooling blocks, even one with a built in fan). Go figure, win10 may get more hardware exposed than can be under X.

 

[h9826790]

So here is some interesting information I have gleaned from running win10. Apparently the temp of my GTX 980 CAN be read, I asked Macs Fan Control how come and got a "we don't do it." Which they certainly DO, their own app reads it AND the Ungine benchmarking apps can read it as well. My guess is it may be exposed by the nVidia drivers running over there. At normal/idle, the card runs around 45ºish. Under full load running the graphics benchmarking apps it runs about 80º. One hot chip... but no unexpected. BUT it seem the PCI ambient is not elevated all that much, my guess is because of the fan on that GPU. My Plan B if my array goes belly up MAY advance to "why not" as I can get the same T drive for under 150 bucks that goes twice as fast as my array (they have some very interesting cooling systems for M2s, heat pipes, water cooling blocks, even one with a built in fan). Go figure, win10 may get more hardware exposed than can be under X.

All GPU temperature in macOS can only be extracted via SMC or IOReg. Since no such reading available for 980 in macOS, no software can do anything about it.

Technically, Nvidia can provide that via web driver. But for whatever reason, they never do. There is nothing the MFC developer can do.

 

[KeesMacPro]

My Plan B if my array goes belly up MAY advance to "why not" as I can get the same T drive for under 150 bucks that goes twice as fast as my array (they have some very interesting cooling systems for M2s, heat pipes, water cooling blocks, even one with a built in fan). Go figure, win10 may get more hardware exposed than can be under X.

A m2 blade is a great improvement and doesnt have to be expensive.
E.g. the KRYO m2 (EVO) is a very nice made PCIe card for a single m2 blade and costs ~30,-.
Note that a m2 blade and a SATA ssd are about the same price.
In case of an array , you may have to look here for compatibilty:

PCIe SSDs - NVMe & AHCI

This is a general info thread for blade SSDs that can be used in the Mac Pro. This is a WikiPost so anyone with the proper credentials may edit it. NVMe SSDs can be used as a boot drive in the MP5,1 and MP6,1 with the latest firmware installed (beginning with version 140.0.0.0.0 for MP5,1 and...

forums.macrumors.com

 

[paulcons]

Indeed I did scratch my had a bit a while back that SATA (AHCI right?) and NVNe blades seemed to similarly priced.