MP 1,1-5,1 Dumpster diving pays off. New Mac Pro!

[EugW]

Well, truthfully, not literally dumpster diving as it was garbage on the side of the road. A Kijiji seller picked up this machine and put up an ad for it for one hundred bux Canadian (~US$76 or ~€64), so I went to check it out. There was no OS on it, but it did have the boot up chime. With my Lion external hard drive plugged in, it did also give me the grey Apple so that was encouraging, but then booted to a distorted screen and then kernel panicked. Nonetheless I bought it anyway.

Took it home, and removed the surprisingly large Quadro FX 4500 and replaced it with my 7300 GT.

Success! Booted up to Lion fine. Confirmed it was a 2 x 3.0 GHz Xeon X5365 quad-core, for a total of 8 cores, with RAM with proper Apple-approved heatsinks. However,the DIMM riser error lights were on. It turns out there was some bad RAM, but that still left me with 12 GB. I added a bit more of RAM I already had, as I was in the process of upgrading a 2 x 2.66 GHz Xeon 5150 dual-core, to bring me to 16 GB RAM. I transferred over the Radeon HD 5770 from that other machine, along with my El Capitan SSD and my Windows 10 SSD. It already had WiFi, and I moved the Bluetooth module over from that other machine. It all works great! I'm typing this post on it right now.

To my pleasant surprise, I didn't have to re-activate Windows. Despite the fact it's a completely different machine, it stayed activated. I guess the hardware is close enough. However, sleep mode has gone wonky for some reason. Before it would sleep fine, but now upon waking, the machine is slow as molasses, as it takes minutes to wake up completely. Hibernation is off, and I've turned the processor settings to maximum to no avail, so for the time being I've deactivated sleep completely in Windows. Oh well. It sleeps perfectly in El Capitan, so it's appears to be a software thing.

Also, to my pleasant surprise, the machine is very quiet. At boot up, the fans stay at minimum speed, despite the much higher TDP at 120 W, vs. the other machine's 65 W Xeon 5150. I had ordered the 80 W E5345 G0 for that other machine, but had I known, I would have ordered the 120 W X5355 G0 instead. However, at this point I don't know if I'll even bother installing the E5345 in that other machine since I won't be using it, now that I have this X5365 G0 machine.

Do I notice much difference with 8 cores vs 4 cores? Actually, for basic OS navigation and surfing, the 4-core machine was pretty decent, although with the new machine some things are smoother when it comes to multitasking. One big difference though is now I can play 1080p60 VP9 in Chrome perfectly. It was a problem on the 4-core machine. 1440p60 remains a no-go though.

In Cinebench R20, you can see that the X5365 is well over twice as fast as the 5150.

Since Geekbench 5 isn't supported on El Capitan, I had to run it Windows 10.

Multi-core performance is roughly the same as my 2017 iPad Pro 10.5" with A10X SoC.

Is the Quadro just junk now? Or can I bake it or something to try to revive it?

 

[splifingate]

Is the Quadro just junk now? Or can I bake it or something to try to revive it?

How are you convinced/sure it's properly borked?

Regards, splifingate

 

[EugW]

How are you convinced/sure it's properly borked?

Based on this this page, my understanding is that the drivers for the Quadro FX 4500 are built into 10.6 Snow Leopard and 10.7 Lion. I tried booting multiple times off different external drives with 10.6.8 and 10.7.1 and it always failed. However, it boots just fine with the same OS installs and the same RAM with both my 7300 GT and Radeon 5770. Furthermore, with these cards, the machine is completely stable (even with the CPUs at max for several minutes while doing benchmarking).

I suspect the GPU was the reason the Mac Pro was in the garbage, and also the reason the seller priced it low as an as-is sale.

 

[EugW]

BTW, there were two hard drives in this machine, both original Apple ones from 12-13 years ago. One is fine, but the other is totally dead. It couldn't be initialized. I tried with two different Macs, and I also tried in Windows, but it just won't.

So, this piece of roadside garbage had a defective GPU, some defective RAM, and a defective hard drive. But even with all that, it was left with 8 fully functional CPU cores (which are as fast as the 2020 MacBook Air for multi-core), fully functional motherboard, a good 500 GB hard drive, 12 GB of good RAM with proper Apple-approved heatsinks, DVD burner, and WiFi. Not bad for the equivalent of £57.

 

[jbarley]

Good luck on your find, but I'd strongly suggest you remove the "horse shoe" from you know where, before attempting to sit down

 

[EugW]

Good luck on your find, but I'd strongly suggest you remove the "horse shoe" from you know where, before attempting to sit down

It was a calculated risk to buy a "broken" as-is MacPro2,1, but I had the advantage of checking it out in person. The fact that it had the power on boot chime and could display the 2D boot screen with the grey Apple were good signs. It flaked out only when the OS was mostly loaded, with video anomalies, so I figured there was a very good chance it was just the video card. My thinking was that it wasn't the same as buying an as-is/for parts machine off eBay, because you can't test those yourself, and often those are more heavily tested by someone who knows what they're doing, so typically those are truly borked.

It also had hard drives, WiFi, and a decent amount of proper memory (not third party server memory), and furthermore, the CPUs alone on eBay cost as much as I paid. I knew the CPUs because the label on the back said 3.0_8CX as well as EMC 2138, which corresponds to this build:

Mac Pro "Eight Core" 3.0 (2,1) Specs (Mac Pro, BTO/CTO, MacPro2,1, A1186, 2138): EveryMac.com

Technical specifications for the Mac Pro "Eight Core" 3.0 (2,1). Dates sold, processor type, memory info, hard drive details, price and more.

everymac.com

http://tim.id.au/laptops/apple/macpro/macpro_8x.pdf

In the very least, if the machine didn't work, the parts would be an OK consolation prize since I had already been upgrading an MacPro1,1 which uses the same hardware.

 

[EugW]

I did the bake trick on the defective Nvidia Quadro FX 4500 video card. At first it didn't work but it turns out it was because I had removed the thermal pads from the memory, and unfortunately the thermal paste wasn't touching the memory heatsinks. So there were all sorts of video anomalies, and it wouldn't boot completely. Those anomalies weren't there before I did the bake trick.



So just as a test, I just stuck some metal washers with some thermal paste there to see what would happen. Well, it completed the boot and I could use it. It was slow I believe because it doesn't accelerate El Capitan, but nonetheless it works, albeit with a lot of anomalies.

The anomalies don't show in the screengrab above, and in El Cap it's only showing up as 7 MB memory, but otherwise the GPU chip itself may be OK.

I will remove the washers from the memory and buy some thermal pads to see if that eliminates the snow. If I can make it work, I'll only get a card really capable of Lion, but for ~US$5 in thermal pads maybe it's worth it. It will be an interesting experiment for me regardless.

 

[OkiRun]

I did the bake trick on the defective Nvidia Quadro FX 4500 video card. At first it didn't work but it turns out it was because I had removed the thermal pads from the memory, and unfortunately the thermal paste wasn't touching the memory heatsinks. So there were all sorts of video anomalies, and it wouldn't boot completely. Those anomalies weren't there before I did the bake trick.

View attachment 946361

So just as a test, I just stuck some metal washers with some thermal paste there to see what would happen. Well, it completed the boot and I could use it. It was slow I believe because it doesn't accelerate El Capitan, but nonetheless it works, albeit with a lot of anomalies.

View attachment 946363

The anomalies don't show in the screengrab above, and in El Cap it's only showing up as 7 MB memory, but otherwise the GPU chip itself may be OK.

I will remove the washers from the memory and buy some thermal pads to see if that eliminates the snow. If I can make it work, I'll only get a card really capable of Lion, but for ~US$5 in thermal pads maybe it's worth it. It will be an interesting experiment for me regardless.

See ~
Just because you can resurrect Frankenstein doesn't mean you should...

 

[EugW]

See ~
Just because you can resurrect Frankenstein doesn't mean you should...

 

[tpivette89]

I get it... it's fun because it's a challenge. Enjoy it whether or not other people say you shouldn't do it. It's just computer hardware, after all.

If I had the same machine and the means to resurrect it, I would do it also. Let us know how it turns out.

 

[EugW]

She's dead, Jim!

No, not the Mac Pro, just that Quadro FX 4500. Despite heroic efforts including the oven bake and a few bucks of thermal pads off Amazon, I cannot get it to usable functionality. Into the electronics waste pile she goes.

As mentioned, after the bake I can now get it to boot, but it's full of anomalies. The thermal pads maybe reduced the number of anomalies a bit, but there are still lots of them. Just in case you're interested, this is what it looks like booted up:

I had bought 1 mm thick thermal pads, but it turns out they were not thick enough, so I tried two layers, but still no joy. I think the bake must have damaged the memory, even though it stabilized the GPU itself. The GPU baking gods giveth and the GPU baking gods taketh away.

Oh well, I already have the Radeon HD 5770 OEM Mac version, which works perfectly in El Capitan in this machine. I had picked that up a while back for less than US$40 locally for a different Mac Pro.

 

[EugW]

So, this machine has turned out to be a true diamond in the rough.

This particular Mac Pro 2,1 has a B08 firmware, as you can see here. I knew B08 was different, but I didn't know that was significant.

Why is it significant? Cuz everyone else has the B06 firmware. People didn't even know the B08 firmware existed. In fact, the official Mac Pro 2,1 firmware updater to update older machines doesn't actually provide this B08 firmware, and only upgrades machines to B06. 🤔 Thus, everyone doing the upgrade hack from Mac Pro 1,1 to 2,1 has been using that older B06 firmware.

That older B06 firmware does not specifically recognize a specific class of Xeon - the Xeon X5365 SLAED G0. This is a lower power version of the X5365 and thus it is popular for upgraders. This works with the B06 firmware, but it's not specifically supported. This new B08 firmware specifically recognizes this newer lower power version of the CPU because this machine uses it, so now the firmware upgraders are quite interested in this machine. 🤓

Mac Pro CPU Compatibility List

thats interesting, because the latest publicly available MP2,1 firmware I have come across, does not actually have microcode for the G0 CPU's (they obviously works fine, but does not have microcodes for it) and all factory MP2,1's I have come across, have B3 stepping CPU's so to see one with...

forums.macrumors.com