Intersted in Classic Mac Pro

[tsialex]

Okay, so I picked up the second Mac Pro and 23" Cinema Display yesterday and just got it fired up today. It's great!

Turns out it has a 60GB OWC Mercury SSD boot drive and 3 other 1TB drives. RAM is 16gb of OWC. All else is stock.

The cosmetic condition of this machine is significantly better than the other machine I bought, so I think I'll be keeping this one and selling the other one.

I set the Mac Pro up with a clean install of El Capitan (what my other machines are running). Anything I need to do from here? Firmware updates, etc?

So now I want to be thinking about upgrades (although its running quite well as-is). I would love for any upgrade that I do to be without compromise. As an example, a video card that doesn't provide a boot screen or an SSD that can't be booted from are not options for me.

So, in light of that, I think I want to upgrade the following items eventually:

Video Card - What can I get that will run games fairly well (like Battlefield 3/4) but will also work natively with the Mac and is supported under Mojave? Don't want to spend over ~$200 here ideally.

SSD - I'd like a bigger SSD. I know there are NVMe options, etc etc, but frankly, I don't know that it would matter to me (or would it?). The current SSD is mounted in the 2nd optical drive bay and perhaps thats fine for me. Assuming that, what would you recommend? 256gb or around should be good.

Thunderbolt - yes, I know this isn't possible

I'll eventually upgrade the processor I'm sure and perhaps add more ram. For now I think those are good.

I'm stoked to have my first Mac Pro! I sincerely appreciate all of the help you guys have provided.

PS. I love the design of these old Cinema Displays with the white sides and the matte screens. Cool!

Crappy photo:

Read here: MP5,1: What you have to do to upgrade to Mojave. All the steps to upgrade the firmware and the Mojave supported GPUs are there.

 

[weezin]

Read here: MP5,1: What you have to do to upgrade to Mojave. All the steps to upgrade the firmware and the Mojave supported GPUs are there.

Thanks! I'll take a look at that.

 

[weezin]

I would like to get a new boot drive for the Mac and am a little confused by the various options. There is a 60gb OWC SSD in the optical bay now and I'd like something larger.

So, for someone who uses the machine as a regular computer with perhaps some gaming, what would you recommend? I'd like whatever I get to be as compatible as possible.

I'm not sure whether I should just replace the SSD that is in there now (with a tried and true Samsung or Crucial SSD - which one?), or go with some sort of PCIe option. For me, I see no need to go for something more expensive if it's not going to have a real world impact on my day-to-day use. Thoughts?

 

[Slash-2CPU]

I would like to get a new boot drive for the Mac and am a little confused by the various options. There is a 60gb OWC SSD in the optical bay now and I'd like something larger.

So, for someone who uses the machine as a regular computer with perhaps some gaming, what would you recommend? I'd like whatever I get to be as compatible as possible.

I'm not sure whether I should just replace the SSD that is in there now (with a tried and true Samsung or Crucial SSD - which one?), or go with some sort of PCIe option. For me, I see no need to go for something more expensive if it's not going to have a real world impact on my day-to-day use. Thoughts?

NVMe prices have fallen lately so that mainstream NVMe drives really don’t cost much more than SATA. With SATA on the cMP, you’re limited to about 260MB/s. With NVMe on a $16 adapter card, you can push a solid 1500MB/s. It’s about half the latency and 3-6x more throughput. Even if you go with a smaller 256GB NVMe for booting, the difference will be very noticeable.

 

[spacedcadet]

SACRILEGE! A business where I freelance a couple of days a week has just got rid of some old Macs. They literally sold 10 2010 5,1 Mac Pros in full working order for SCRAP METAL for about £100. I didn't know they were going to do that or I'd have rescued them!

 

[weezin]

NVMe prices have fallen lately so that mainstream NVMe drives really don’t cost much more than SATA. With SATA on the cMP, you’re limited to about 260MB/s. With NVMe on a $16 adapter card, you can push a solid 1500MB/s. It’s about half the latency and 3-6x more throughput. Even if you go with a smaller 256GB NVMe for booting, the difference will be very noticeable.

Thanks, thats good to know. Would I have to do anything special either initially or on an ongoing basis if I wanted to make one of these my boot drive? That's what I'm trying to avoid if possible.

Can you recommend an adapter card and an NVMe drive (probably looking for 256 or 500gb). I'm looking for reliability as once I put this in, I don't want to have to mess with it much.

SACRILEGE! A business where I freelance a couple of days a week has just got rid of some old Macs. They literally sold 10 2010 5,1 Mac Pros in full working order for SCRAP METAL for about £100. I didn't know they were going to do that or I'd have rescued them!

Ah, bummer!

 

[pl1984]

Thanks, thats good to know. Would I have to do anything special either initially or on an ongoing basis if I wanted to make one of these my boot drive? That's what I'm trying to avoid if possible.

My recommendation is to purchase a high quality SATA SSD, such as a Samsung 860 Evo, and be done with it. Random read / write access dominates the disk activity for the majority of casual users. The limitations of SATA and the GB/sec transfer numbers primarily apply to sequential read / write access. It's likely you would be hard pressed to tell the difference between a SATA SSD (even with the cMP's SATA-II limit) and an NVMe SSD.

 

[opusthe2nd]

Did you get one yet?

 

[weezin]

My recommendation is to purchase a high quality SATA SSD, such as a Samsung 860 Evo, and be done with it. Random read / write access dominates the disk activity for the majority of casual users. The limitations of SATA and the GB/sec transfer numbers primarily apply to sequential read / write access. It's likely you would be hard pressed to tell the difference between a SATA SSD (even with the cMP's SATA-II limit) and an NVMe SSD.

Honestly, that's probably the right move for me. Less complicated, cheaper and probably just as fast for what I use it for. Thanks.

Did you get one yet?

I did! 2010 single CPU with SSD and 16gb of ram in near perfect condition. I'm quite happy with it!

 

[Photofish]

For graphic card choices, OWC is now offering a Gigabyte Radeon RX 580 graphic card for $368.88 featuring 8GB VRAN GPU that is advertised as having Metal supporting the Mac Pro for upgrading it to macOS 10.14.x Mojave.

I have a 2011 5,1 MacPro with a single3.46 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon W3690 Processor along with 48GB (3 x 16GB) 1333 MHz DDR3 ECC memory modules and OWC Mercury Electra 3G 240GB SSD for the System Disk Boot Drive. The last OS X upgrade was El Capitan 10.11.6. Since most of what I do involves a heavy amount of Adobe CC Photoshop and InDesign usage along with a increasing amount of time being spent on both DaVinci Resolve Finial Cut Pro X for video editing, I was in need of graphics card with more GPU.

As such I wanted (pretty much needed) to up grade graphics card with at least double the amount of VRAM as my current 4GB graphics card as well as handle a OS upgrade from El Capitan to Mojave. Searching the forums like Mac Rumors how to do it along with what I will need to accomplish it was to say the least was daunting as the main issue was which graphics cards were actually compatible, one requiring Metal (required for Mojave) and the proper drivers, should you be attempting to use NVIDIA cards.

I got the card, swapped it out and upgraded the OS to Mojave all in one stroke. As far as I can see, everything is running as it should right from the start with both the telltale Apple chime and boot/log in screen, to running all my apps – Abobe CC Photoshop, Bridge, Acrobat, InDesign to Finial Cut Pro X. Hell, even Microsoft Office 2011 is working fine with no issues.

 

[tommy chen]

https://www.amazon.com/Sapphire-112...04&sr=8-3&keywords=Sapphire+AMD+Radeon+RX+580

 

[weezin]

For graphic card choices, OWC is now offering a Gigabyte Radeon RX 580 graphic card for $368.88 featuring 8GB VRAN GPU that is advertised as having Metal supporting the Mac Pro for upgrading it to macOS 10.14.x Mojave.

I have a 2011 5,1 MacPro with a single3.46 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon W3690 Processor along with 48GB (3 x 16GB) 1333 MHz DDR3 ECC memory modules and OWC Mercury Electra 3G 240GB SSD for the System Disk Boot Drive. The last OS X upgrade was El Capitan 10.11.6. Since most of what I do involves a heavy amount of Adobe CC Photoshop and InDesign usage along with a increasing amount of time being spent on both DaVinci Resolve Finial Cut Pro X for video editing, I was in need of graphics card with more GPU.

As such I wanted (pretty much needed) to up grade graphics card with at least double the amount of VRAM as my current 4GB graphics card as well as handle a OS upgrade from El Capitan to Mojave. Searching the forums like Mac Rumors how to do it along with what I will need to accomplish it was to say the least was daunting as the main issue was which graphics cards were actually compatible, one requiring Metal (required for Mojave) and the proper drivers, should you be attempting to use NVIDIA cards.

I got the card, swapped it out and upgraded the OS to Mojave all in one stroke. As far as I can see, everything is running as it should right from the start with both the telltale Apple chime and boot/log in screen, to running all my apps – Abobe CC Photoshop, Bridge, Acrobat, InDesign to Finial Cut Pro X. Hell, even Microsoft Office 2011 is working fine with no issues.

Thanks. So you got the RX 580 from OWC? In their notes, they say "Note: With this Metal-compatible graphics card installed, you will not be able to see the Apple logo at boot, nor can you access boot options. Once your system has fully booted, the graphics card will function normally."

You say that you're seeing the boot screen and login options - interesting! Do you know if OWC is doing anything special to that card to make it compatible, or is it just a regular RX 580 card?

https://www.amazon.com/Sapphire-112...04&sr=8-3&keywords=Sapphire+AMD+Radeon+RX+580

Thanks. I would assume this would not produce the boot screen?

 

[Photofish]

OWC has two different model Gigabyte RX 580 cards. The MP1012R580V (OWC SKU: OWCMP1012R580V), which is the one I got, and the GV-RX580GAMING-8GD (OWC SKU: GBYRX580GAMING8OWC) model that looks the same, but when I enquired about it, OWC said that one was not compatable with the Mac Pro and was meant only for use in a eGPU box.

The one I got and installed in my 5,1 cMP is the first one mentioned: https://eshop.macsales.com/item/GIGABYTE/MP1012R580V/
Running Mojave 10.14.2 I still get the chime at start up followed by the grey screen with the apple logo on it, followed by the Mojave sand dune with the log in window just like it did before I started this venture.

 

[weezin]

OWC has two different model Gigabyte RX 580 cards. The MP1012R580V (OWC SKU: OWCMP1012R580V), which is the one I got, and the GV-RX580GAMING-8GD (OWC SKU: GBYRX580GAMING8OWC) model that looks the same, but when I enquired about it, OWC said that one was not compatable with the Mac Pro and was meant only for use in a eGPU box.

The one I got and installed in my 5,1 cMP is the first one mentioned: https://eshop.macsales.com/item/GIGABYTE/MP1012R580V/
Running Mojave 10.14.2 I still get the chime at start up followed by the grey screen with the apple logo on it, followed by the Mojave sand dune with the log in window just like it did before I started this venture.

Weird. In my limited experience, I've never heard of anyone getting a boot screen with the RX 580. OWC themselves claim that you won't get a boot screen. I wonder how it's happening on your machine..

Can you get to the drive selector on startup by holding down the Option key after you head the chime?

 

[bjar]

Weird. In my limited experience, I've never heard of anyone getting a boot screen with the RX 580. OWC themselves claim that you won't get a boot screen. I wonder how it's happening on your machine..

The rx 580 will briefly show the Apple logo, and no, you will not get the boot selector.

 

[weezin]

The rx 580 will briefly show the Apple logo, and no, you will not get the boot selector.

Thanks, that's what I thought. I wonder if there's any chance in the future that these cards will have full compatibility (boot screens and all)..

 

[jscipione]

Installed an MSI RX 580 in my 5,1 yesterday and on the bright side it displays as "RX 580 8GB" in About this Mac once you install the Mojave firmware, yet the bad news is there is still no boot screen support :/

Still working on getting Mojave installed on my APFS RAID 0, I got Mojave to install by manually resizing the boot partition to be larger but the installer says something about not being able to bless the file system.

 

[weezin]

Installed an MSI RX 580 in my 5,1 yesterday and on the bright side it displays as "RX 580 8GB" in About this Mac once you install the Mojave firmware, yet the bad news is there is still no boot screen support :/

Still working on getting Mojave installed on my APFS RAID 0, I got Mojave to install by manually resizing the boot partition to be larger but the installer says something about not being able to bless the file system.

Good to know, thanks!

 

[weezin]

Just wanted to do a quick update to say that I'm loving my machine thus far. I upgraded it with a Samsung 860 EVO SSD and a USB 3.0 card.

I'm now thinking about a processor upgrade, and I had heard that the X5680 is a great option (which is likely what I'm going to go with). I see that there are a lot of them on eBay, mostly used it seems. Is there anything to look for specifically when picking one out? Reputable seller, but aside from that, I'm not sure.

To do the processor, I know I will need thermal paste, but what else?

 

[Slash-2CPU]

Just wanted to do a quick update to say that I'm loving my machine thus far. I upgraded it with a Samsung 860 EVO SSD and a USB 3.0 card.

I'm now thinking about a processor upgrade, and I had heard that the X5680 is a great option (which is likely what I'm going to go with). I see that there are a lot of them on eBay, mostly used it seems. Is there anything to look for specifically when picking one out? Reputable seller, but aside from that, I'm not sure.

To do the processor, I know I will need thermal paste, but what else?

Specifically, you want X5680 with S-Spec code SLBV5. Any CPU S-Spec that starts with Q or E is an engineering sample, not a production part and probably won't work.

X5690 would be S-Spec SLBVX.

You'll also need a 3mm hex key / Allen wrench to remove the heatsink. The cheapest one you can find will work the same as the ridiculously expensive ones.

 

[pl1984]

Just wanted to do a quick update to say that I'm loving my machine thus far. I upgraded it with a Samsung 860 EVO SSD and a USB 3.0 card.

I'm now thinking about a processor upgrade, and I had heard that the X5680 is a great option (which is likely what I'm going to go with). I see that there are a lot of them on eBay, mostly used it seems. Is there anything to look for specifically when picking one out? Reputable seller, but aside from that, I'm not sure.

To do the processor, I know I will need thermal paste, but what else?

Make sure to avoid engineering samples (ES branded). These are usually priced a little lower than the non-ES versions. Some may advise against purchasing from China. I've purchased a couple of things, including the 3.46GHz quad core processor for my 2010 Mac Pro, from China and haven't had issues. But I've read some feedback in this forum about being careful. If you have a specific auction you'd like feedback on let us know and we'll be happy to do so.

 

[weezin]

Specifically, you want X5680 with S-Spec code SLBV5. Any CPU S-Spec that starts with Q or E is an engineering sample, not a production part and probably won't work.

X5690 would be S-Spec SLBVX.

You'll also need a 3mm hex key / Allen wrench to remove the heatsink. The cheapest one you can find will work the same as the ridiculously expensive ones.

Make sure to avoid engineering samples (ES branded). These are usually priced a little lower than the non-ES versions. Some may advise against purchasing from China. I've purchased a couple of things, including the 3.46GHz quad core processor for my 2010 Mac Pro, from China and haven't had issues. But I've read some feedback in this forum about being careful. If you have a specific auction you'd like feedback on let us know and we'll be happy to do so.

Thanks guys! I didn't know there were two different versions.

This is the one I had my eyes on: https://www.ebay.com/itm/INTEL-X568...ityMailSmallFlatRateBox!94121!US!-1:rk:2:pf:0

Seems like it is the SLBV5.