Mac Pro 2010 2.4 8 core upgrades?

[Boomish69]

I am planning on a few upgrades to my dual CPU 8 core 2.4 Mac Pro 10.12.6 and wanted to check a few bits, I've spent hours searching & got it to this:

CPU upgrade - x5690 12 core CPU's from Ebay , that should work out of the box.

Ram - Existing 8 x 2gb - MICRON 2GB PC3-10600E DDR3-1333 UNBUFF ECC MEMORY MODULE MT9JSF25672AZ-1G4D1ZF - I think they will adjust to 1333 with the new CPU's, although the memory is a mixture of some kingston modules too, hopefully they are all 133 or I might be in trouble, I am thinking of replacing it all with 32BG of new 1333 server ram as it's so cheap from Ebay. I presume you have to upgrade to 1333 memory with the X5690? IE 1066 memory CL7 won't run at the higher speed?

Storage - I have a generic Sata III controller with Crucial MX 100 CT512 SSD for boot & 1 M500 CT240 for a work drive, it's not that fast 264 write & 451MB/s read , so plan to replace with : Lycom DT129 PCIe adapter (upgraded 120) with a Samsung M.2 but not sure which one?
Samsung SM961, PM961 or 960 EVO The new polaris chipset seems fast and the speed breakdowns here is a good guide : https://www.anandtech.com/show/10698/samsung-announces-960-pro-and-960-evo-m2-pcie-ssds
The 960 Pro s not worth the price difference so it's toss up btwent he 960 EVO & the SM961 but I can't find any thread saying these work in a Mac Pro, although I have read all NVMe drives should work in High Sierra.

GPU - as my main app is Logic Pro I'm not too fussed but as Logic Pro now uses Open CL it will be worth an upgrade, I've got an old 7850 'm going to shove in & see if it works, again i can't find anyone that has tried this particular card but I think an upgrade to High Sierra seems to promise support for all kinds of graphics cards..

Excuse the long list but if anyone can shed any light or opinion on any of these bit's I'd be truly grateful , there are some Christmas deals out there so it as good as time as any to upgrade, I've looked for nearly 2 years on doing this including the Hackintosh route but I think a X5690 and the NVME upgrade should breath enough life into the Mac Pro without too much hassle besides which I love these old machines

 

[h9826790]

I am planning on a few upgrades to my dual CPU 8 core 2.4 Mac Pro 10.12.6 and wanted to check a few bits, I've spent hours searching & got it to this:

CPU upgrade - x5690 12 core CPU's from Ebay , that should work out of the box.

Ram - Existing 8 x 2gb - MICRON 2GB PC3-10600E DDR3-1333 UNBUFF ECC MEMORY MODULE MT9JSF25672AZ-1G4D1ZF - I think they will adjust to 1333 with the new CPU's, although the memory is a mixture of some kingston modules too, hopefully they are all 133 or I might be in trouble, I am thinking of replacing it all with 32BG of new 1333 server ram as it's so cheap from Ebay. I presume you have to upgrade to 1333 memory with the X5690? IE 1066 memory CL7 won't run at the higher speed?

Storage - I have a generic Sata III controller with Crucial MX 100 CT512 SSD for boot & 1 M500 CT240 for a work drive, it's not that fast 264 write & 451MB/s read , so plan to replace with : Lycom DT129 PCIe adapter (upgraded 120) with a Samsung M.2 but not sure which one?
Samsung SM961, PM961 or 960 EVO The new polaris chipset seems fast and the speed breakdowns here is a good guide : https://www.anandtech.com/show/10698/samsung-announces-960-pro-and-960-evo-m2-pcie-ssds
The 960 Pro s not worth the price difference so it's toss up btwent he 960 EVO & the SM961 but I can't find any thread saying these work in a Mac Pro, although I have read all NVMe drives should work in High Sierra.

GPU - as my main app is Logic Pro I'm not too fussed but as Logic Pro now uses Open CL it will be worth an upgrade, I've got an old 7850 'm going to shove in & see if it works, again i can't find anyone that has tried this particular card but I think an upgrade to High Sierra seems to promise support for all kinds of graphics cards..

Excuse the long list but if anyone can shed any light or opinion on any of these bit's I'd be truly grateful , there are some Christmas deals out there so it as good as time as any to upgrade, I've looked for nearly 2 years on doing this including the Hackintosh route but I think a X5690 and the NVME upgrade should breath enough life into the Mac Pro without too much hassle besides which I love these old machines

Correct, X5690 will work OOTB.

Your current RAM should work fine with the X5690. Of course, if any one of the DIMM is 1066, then all DIMMs will only run at 1066. But it should not give you any trouble. The 1333 RAM will downclock themselves.

NVMe SSD only work AFTER you boot to desktop. In other words, as data drive only. Cannot boot.

Pretty sure quite a few members here used the 7850 before. It should be a OOTB card (no boot screen).

 

[pl1984]

Storage - I have a generic Sata III controller with Crucial MX 100 CT512 SSD for boot & 1 M500 CT240 for a work drive, it's not that fast 264 write & 451MB/s read , so plan to replace with : Lycom DT129 PCIe adapter (upgraded 120) with a Samsung M.2 but not sure which one?
Samsung SM961, PM961 or 960 EVO The new polaris chipset seems fast and the speed breakdowns here is a good guide : https://www.anandtech.com/show/10698/samsung-announces-960-pro-and-960-evo-m2-pcie-ssds
The 960 Pro s not worth the price difference so it's toss up btwent he 960 EVO & the SM961 but I can't find any thread saying these work in a Mac Pro, although I have read all NVMe drives should work in High Sierra.

Are you working with large enough files where the speed benefits from NVMe would pay dividends? I would suggest you start Activity Monitor and check your disk utilization to see if your current read/write throughput is holding you back. It's impressive to see multi-gigabyte throughput from NVMe drives but if you're not saturating your current SSDs then there's no benefit to buying a faster drive let alone an NVMe setup.

 

[ActionableMango]

If your existing RAM is 1066, you are not required to upgrade it to 1333. The new CPUs support "up to" 1333, but will certainly run fine with 1066.

You can mix 1066 RAM with 1333 RAM. It will all run at 1066.

For the 5,1 Apple installed 1333 RAM even when the Mac Pro was equipped with CPUs that only support up to 1066. So existing Apple RAM will run at 1333 when matched with the right CPUs. (4,1 came with 1066 RAM.)

 

[Boomish69]

Are you working with large enough files where the speed benefits from NVMe would pay dividends? I would suggest you start Activity Monitor and check your disk utilization to see if your current read/write throughput is holding you back. It's impressive to see multi-gigabyte throughput from NVMe drives but if you're not saturating your current SSDs then there's no benefit to buying a faster drive let alone an NVMe setup.

The NVME is for my main audio work drive, not a boot drive, I often run large audio projects in Pro Tools & Logic Pro, 96k surround stuff , the large concerts can hold 100 + 2 hour long WAV files , so def some big files now & again. Good idea to check the Acitivity monitor, I do use this now & again for fault finding, monitoring memory etc How can I tell if it’s holding the system back if it’s running at max I presume?

Thanks again for the replies everyone, really helpful.

 

[flowrider]

If your existing RAM is 1066, you are not required to upgrade it to 1333. The new CPUs support "up to" 1333, but will certainly run fine with 1066.

All 5,1 cMPs came with 1333MHz RAM. Even though some with slower CPUs would not run it at full speed.

Lou

 

[h9826790]

The NVME is for my main audio work drive, not a boot drive, I often run large audio projects in Pro Tools & Logic Pro, 96k surround stuff , the large concerts can hold 100 + 2 hour long WAV files , so def some big files now & again. Good idea to check the Acitivity monitor, I do use this now & again for fault finding, monitoring memory etc How can I tell if it’s holding the system back if it’s running at max I presume?

Thanks again for the replies everyone, really helpful.

If the hard drive constantly transfer at max speed, then it should be the bottleneck.

 

[Boomish69]

As a follow up I upgraded the Mac pro CPU today with two used X5690 , it's not as fast as what I hoped, not sure why but old 2.4 system with 8 cores got Geekbench scores of
Single core - 2042 Multi Core -11136

New 3.46 12 core got
Single Core -2704 Multi Core - 18700

I had seen reports of 28000 to 32000 with this chip why is mine slow , is it memory?

Everything is running at 1333 MHz now, so thanks to your advice all the existing memory worked fine. Anyone doing this I would suggest getting the Artic compound cleaner it made it so much easier to clean the heat sinks.

 

[h9826790]

As a follow up I upgraded the Mac pro CPU today with two used X5690 , it's not as fast as what I hoped, not sure why but old 2.4 system with 8 cores got Geekbench scores of
Single core - 2042 Multi Core -11136

New 3.46 12 core got
Single Core -2704 Multi Core - 18700

I had seen reports of 28000 to 32000 with this chip why is mine slow , is it memory?

Everything is running at 1333 MHz now, so thanks to your advice all the existing memory worked fine. Anyone doing this I would suggest getting the Artic compound cleaner it made it so much easier to clean the heat sinks.

Try GeekBench 3.

GeekBench 4 score is at a non linear scale, very hard to understand.

 

[MassMacMan]

The OT should be getting much higher scores. Several months ago I upgraded a 2010 8-core 2.4 gHz machine to a 12-core pair of X5680s at 3.33 gHz. Geekbench 3 scores were 30935 multi-core and 2775 single-core. Geekbench 4 scores are 24484 multi- and 2870 single-core. I have 48GB of RAM, but I got essentially the same scores with just 16 GB of RAM. The most important thing I did to get these scores was to strip down my OS to eliminate any background processes.

 

[Boomish69]

Try GeekBench 3.

GeekBench 4 score is at a non linear scale, very hard to understand.

you absolute beautiful person!..phew ok a bit more what i expected..Single Core 2652 & multi core 29611 ..64 bit
[doublepost=1514988149][/doublepost]

The OT should be getting much higher scores. Several months ago I upgraded a 2010 8-core 2.4 gHz machine to a 12-core pair of X5680s at 3.33 gHz. Geekbench 3 scores were 30935 multi-core and 2775 single-core. Geekbench 4 scores are 24484 multi- and 2870 single-core. I have 48GB of RAM, but I got essentially the same scores with just 16 GB of RAM. The most important thing I did to get these scores was to strip down my OS to eliminate any background processes.

Wow thats amazing scores, thanks so much for the feedback, I did read something about RAM using 3 slots & not four means its in triple mode & not dual (I have 8x 2gB sticks) but I am running Geekbench with quite lot of background apps running. I'll see what background I can turn off and see if Geekbench 4 goes up.

I did try Logic and that seems to be much improved, 24 cores multithreading

 

[iAmRod]

GPU - as my main app is Logic Pro I'm not too fussed but as Logic Pro now uses Open CL it will be worth an upgrade, I've got an old 7850 'm going to shove in & see if it works, again i can't find anyone that has tried this particular card but I think an upgrade to High Sierra seems to promise support for all kinds of graphics cards..

I'll chime in with my teeny bit of experience upgrading to High Sierra and having an older (2010) 12-core Mac Pro. Recently swapped out the stock GPU from Apple with a newer Sapphire card (no firmware upgrade coming from a Windows machine) that has 2GB of memory. While I could certainly boot into Mac OS Sierra and use it as I had intended, where I ran into an issue is when I attempted to upgrade to High Sierra from Sierra. Something with not having that Apple-compliant boot screen prevented me from allowing the machine firmware to be upgraded. Had to swap the stock card back in before I could complete the upgrade to High Sierra. However, after that was completed I put the newer (but still old by today's standards) Sapphire card back in and no issues.

Good Luck!!

 

[tomscott1988]

My single 3.46 6 core runs a higher single at just over 3000 but runs 15500ish on multi. Still 3000 isnt fast and most programmes still use single overmulti apart from rendering.

Interesting was working in lightroom last night and got utilities up for it to show lightroom making use of the 6 cores but it obviously doent work with hyperthreading as non of the other 6 were being taxed.

Been thinking about upgrading the machine to a twin by replacing the tray but they are almost impossible to find and the 2.4 8 cores are running £1200-1500 atm which is crazy. Looks like im waiting to see what the new pro brings.

 

[Boomish69]

I'll chime in with my teeny bit of experience upgrading to High Sierra and having an older (2010) 12-core Mac Pro. Recently swapped out the stock GPU from Apple with a newer Sapphire card (no firmware upgrade coming from a Windows machine) that has 2GB of memory. While I could certainly boot into Mac OS Sierra and use it as I had intended, where I ran into an issue is when I attempted to upgrade to High Sierra from Sierra. Something with not having that Apple-compliant boot screen prevented me from allowing the machine firmware to be upgraded. Had to swap the stock card back in before I could complete the upgrade to High Sierra. However, after that was completed I put the newer (but still old by today's standards) Sapphire card back in and no issues.

Good Luck!!

Thanks yes I had figured that, I'm keeping the old GPU safe and sound in case I need the boot screens, I think I can flash it with new firmware but I'll leave that to another day. it' takes 2 mins to swap and it's not often we need the boot screen.