MP 4,1 - Doubts after upgrading

[pojavi]

Hi all. After some research and some money spent, I finally made it. So I´m proudly writing now from my cMP 4,1 flashed to 5,1 with mojave 10.14.2. Thanks a million to this forum and the people for their help.

I have installed mojave using the sapphire 7950 vaporx that I flashed some days ago with a PC. There was a moment of incertinty during the firmware update, as the gpu didn´t show the progress bar. The screen remained all white during the whole process, but after rebooting I got the white screen, then the logo and the progress bar rising. I don´t know if this is normal, but when the progress bar is in the middle, the screens turns to black, and returns again after 2 o 3 seconds showing the rest of the progress bar. Is this normal?

On the other hand, the gpu seems to work fine. It shows the apple logo, and allows to access the boot screen to select the boot unit.

I have installed a pcie with 3.0 ports usb 3.0, and finally an angelbird px1 with a samsung 970 250gb.

Although during the installation of mojave and the hardware upgrade, I didn´t have any problems, I have some doubts about which is the best slot configuration. Right now I have this one:

Slot 1: sapphire raddeon 7950 vaporx
Slot 2: due to the gpu size, blocks the second slot, the one x16)
Slot 3: angel bird px1 + samsung evo nmve 250gb (have formatted in APFS, I don´t know if HFS+ would have been better)
Slot 4: sonnos allegro 4 usb ports 3.0

Is this configuration ok? or do I have to change something to improve the performance. I have used speed test software and the read write rate is between 1300/1500 mb/s.

Finally I did notice that the gpu fans are sometimes noisy, which is the recommended rpm for the fans? Mac fans control indicates that the fan gpu runs at 1600/1800 rpm, so I don´t know if it is advisable to reset pram smc, etc, or installing drivers to solve this.......

Thanks in advance.

 

[crjackson2134]

I don´t know if this is normal, but when the progress bar is in the middle, the screens turns to black, and returns again after 2 o 3 seconds showing the rest of the progress bar. Is this normal?

Yes, that's normal...

I'll leave the rest of your questions to others...

 

[Alaska_guy]

Configuration looks good and your read and write speeds are normal due to the pcie 4 lanes.

 

[tsialex]

Configuration looks good and your read and write speeds are normal due to the pcie 4 lanes.

It's not the 4 lanes, but PCIe 2.0 that limits into 1500MB/s.

Even if the OP install the Angelbird Wings PX1 into slot 1 or 2, the speed will be the same. Only PCIe adapters with PCIe 3.0 switches can get past 1500MB/s when using slot 1 or 2.

 

[Alaska_guy]

Good clarification. Thanks!

 

[pojavi]

Hi, thank you all for your responses. At the moment it seems that the cMP works without any issue. It is tru that I expected to behave much faster thant with an classic ssd.

The startup chime sounds after 12 seconds, the apple logo appears after 33 secs , and the cMP is fully loaded after 1 minute. Right now I have installed: 4 hard disk (4tb each) in the 4 bays, the optical drive and an ssd next to it with high sierra. Finally the cards I indicated in the first post. So I understand it is normal that it takes some time to boot.

However, the gpu fan speed (the 7950 vapor-x has 2) are a little noisy. I am checking them using mac fans contro, and the RPM rate is between 1500 and 2000, is it normal?. I have also read that after a hardware update a pram/smc reset is convenient but I don´t want to mess around without being sure. I would like to fix this without any third partys software.

On the other hand I don´t know is the specs of my cMP are responsible for some time of bottleneck. I mean, these are the specs:

Mac Pro (early 2009)
2,66 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
16 GB 1066 MHz DDR3
AMD Radeon HD 7950 3072 MB

Thanks again for your help.