MP 1,1-5,1 My new? Mac pro 4.1/5.1

[Cactusface]

Hi All,
It's been a long time since I had my hands on a Mac pro, it ran something like Snow leapard!!

I have just got myself a Mac pro 4.1 upgraded to a 5.1. I was a bit mysified by the no-boot screen, but understand that's down to the graphics card... But it also has no W-Fi card, that's a bit of a bummer. I am running Mojave and thinks it's right that this does not support the old wi-fi cards, So I need a wi-fi card, there seem to be a lot on ebay, but what's good or bad? Any BCxxxxxxxx numbers I should look for?

In time I hope to dual boot windows 10, not sure if that works with no boot screen, or would opencore be a better way of doing it. One youtube video made it look so simple, other talk about patching, etc think I need to learn a bit more yet!!

Here's a couple of screen shots that might help you see what I have.

Regards

Mel.

 

[KeesMacPro]

Hi,

Congrats with your new Mac Pro

If you're just looking for a Wifi card this one is cheap on eBay , and doesnt have to be original Apple to work : BCM94322MC ( compatible with Mojave ).

In case you need the latest/fastest Bluetooth etc you'll have to search a bit on this forum there are several threads about wifi/bluetooth kits and howto.

You could install OpenCore or MyBootMgr for dual booting with a bootscreen , but it's also possible to install Windows in legacy mode without a bootscreen :

Classic Mac Pro (5,1): installing Windows 10, switching between macOS Mojave & Windows without boot screen - CrystalIDEA Blog

crystalidea.com

 

[Cactusface]

Hi Kees,
Thanks for your reply, after 150 views, I didn't think there was anyone at home! So good to hear from you, was there ment to be a link to the ebay card? or is it just generic? Took a quick look at the windows install site, must give it a good read!

OK guys please lets have a few more ideas...

 

[KeesMacPro]

Hi Kees,
Thanks for your reply, after 150 views, I didn't think there was anyone at home! So good to hear from you, was there ment to be a link to the ebay card? or is it just generic? Took a quick look at the windows install site, must give it a good read!

Hi Mel,

I've used (and still do) different brands of the BCM94322MC and all work fine, so depending on your location you'll find one relatively easy googling/at eBay for ~15,- bucks

There are lots of upgrades you could consider e.g. GPU, RAM , NVMe drive etc.

cMP {classicMacPro}{4,1 & 5,1} - Upgrade Guide Sticky Discussion

Hey Folks, Lets start a discussion and collect everything relevant for cMP upgraders out there. Topics to consider: CPU Upgrades Compatibility chart CPU Delid / standoffs 4,1 to 5,1 firmware upgrade Memory Compatibility and Upgrades UDIMM Model Numbers RDIMM Model Numbers RAM...

forums.macrumors.com

Edit: personally I'd start with a superior GPU ,unless you're fine with the limitations of the GT710 of course.
For Mojave and up Nvidia Kepler family and AMD Metal compatible cards will run fine and much better than the GT710.

RAM sticks are not expensive e.g. a server pull on eBay from a major seller.
For best performance install in triple channel e.g. 3x8GB or 3x16GB (1333MHz).

GPU Compatibility List for cMP

Content: 1. Summary 2. Information on common GPUs that can be used in cMP 3. GPU power consumption 4. Color compatibility 5. Flashing nuances 6. What to choose? 7. Useful links. 1. Summary 1.1. There are 50+ GPU types that are compatible with cMP (classic MacPro = Mac Pro 1.1-5.1/...

forums.macrumors.com

Another good source for maintenance , troubleshooting , disassembling etc is the Technician Guide:

https://tim.id.au/laptops/apple/macpro/macpro_early2009.pdf

 

[Cactusface]

Hi Kees,
well my wireless card arrived today (very quick) and I installed it, but had trouble connecting the second aerial lead, and gave it a try without, and the connection is fine. I get a full set of bars. A few minor things I've got a white! mac keyboard and mouse arriving next week.
Yes I noted the memory was not the fastest I could use, perhaps 32GB would help, a better GPU yes in time...
Here's a couple of pics, the other is my DIY Z80 system... https://hackaday.io/project/168104-...slrLPOT9_0maRE8MjxCljVLgEsdZt7Cpn5RYl5wko4xwc

 

[KeesMacPro]

Hi Mel,

Good to hear the airport card works, keep upgrading
Getting the antenna cables connected can be a challenge , been there.
For low costs and depending on the load, maybe 3x8GB 1333MHz RAM is sufficient and faster than the sticks installed now.
For a massive GPU improvement at low cost I'd look for e.g. GTX680 and flash it with a Mac BIOS.
There are loads of interesting threads here , definitely worth exploring a bit!

The Z80 looks very cool, but the monitor is awesome!

 

[Cactusface]

Hi Kees, and any one else,
The Mac already has a PCIe drive it's 256GB, here's a speed test! what do you think? I have nothing to go by!! I have a GTX660 in the PC I could try that, how do people get Graphic cards flashed ?? Can I do it, done a bit of PIC and arduino flashing!!!

Best


Mel.

 

[KeesMacPro]

Hi Mel,

Write speed seems quite slow to me (usually R/W are both ~1500 = saturating PCIe 2.0x4 )
I don't know what blade it is exactly, but check if TRIM is enabled in About this Mac>system info> PCI
If not , open terminal:
sudo trimforce enable

Another very useful app is DriveDX to check the health and status of your drives.

To flash a GPU you'll need e.g. NVFlash or ATIFlash running Windows.
You also need a Mac BIOS for this specific GPU , not sure a GTX660 BIOS Mac version exists..
The GTX680 is a very popular GPU and there are threads about it here at MacRumors.
You'll have to google a bit for this , but GPU BIOS can be found at e.g. TechPowerUp etc.

Anyway, the GTX660 would be a great improvement compared to the GT710....

 

[Cactusface]

Hi Kees,
Yes I got DriveDX and it shows the drive has ran for 1700+ hours but healthy! The drive is on a very basic PCIe card, no controller or anything like that, so perhaps that could do with a change.(I assume a blade is a combo of drive etc) I found nothing in system, infact I don't think I found system info!! (Mojave) but can't see it anywhere? Ref TRIM.

Last week I brought a ATI HD4870 for 99p that's less then 1U$D (I think?), sold as faulty as the fan was very noisy! So I gave it a try and yes the fan was going full speed. I removed the fan and heatsink to find the thermal paste solid, like cement, cleaned it up added some new and OK, BUT the fan was still going full pelt!! I removed the extra power connectors and it's been running fine, even with videos/youtube, photo editing, etc. Is it safe to leave it like this??
More pictures...

 

[KeesMacPro]

Hi Kees,
Yes I got DriveDX and it shows the drive has ran for 1700+ hours but healthy! The drive is on a very basic PCIe card, no controller or anything like that, so perhaps that could do with a change.(I assume a blade is a combo of drive etc) I found nothing in system, infact I don't think I found system info!! (Mojave) but can't see it anywhere? Ref TRIM.

Last week I brought a ATI HD4870 for 99p that's less then 1U$D (I think?), sold as faulty as the fan was very noisy! So I gave it a try and yes the fan was going full speed. I removed the fan and heatsink to find the thermal paste solid, like cement, cleaned it up added some new and OK, BUT the fan was still going full pelt!! I removed the extra power connectors and it's been running fine, even with videos/youtube, photo editing, etc. Is it safe to leave it like this??

Hi Mel,

Sorry my mistake, look at NVMe in system info.
A blade is a NVMe SSD.
You could also check under SATA since you have another SSD installed ;if TRIM is enabled it's for all SSD drives.
A controller isnt needed: the NVMe blade is connected directly to the PCIe slot through a PCB.

The HD4870 is a nice find to tinker!
Unfortunately it's not Metal compatible, so it will not run/ run without acceleration under Mojave though...

Personally I would never run any GPU without all 6/8 pin power connectors connected.
Besides the probability to destroy the card, in this case all power is drawn from the PCIe slot.
I'm actually surprised it works.
The HD4870 is rated TDP 150W, but the slot is rated at max 75W...

 

[Cactusface]

Hi Kees,
It looks like TRIM is enabled for the PCIe SSD but not the others, which seems kind of strange!
I tried the HD4870 and it seems OK, gives me a boot screen that I'm sure will be useful at some point.
I downloaded an on-line shooting game, to test the cards and the difference now shows, the HD4870 is pretty useless for anything like that.

When I got this Mac the USER was user and the password was user, but I managed to get myself set up as ADMIN, but can't delete the old user, also when using the terminal and SUDO it will not accept a password, it shows a key symbol is this to do with the keychain? How does that work?

Again a few attachments to help!

Best.

Mel.

 

[KeesMacPro]

Hi Mel,

I guess the NVMe is an Apple SSD , and thus automatically with TRIM enabled.
For 3rd party SSDs you have to use the terminal command.

If you set up the new user account with admin privileges, the command should work.
Note that when you write your password in terminal, it shows nothing, so just "blind" type password and press enter.

Personally I would consider to backup the OS ( with e.g. TM) and do a clean Mojave install (especially in case of account trouble).
After the install you can import your data with Migration Assistant .
This way you'll have an absolute clean install and user account without any possible data/settings from the previous owner.

This is an excellent thread about Mojave install and covers all possible scenarios (post #1):

MP5,1: What you have to do to upgrade to Mojave (BootROM upgrade instructions thread)

Please fully read this first post, you will probably find that you have one or more problems described into the various notes below. Mojave will only install if you have upgraded your BootROM to the current release and your Mac Pro have a Metal capable GPU*. If you are trying to install Mojave...

forums.macrumors.com

 

[Cactusface]

Hi Kees,
I did a clean install of mojave, I had not tried before as I had heard of it not being easy as it's unsupported by Apple, but I just got it from the Apps store! and it installed OK. And again as you said the Migration assistant did the rest! Better then I expected. I installed it to one of the Samsung 500GB EVO and it now boots a lot quicker.
I might now use CCC to copy it back to the PCIe M.2 drive which is also a Samsung drive a PM961 so it's not an apple drive!! is it?

Thanks for the help, BTW I had used time machine from the beginning.

Mel.

 

[KeesMacPro]

Hi Mel,

Mojave is the latest supported Os for a MP 5,1 or 4,1>5,1 and known as one of the most stable OS .
Good to hear all worked out fine , make sure the M.2 drive is formatted as APFS before cloning to this drive.

IINM Apple used a PM961 too, and this would be the only possibility to have TRIM enabled on this drive and the SATA SSDs not....
Anyway, I would check TRIM for all SSDs and if not activated for all yet, use the terminal command.
TRIM improves performance and maintains the drive "clean".

BTW: it's normal that the time until booting process starts , is a bit longer for a NVMe drive than for a SATA drive, but performance is far better with a blade .

 

[jscipione]

I had similar write speed issue on an NVMe drive in my Mac Pro. Check what your block size is set to. You may use the following Terminal command to output your block size:

diskutil info / | grep "Block Size"

If your block size is set to 512 that might explain the slow write speeds you're seeing. Converting to 4096 will fix the problem, but might require a Windows box and a Samsung utility program to do it.

 

[KeesMacPro]

I had similar write speed issue on an NVMe drive in my Mac Pro. Check what your block size is set to. You may use the following Terminal command to output your block size:

diskutil info / | grep "Block Size"

If your block size is set to 512 that might explain the slow write speeds you're seeing. Converting to 4096 will fix the problem, but might require a Windows box and a Samsung utility program to do it.

I've just been reading a lot about setting block sizes etc : very interesting, but finding a hands-on howto isnt easy apparently...

Looking at the specs of the PM961 Write speed is rated at ~1100MB/s.
Now benchmarking the blade with larger files e.g. 5GB, could it be that the result as posted by the OP is normal, due to filling the cache completely and/or wear?

@Cactusface : could you maybe run Blackmagic set to "stress 1GB" and see what happens?

 

[Cactusface]

Hi jsc,
Thanks for your input! followed your instructions and it came back with 4096 so 4K which I believe is right.
But Kees when I ran BlackMagic it was already set to stress "5GB" I'll rerun the test at 1GB and see how it goes!

My BackUp drive which is a mechanical HD is formatted in OS and not APFS, if I erase it, I still don't get the option to use APFS?

 

[KeesMacPro]

Hi Mel,

4096 is perfect, so this is not causing the slow write speed (if I may respond to this).

Generally, for Mojave and up , the best performance is with HFS+ for data(especially on spinners) and APFS for OS drives.
Running Mojave, the option APFS should be there in Disk Utility, note that partition scheme is GUID (always for all mac volumes regardless data or OS).

APFS is mandatory as the format for volumes with OS Mojave and up .
Now, what could happen is that if you clone the OS to your blade formatted as HFS+ , you just did a known workaround to use a OS on a HFS+ volume.
This works , but you can't update without another workaround....

Curious what comes out a 1GB test on the erased and new formatted blade!

BTW : Mac OS journaled = HFS+

 

[jscipione]

Hi jsc,
Thanks for your input! followed your instructions and it came back with 4096 so 4K which I believe is right.
But Kees when I ran BlackMagic it was already set to stress "5GB" I'll rerun the test at 1GB and see how it goes!

My BackUp drive which is a mechanical HD is formatted in OS and not APFS, if I erase it, I still don't get the option to use APFS?

Looks like your ssd is set to 4096 block size so that's not the problem. Perhaps there is a firmware update that could be applied? Looks like you'd need Samsung Magician software [0] to check, and that software only runs on Windows. From what I've seen the drive should write faster than it currently is at least on a regular PC [1] and even on a Mac Pro [2] at least one that has PCIe v3. Unfortunately I was unable to find a PM961 or PM960 Evo benchmark on another classic Mac Pro.

If your backup drive is using Time Machine you cannot use APFS on it unless you upgrade to Big Sur. It's probably better to keep the mechanical spinning rust drive on HFS+ for performance reasons anyway. However if that doesn't convince you and you still want to convert the drive from HFS+ to APFS you may do so using Disk Utility => Edit menu => Convert to APFS.

[0] https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/download/tools/
[1] https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/...sing-blackmagic-disk-speed-test.79217/page-37
[2] https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/pcie-ssds-nvme-ahci.2146725/?post=26639343#post-26639343

 

[KeesMacPro]

Perhaps there is a firmware update that could be applied? Looks like you'd need Samsung Magician software [0] to check,

IINM there is no firmware or other software available for the PM961, as it seems to be an OEM part and without Samsung support.

 

[Cactusface]

HI,
Well changing the stress to 1GB made quite a difference to the write speed test as you can see! I'm happy with the back up disk on HFS+ I'm now going to look at getting windows running on the Mac, may try the easy way first? But which is that? Bootcamp don't seem to work with this Mac Pro! Surely windows will need some support and drivers for the Mac hardware?

 

[KeesMacPro]

HI,
Well changing the stress to 1GB made quite a difference to the write speed test as you can see! I'm happy with the back up disk on HFS+ I'm now going to look at getting windows running on the Mac, may try the easy way first? But which is that?

Hi Mel,

Looks like the PM961 is working fine!

For Mojave and up Bootcamp is no longer supported on the Mac Pro 4,1/5,1.
However, it is possible to install Windows in 2 ways:
-Legacy mode:

Bare Metal Windows on cMP

PART 1 of 3 This is a guide to installing Windows 10 on Classic Mac Pros without the Boot Camp Assistant. This is one of many ways to implement such a "Bare Metal" setup but is a straightforward method. This guide is for installing Legacy Windows, as opposed to UEFI Windows, but can also be...

forums.macrumors.com

Or e.g:
https://crystalidea.com/nl/blog/classic-mac-pro-and-windows

-UEFI mode :
This way you'll have to install OpenCore first , note that an UEFI install will corrupt the BootROM if booted without the OpenCore protection.

BTW: did you succeed in setting TRIM for the SATA SSD?

 

[Cactusface]

Hi Kees,
Yes I forgot to mention it, but yes got trim working for the other SSD's as per your intructions.
Best

Mel.

 

[Cactusface]

Hi Dayo,
So I thought I'd try your way of installing and running Windows, all OK so far but my version of Disk utility does not give me the choice of setting the System file type, and I end up with a GUID and not MBR

type,

but I am hoping to use a Samsung EVO SSD, or does it have to be a HHD?

Any Help!!

Mel

 

[Macschrauber]

it's getting risky with GUID !

At least make a Firmware backup to get rid of the certificates.

Macschrauber's CMP Rom Dump.dmg

Ihr persönlicher Freigabelink | GMX Cloud

Mit diesem Link erhalten Sie Zugriff auf die mit Ihnen geteilten Daten.

c.gmx.net

this is my tool for it, the plus is it probes the chip and do some analysing of the rom health.

for formatting mbr you should show all volumes in view - and use the button "erase", you stepped in the trap almost everyone steps.