MP 1,1-5,1 OS X Version for an old 3,1 Mac Pro for speed question.

[DouglasCarroll]

Hi everyone,

I've got an old Mac Pro 3,1 and am going to reinstall OS X so I can play around with it. Snow Leopard flies on it, which is what's on there now, but later versions are pretty slow. I'd like to find a happy medium between speed and usefulness. I'd like to install at least 10.12 so I can run newer versions of Firefox, etc but would also go higher using the Dosdude patcher if the system doesn't slow to a crawl.

Anyone out there have any anecdotal experience with their favorite OS version for this machine for speed vs usefulness? I tried Mojave on it once and thought "damn this is slow", Ha ha ha.

Thanks!

 

[scarlett7447]

I put High Sierra on mine and it runs quite well, I could even game on it and I haven't even upgraded it yet. It has only 6 GB of RAM, only one quad-core CPU and an 80 GB HDD. Only the GPU has been upgraded to a Radeon HD 5770.

 

[Diablo360]

Do you have an SSD installed? If not, that‘ll make a huge difference, more so than OS X version

 

[DouglasCarroll]

I do have an ssd installed as the bootdrive.

Thanks for the advice so far everyone!

 

[OS6-OSX]

If you have needed legacy apps for 10.6.8 just dual boot

 

[DouglasCarroll]

I just went ahead and upgraded to High Sierra for my app compatibility. So far everything seems just fine!