Do you have a write up or at very least pictures? I am very curious to see the custom raid setup.
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Xs 1,1-3,1 time for a sticky: Xserve upgrade guide
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Are you currently running multiple mac vms on your machine through ESXi? And if so how does it preform?
Has anyone been exploring OpenCore on their Xserve? Curious if anyone was making progress.
I have OpenCore running on mine. I’ve also played a bit with a flashed thunderbolt titan ridge card.
What are you looking for from OpenCore?
(I’m also using a flashed WX 4150 MXM card and am running Mojave)
I have been running OC on my Mac Pro for a while and just picked up an Xserve 3,1 a few days ago to tinker with now that my Mac Pro is pretty maxed out. It seems like there is a lot of potential in the Xserve but not a lot of talk going on. My Xserve is still stock running ElCapitan. I am just starting to learn and explore.
Did you flash your Xserve to 5,1?
As for Open Core on the Xserve I was curious if anyone had attempted to use the New Mac Pro ID's etc and managed to have all twelve ram slots working with Westmere Processors.
Did you flash your Xserve to 5,1?
As for Open Core on the Xserve I was curious if anyone had attempted to use the New Mac Pro ID's etc and managed to have all twelve ram slots working with Westmere Processors.
Mine is not cross flashed. But I do have a modded BootROM.
im Sure a customized smbios setting via OpenCore will work. I don’t think it would be to use the MacPro 7,1 ID though.
Experimenting- I flashed my Xserve3,1 to Mac Pro5,1 successfully last night and installed 2 delidded X5675's I had left over from my cMP. Now running 2x3.06 cpus with 64gb(8x8) 1333 ECC ram. I seem to have lost access to the SATA carrier/HDD. Do we know if SAS carriers are recognized, or do you lose access to the hot swap bays completely?
Edit- Seems that the loss of SATA carriers is a known issue. Hope to have some SAS carriers headed my way soon to try out.
Edit- Seems that the loss of SATA carriers is a known issue. Hope to have some SAS carriers headed my way soon to try out.
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Which WX4150 did you end up getting to work in your Xserve? I saw your post in the iMac thread and you posted an eBay auction there. Curious because they say only Dell branded cards are working but the auction you linked showed an HP card. I ordered THIS card on eBay before seeing the post saying only Dell branded cards worked in iMacs. It hasn't arrived yet, hoping I didn't make a mistake, lol.
This looks like the exact card I bought. Those part numbers look like a match to what I Recall.
The imac may be the one needing Dell GPUs. But the xserve has a different chipset and is believed to be why this card works for xserve but not for iMac.
It should work out of the box and with the right OpenCore config you’ll get a boot screen.
You can boot linux via EFI with it working out of the box. There are ROMs you can flash to get a classic Apple oem boot screen which will require a customized BootROM on the xserve.
Thanks for the reply! Mine should show up soon. This seems like a solid upgrade, can't wait to
try it out.
The GT 120 heatsink does fit it but to feel safer with cooling you may want to swap it out with this one.
This is the heatsink I’m using.
HP 716551-001 708165-001 NVIDIA QUADRO Q1000 MXM Heatsink for sale online | eBay
Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for HP 716551-001 708165-001 NVIDIA QUADRO Q1000 MXM Heatsink at the best online prices at eBay! Free shipping for many products!
www.ebay.com
Thanks!The GT 120 heatsink does fit it but to feel safer with cooling you may want to swap it out with this one.
This is the heatsink I’m using.
HP 716551-001 708165-001 NVIDIA QUADRO Q1000 MXM Heatsink for sale online | eBay
Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for HP 716551-001 708165-001 NVIDIA QUADRO Q1000 MXM Heatsink at the best online prices at eBay! Free shipping for many products!www.ebay.com
I wanted to thank you again for the info on the WX4150 and the suggestion about the heatsink. I ran the WX 4150 with the GT 120 heatsink for a while waiting for the one you suggested to arrive. It came in today, I installed it and I'm seeing much better temps.The GT 120 heatsink does fit it but to feel safer with cooling you may want to swap it out with this one.
This is the heatsink I’m using.
HP 716551-001 708165-001 NVIDIA QUADRO Q1000 MXM Heatsink for sale online | eBay
Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for HP 716551-001 708165-001 NVIDIA QUADRO Q1000 MXM Heatsink at the best online prices at eBay! Free shipping for many products!www.ebay.com
Also be sure you remove the extra thermal pad on the top of the new heatsink as it’s probably not able to contact anything to dissipate more heat it likely would act more like a blanket.
xserve are super underated : to me they are the next macpro5.1
they can be have for 150€ in most case, there a tons of parts available, they basically never fail because of the servergrade cooling...
if upgraded to work as a 5.1 via opencore they could very much be a very good alternative to cMP 5.1.
those wx4150 is a great idea.
as I said a couple of year ago a maxed out xserve with dual x5690, an anfeltec squid raid 0 ssd and 192 gb wil cost you less than 2000€ if you shop wisely and can be a very, very potent machine to do network render. coupled with atto nt12 card they are a consistent 900mb/s read/write nas....
they can be have for 150€ in most case, there a tons of parts available, they basically never fail because of the servergrade cooling...
if upgraded to work as a 5.1 via opencore they could very much be a very good alternative to cMP 5.1.
those wx4150 is a great idea.
as I said a couple of year ago a maxed out xserve with dual x5690, an anfeltec squid raid 0 ssd and 192 gb wil cost you less than 2000€ if you shop wisely and can be a very, very potent machine to do network render. coupled with atto nt12 card they are a consistent 900mb/s read/write nas....
Hi guys,
I’ve been reading this forum for some time now and was waiting for an easy straight forwards way to upgrade my xserve 3,1 to 5,1. I can see that some guys managed to do it with some loses in front panels led’s, LOM, etc. can someone help me please with the step by step instructions to upgrade my machine? Thanks a lot
I’ve been reading this forum for some time now and was waiting for an easy straight forwards way to upgrade my xserve 3,1 to 5,1. I can see that some guys managed to do it with some loses in front panels led’s, LOM, etc. can someone help me please with the step by step instructions to upgrade my machine? Thanks a lot
The front panel LEDs are lost not because of the firmware, as they are a USB device, but because the drivers are not part of macOS beyond Lion, but could be hacked into up to mavericks if i recall correctly. There is a github repo out there that has an open source recreation of the CPU lights on the front panel that works in mojave.
LOM still works when running the hybrid setup that i did using the re-purposed mac pro 4,1 to 5,1 flasher that i modified to go from XS3,1 to MP5,1 version 144 firmware. You just need to set it up first it looks like. I'm also going to guess that the LOM firmware is stored on a different SPI flash chip from the mac EFI. The RAM slot issue still hasn't been fully vetted, but suffice it to say that currently you lose 2 or 4 slots (single vs dual CPU) with the current methods we have, it might be fixable via Clover but that has a higher risk of bricking the mac (based on the cMP 5,1) and I've heard that booting ESXi allows for all slots to work, so it depends on what OS you are booting. needs further testing.
Thanks a lot for your reply! I managed to flash it using dosdude1’s rom flash and extracted the firmware from Mojave’s installer. I used the hack the bring the led’s back to life, and when all went well I decided to upgrade the processor and in the process I snagged a few pins in the cpu tray, so I ordered a replacement logic board, hopefully it should be here in 10 days or so. Indeed I lost 2 ram slots per processor and the serial number was gone. I tried using opencore to inject them but I felt it’s a bit complicated and didn’t want to screw it up, any ideas about that? Have u used it before? Thanks a lot
Well, it looks like one was shorted and melted (changed colour from Yellow to silver with black chard on it) and another 5 were bent but could bend them back, and one was broken. I found brand new board on Ebay for about 40 dollars, so honestly its much better than going through the hassle of trying to fix it.
I posted about this in the other xserve3,1 thread, but I think there is a wider audience in this one.
Using OpenCore at least version 0.6.3 (0.6.4 in my case) we can set a custom smbios memory profile which will allow a Mac Pro 5,1 flashed xserve with westmere chips to retain use of all 6 or 12 DIMMs. The annoying part is you have to manually populate the memory configuration with the properties of your ram but in my testing on my single CPU board shows it works fine. I ran out of thermal paste so i can't swap to the dual socket board i have to test there but i'd expect it would just work.
Quotes from the other thread with my posting there (the original thread also has some photos of the about this mac / system profiler):
Using OpenCore at least version 0.6.3 (0.6.4 in my case) we can set a custom smbios memory profile which will allow a Mac Pro 5,1 flashed xserve with westmere chips to retain use of all 6 or 12 DIMMs. The annoying part is you have to manually populate the memory configuration with the properties of your ram but in my testing on my single CPU board shows it works fine. I ran out of thermal paste so i can't swap to the dual socket board i have to test there but i'd expect it would just work.
Quotes from the other thread with my posting there (the original thread also has some photos of the about this mac / system profiler):
I think I took some pictures when I first did it, but at the moment I can't find them.
And, it is running on my desk at the office where I haven't been, except to build the xserve, for 8 months.
Using the G5 raid backplane in the 3,1 xserve is annoying because the backplane takes up space used by the processor fans. I tried removing one of the fans, but then the machine wouldn't boot. Ended up needing to remove the fins from the fan but leave it connected, and bend away the metal frame for the fans. Real pain. Would not do it again given the option, would just run with m2s or similar plugged direct into pcie.
But at the same time, it has been relatively stable with the 3x 960GB SSDs in the trays running raid 1 + hot spare, with a very old SAS/SATA 3gbps raid card (6gbps card is not compatible with the backplane).
I have 5 mac VMs running in ESXi. 2 catalina, 2 mojave, and 1 el capitan. Performance is about on par with the VNC session into the 2015 imac in our QA lab, so I'm happy with the result.
I will probably just use it as is until i get a hardware failure, then will replace it with whichever mac minis are on the vmware HCL at the time.
That is great news! Sounds very promising. My serve is down for the moment as I pulled the x5675s out for a cMP that I picked up, but I would love to experiment with this when I get some new processors.
This is what i've got in my config.plist for memory configuration.
It works, but cosmetically i'm sure it could be improved, and I'm not 100% sure that the slots are correct but I suspect that as long as you are fully populated and use the same size DIMM in all slots you'd be "fine"
The example below is 6 DIMMs, (but I did do 12 slots as I plan to move to dual socket) all slots should be defined according to OC docs, just set size to 0MB for empty slots, but that assumes you know 100% which slots are which.
I have 6x 8Gb 2R4 Samsung 10600R DDR3L-ECC 1333MT/s (I presume the "R" indicates registered so that is defined in the info as well)
For serial numbers I put in my guesses for P1 / P2 (processor) and then a slot number, but they probably don't line up with the board as those aren't in order either.
M393B1K70CH0-YH9
It works, but cosmetically i'm sure it could be improved, and I'm not 100% sure that the slots are correct but I suspect that as long as you are fully populated and use the same size DIMM in all slots you'd be "fine"
The example below is 6 DIMMs, (but I did do 12 slots as I plan to move to dual socket) all slots should be defined according to OC docs, just set size to 0MB for empty slots, but that assumes you know 100% which slots are which.
I have 6x 8Gb 2R4 Samsung 10600R DDR3L-ECC 1333MT/s (I presume the "R" indicates registered so that is defined in the info as well)
For serial numbers I put in my guesses for P1 / P2 (processor) and then a slot number, but they probably don't line up with the board as those aren't in order either.
M393B1K70CH0-YH9
XML:
<key>Memory</key>
<dict>
<key>DataWidth</key>
<integer>64</integer>
<key>Devices</key>
<array>
<dict>
<key>AssetTag</key>
<string></string>
<key>BankLocator</key>
<string>BANK 0</string>
<key>DeviceLocator</key>
<string>ChannelA-DIMM0</string>
<key>Manufacturer</key>
<string>Samsung</string>
<key>PartNumber</key>
<string>M393B1K70CH0-YH9</string>
<key>SerialNumber</key>
<string>P1-1</string>
<key>Size</key>
<integer>8192</integer>
<key>Speed</key>
<integer>1333</integer>
</dict>
<dict>
<key>AssetTag</key>
<string></string>
<key>BankLocator</key>
<string>BANK 1</string>
<key>DeviceLocator</key>
<string>ChannelA-DIMM1</string>
<key>Manufacturer</key>
<string>Samsung</string>
<key>PartNumber</key>
<string>M393B1K70CH0-YH9</string>
<key>SerialNumber</key>
<string>P1-2</string>
<key>Size</key>
<integer>8192</integer>
<key>Speed</key>
<integer>1333</integer>
</dict>
<dict>
<key>AssetTag</key>
<string></string>
<key>BankLocator</key>
<string>BANK 2</string>
<key>DeviceLocator</key>
<string>ChannelB-DIMM0</string>
<key>Manufacturer</key>
<string>Samsung</string>
<key>PartNumber</key>
<string>M393B1K70CH0-YH9</string>
<key>SerialNumber</key>
<string>P1-3</string>
<key>Size</key>
<integer>8192</integer>
<key>Speed</key>
<integer>1333</integer>
</dict>
<dict>
<key>AssetTag</key>
<string></string>
<key>BankLocator</key>
<string>BANK 3</string>
<key>DeviceLocator</key>
<string>ChannelB-DIMM1</string>
<key>Manufacturer</key>
<string>Samsung</string>
<key>PartNumber</key>
<string>M393B1K70CH0-YH9</string>
<key>SerialNumber</key>
<string>P1-4</string>
<key>Size</key>
<integer>8192</integer>
<key>Speed</key>
<integer>1333</integer>
</dict>
<dict>
<key>AssetTag</key>
<string></string>
<key>BankLocator</key>
<string>BANK 4</string>
<key>DeviceLocator</key>
<string>ChannelC-DIMM0</string>
<key>Manufacturer</key>
<string>Samsung</string>
<key>PartNumber</key>
<string>M393B1K70CH0-YH9</string>
<key>SerialNumber</key>
<string>P1-5</string>
<key>Size</key>
<integer>8192</integer>
<key>Speed</key>
<integer>1333</integer>
</dict>
<dict>
<key>AssetTag</key>
<string></string>
<key>BankLocator</key>
<string>BANK 5</string>
<key>DeviceLocator</key>
<string>ChannelC-DIMM1</string>
<key>Manufacturer</key>
<string>Samsung</string>
<key>PartNumber</key>
<string>M393B1K70CH0-YH9</string>
<key>SerialNumber</key>
<string>P1-6</string>
<key>Size</key>
<integer>8192</integer>
<key>Speed</key>
<integer>1333</integer>
</dict>
<dict>
<key>AssetTag</key>
<string></string>
<key>BankLocator</key>
<string>BANK 6</string>
<key>DeviceLocator</key>
<string>ChannelA-DIMM0</string>
<key>Manufacturer</key>
<string>Samsung</string>
<key>PartNumber</key>
<string>M393B1K70CH0-YH9</string>
<key>SerialNumber</key>
<string>P2-1</string>
<key>Size</key>
<integer>0</integer>
<key>Speed</key>
<integer>1333</integer>
</dict>
<dict>
<key>AssetTag</key>
<string></string>
<key>BankLocator</key>
<string>BANK 7</string>
<key>DeviceLocator</key>
<string>ChannelA-DIMM1</string>
<key>Manufacturer</key>
<string>Samsung</string>
<key>PartNumber</key>
<string>M393B1K70CH0-YH9</string>
<key>SerialNumber</key>
<string>P2-2</string>
<key>Size</key>
<integer>0</integer>
<key>Speed</key>
<integer>1333</integer>
</dict>
<dict>
<key>AssetTag</key>
<string></string>
<key>BankLocator</key>
<string>BANK 8</string>
<key>DeviceLocator</key>
<string>ChannelB-DIMM0</string>
<key>Manufacturer</key>
<string>Samsung</string>
<key>PartNumber</key>
<string>M393B1K70CH0-YH9</string>
<key>SerialNumber</key>
<string>P2-3</string>
<key>Size</key>
<integer>0</integer>
<key>Speed</key>
<integer>1333</integer>
</dict>
<dict>
<key>AssetTag</key>
<string></string>
<key>BankLocator</key>
<string>BANK 9</string>
<key>DeviceLocator</key>
<string>ChannelB-DIMM1</string>
<key>Manufacturer</key>
<string>Samsung</string>
<key>PartNumber</key>
<string>M393B1K70CH0-YH9</string>
<key>SerialNumber</key>
<string>P2-4</string>
<key>Size</key>
<integer>0</integer>
<key>Speed</key>
<integer>1333</integer>
</dict>
<dict>
<key>AssetTag</key>
<string></string>
<key>BankLocator</key>
<string>BANK 10</string>
<key>DeviceLocator</key>
<string>ChannelC-DIMM0</string>
<key>Manufacturer</key>
<string>Samsung</string>
<key>PartNumber</key>
<string>M393B1K70CH0-YH9</string>
<key>SerialNumber</key>
<string>P2-5</string>
<key>Size</key>
<integer>0</integer>
<key>Speed</key>
<integer>1333</integer>
</dict>
<dict>
<key>AssetTag</key>
<string></string>
<key>BankLocator</key>
<string>BANK 11</string>
<key>DeviceLocator</key>
<string>ChannelC-DIMM1</string>
<key>Manufacturer</key>
<string>Samsung</string>
<key>PartNumber</key>
<string>M393B1K70CH0-YH9</string>
<key>SerialNumber</key>
<string>P2-6</string>
<key>Size</key>
<integer>0</integer>
<key>Speed</key>
<integer>1333</integer>
</dict>
</array>
<key>ErrorCorrection</key>
<integer>5</integer>
<key>FormFactor</key>
<integer>9</integer>
<key>MaxCapacity</key>
<integer>0</integer>
<key>TotalWidth</key>
<integer>72</integer>
<key>Type</key>
<integer>24</integer>
<key>TypeDetail</key>
<integer>8192</integer>
</dict>
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