MP 1,1-5,1 Upgrade path on my 2009 cMP

[Berenod]

Bit of a long story, but might be an interesting read for somebody coming accross a cheap(ish) cMP 4.1 or 5.1!


Was lucky enough to get a virtually free cMP4.1 from 2009. Cost me exactly the equivalent of 50€ in beer , the bloke was happy somebody got it out of his study.

So what did I get for my 50€:

• The cMP, which apparently already had the firmware upgraded to 5.1 (presumably to be able to run the memory @ 1333 MHz)
• 32GB of 1333MHz DDR3 memory
• A single Bloomfield Xeon W3580
• A GTX285 mac version
• Running High Sierra of a 1TB spinning drive.

While already sort of a usable machine (apart from the slow spinner drive and rather slow CPU, which later on proved to be easily upgraded).

Since I got it so cheap I started a bit of research wether it would be worth it to spend some extra money on it and end up with a machine which can hold its own in this modern day.

Found out it actually would be a rather sensible idea!

Things I bought during my first round of upgrades (+price), after some serious research towards compatibility:

• A W3680 Westmere Xeon. A whole lot faster then the bloomfield, was looking at several acceptable options in the X56xx range, but this one popped up on ebay from a seller in the same European country as myself for 35€, which added only another 4.5€ for the shipping.
• GPU's are stupid expensive right now, but I did manage to scoop up an EVGA GTX 680/4GB (regular PC version) for 90€. This site proved very usefull for determining compatibility before buying.
  Would have preferred something more recent, but at current 2nd hand prices not such a sensible idea.

I still had some regular SATA SSD's lying around, so took a Crucial BX500, and used Super Duper to move over the OS. Went pretty painless.

Unfortunately speeds were a tad dissapointing due to the SATA2 interface of the cMP (+- 240 MBps read/write). Quite a bit better then the spinner though! Was alreday in the back of my mind to find some faster solution, see round 2 of upgrades.

With the now free 1TB spinner (whiched proved to have an all green smart data report) I opted to add another 1TB spinner and configured them in raid 0 for faster throughput and use as non-critical data storage (for that I use an NAS + cloud solution).

In order to easylu flash the GTX680 to make sure it was bootscreen capable, I installed Win7 on bootcamp for the NVflash proceure.
This proved to be not so easy, WIN 7 refused to install, needed a fair bit of research to find out you need to remove al other drives (the raid 0 I had running), after that the install succeeded.

Setting the bootdrive to Win7, swapping out the GPU's, rebooting into Win7 and flashing the card went totally painlkess, thanks to all the info on this site.
Reboot and all went well with bootscreen!

Then continued to the now possible upgrade to Mojave.

Used the machine a bit in this configuration, but was annoyed by the slow SSD (or rather the Sata 2 port).

So round two is just the SSD upgrade.

So again some research got me ordering a KryoM.2 PCIe adapter on Amazon (40€ shipping incl.) and locally a Kingston A2000 500GB SSD for 60€.

Popped it in, formatted and again used Super Duper to move everything painlessly over.

Pretty darned impressive different, writes @ 1400 MBps and reads a round about 1500. That's times 6 the SATA 2 SSD and a very noticeable improvement.

So total cost of this machine ended up being 280€! And it is 500% worth every penny, it outperforms a lot of the up to 2015 iMacs and Macbook pro's, which sell substantially more expensive (here in Europe anyway).

I'm not even talking about the trashcan 6.1's with their nutty prices!

It's a bit of a shame the GPU's are so expensive at the moment, pair it up with an RX580 (which is what I wanted, but at well over 300€ at the moment not worth the money) and you get even more GPU power.

Next step is slowly looking into open core with the plan to move up to Catalina/Big Sur as security updates for Mojave likely will end fall this year.

 

[Berenod]

There are obviously some (for me smallish) caveats to the above systemupgrade:

• The original wifi does not work anymore. Depending on exactly which card is installed it actually already stopped working in Sierra/High Sierra! As always, upgrades are possible, lucky for me I prefer the stability of the dual gigabit ethernet ports. Quite funny to see it working perfectly in Windows and refusing to show up in MacOS where it was intended for!
  AS usual, solutions exist, meaning replacing the wifi card, which is a bit of a fidly undertaking requiring not too big of a set of fingers!
• Bootcamp stops working in Mojave. Also rather easily circumvented as long as you do not install Windows on the main MAcOS drive, but on a seperate one. Bit of a pity, for me means not being able to install on the fast PCIe nvme drive, but only on a SSD on a SATA2 port.
  Or of course go VM.
• No bootscreen apparently when connected on a 4K 60Hz monitor (through displayport). Easily circumvented if you need it (recovery or something like that) by also having a hdmi cable to your screen on the ready, that connection is limited to 4K/30 Hz on which the bootscreen works just fine
• No CUDA support if you run a Nvidia card as I do. Highest OS you'll get that is High Sierra (10.13)

So anyways, most of the above, apart from the CUDA support, can be rather easily solved, all necesary info and tutorials can be found on this site!

 

[Berenod]

Only one upgrade left for me, and that's a USB3 card.

Still kind of trying to decide between regular 3.1 gen 1 or 3.1 gen 2, the latter being a lot faster but also a lot more expensive.

Big advantage on the 3.1 gen 2 would be the capability to install Windows on an external drive, for example a Samsung T5 or T7, which would likely be way faster then the internal SATA2 limited SSD I'm using now.

 

[KeesMacPro]

Only one upgrade left for me, and that's a USB3 card.

Still kind of trying to decide between regular 3.1 gen 1 or 3.1 gen 2, the latter being a lot faster but also a lot more expensive.

USB 3.x PCIe Cards for Classic Mac Pro

Thread summary for latest recommendations. This thread refers to PCIe cards for adding USB 3.0 and 3.1 to classic Mac Pros. General Notes: The USB 3.0 cards in this list support UASP for faster transfer speeds and reduced CPU utilization (exceptions to this are noted). The USB 3.0 cards in...

forums.macrumors.com

 

[M3Stang]

I am still contemplating the 3.0 on mine as well. Similar to you, I got mine for almost free. I flashed it to 5,1, put a 6 core 3.33GHz Xeon, (forgot which X56xx it was) and 32GB of 1333 and an RX580 8GB to run Mojave natively. I still use this for video and audio stuff as my main machine, and that is saying something as my daily PC has a 12 core/24 thread Ryzen 5900X. I just like iMovie, and there is seemingly nothing that good and free for Windows. I am going to keep using this one probably till the 14" MBP M1X comes out then ill probably grab that so I can have a ton more power to go. I'd do something like I did still very usable and can pretty comfortably edit 4K30.

 

[tsialex]

Big advantage on the 3.1 gen 2 would be the capability to install Windows on an external drive, for example a Samsung T5 or T7, which would likely be way faster then the internal SATA2 limited SSD I'm using now.

You can't boot from third party USB cards with a MacPro5,1. Booting is limited to the native USB2.0 ports.

 

[Berenod]

You can't boot from third party USB cards with a MacPro5,1. Booting is limited to the native USB2.0 ports.

Ah, damn.

Actually knew this, penny just didn't drop, drivers of the usb3 cards are only loaded with the OS, so card remains invisible until then...
Basically would need a second pci-e SSD to get Windows on a fast drive.

Actually running win10 in a Fusion 11 VM now, not half bad apart from graphics, probably needs some more fine tuning...