MP 1,1-5,1 Wow that old graphics card was a mess!

[OldMacPro2]

So, I have been slow going through this Mac Pro 4,1 a little bit at time.

This is one I bought off Facebook for about $40. It was missing the side cover, any of the drive trays, and was some what dusty inside.

So, I've cleaned it out to get the big dust bunnies out, found a side cover on eBay, and got a drive tray with an adapter for a Patriot SSD that I had. Now I can boot it up and run High Sierra (thanks to dosdude1).

Today was the first day that I noticed that there was some "grinding" fan noise today.
So, I downloaded Macs Fan Control and started playing around.

None of the main system fans were making the noise, so I took off the side case and could see it was the HD 4870 fan, which was crusted with dirt. (no, I don't mean dust...it was like DIRT)

Spent about an hour or so taking it all apart, cleaning the crud out of the fan, repasting the heat sink, etc.

When I got it all back together, I only had one extra screw. Not bad for me.

Reinstalled and it seems to be running a little quieter now.

I do notice that in the Fan Control app, the GPU ATI Radeon icon is there, but there's no temp shown....just a "-".

Guess that's normal for a card this old?

 

[h9826790]

OSX / macOS has extremely poor support for reading GPU temperature. Even that's the Apple native HD4870, the temperature reading may be still not avail at all.

If you worry about that, you can run Linux in LiveUSB / LiveCD mode to check that.

 

[avro707]

I remember on the old work iMac 27", that Radeon 4870 used to show red-boxes all over the screen even when almost new, we had to put a fan control utility on it to keep the fan speeds higher. As soon as we did that, the red-boxes stopped appearing and that old machine was still going, albeit slowly (slow spinning HDD).

 

[OldMacPro2]

I have an RX 460 that I want to put in this thing and keep the HD4870 around to install if needed.

But I think I have to do some stuff (not an expert) to get the RX 460 to work with HS...which is what I am currently running. The RX is not a Mac-flashed card. Just an HP OEM 2GB card that I bought off eBay.

And, the last "missing piece" for this Mac 4,1 showed up in the mail today. It's the PCI card bracket. Found one on eBay for not too much money. So, altogether I think I have about ~$120 in this box so far. Not too bad for what is still a very usable system. Dual-Quad core (2x2.66Ghz) with the stock 6GB RAM. Nothing great, but something to build on.

Most importantly, I kept this cMP out of a landfill or worse.

The guy I bought it from had a grungy warehouse full of PCs and parts and he sells them on Facebook and Craigslist.

He told me he wanted to gut this thing and put a "real PC" motherboard in it.
But it looked like it was going to be too much work, so he gave up

I convinced him to sell it to me cheap.

 

[h9826790]

I have an RX 460 that I want to put in this thing and keep the HD4870 around to install if needed.

But I think I have to do some stuff (not an expert) to get the RX 460 to work with HS...which is what I am currently running. The RX is not a Mac-flashed card. Just an HP OEM 2GB card that I bought off eBay.

And, the last "missing piece" for this Mac 4,1 showed up in the mail today. It's the PCI card bracket. Found one on eBay for not too much money. So, altogether I think I have about ~$120 in this box so far. Not too bad for what is still a very usable system. Dual-Quad core (2x2.66Ghz) with the stock 6GB RAM. Nothing great, but something to build on.

Most importantly, I kept this cMP out of a landfill or worse.

The guy I bought it from had a grungy warehouse full of PCs and parts and he sells them on Facebook and Craigslist.

He told me he wanted to gut this thing and put a "real PC" motherboard in it.
But it looked like it was going to be too much work, so he gave up

I convinced him to sell it to me cheap.

RX460 should just work in 10.13.6.

If you want boot screen, you can install RefindPlus

 

[OldMacPro2]

RX460 should just work in 10.13.6.

If you want boot screen, you can install RefindPlus

I will give it a shot.

And yes, I’ve read some posts about rEFInd and Open Core, I need to make some time where I can pursue that.

For right now, what I am doing, this thing is actually working OK. I tend to think I need max CPU speed, max RAM, and an NVMe when a clean install on a new SDD can work wonders for 90% of what I usually do.

 

[StellarVixen]

So, I have been slow going through this Mac Pro 4,1 a little bit at time.

This is one I bought off Facebook for about $40. It was missing the side cover, any of the drive trays, and was some what dusty inside.

So, I've cleaned it out to get the big dust bunnies out, found a side cover on eBay, and got a drive tray with an adapter for a Patriot SSD that I had. Now I can boot it up and run High Sierra (thanks to dosdude1).

Today was the first day that I noticed that there was some "grinding" fan noise today.
So, I downloaded Macs Fan Control and started playing around.

None of the main system fans were making the noise, so I took off the side case and could see it was the HD 4870 fan, which was crusted with dirt. (no, I don't mean dust...it was like DIRT)

Spent about an hour or so taking it all apart, cleaning the crud out of the fan, repasting the heat sink, etc.

When I got it all back together, I only had one extra screw. Not bad for me.

Reinstalled and it seems to be running a little quieter now.

I do notice that in the Fan Control app, the GPU ATI Radeon icon is there, but there's no temp shown....just a "-".

Guess that's normal for a card this old? View attachment 2030197

That heat sink is very well insulated...


No heat is ever gonna escape from that GPU.

 

[OldMacPro2]

That heat sink is very well insulated...


No heat is ever gonna escape from that GPU.

That was the worst stuff I’ve ever run across in a working computer. The rest of the system was full of dust bunnies, but not terrible.

Didn’t appear to come from a smoking environment or anything, no usual smells.

But that heat sink was fully clogged. Surprized the video card was still functioning at all.