EVERYTHING You NEED to Know: Upgrading The Mac Pro 5,1

[Music] though you just got your new Mac Pro and you want to take it from being an office sleeper to a video editing screamer [Music] to do that we're gonna need to take a look at every major component and we're gonna have to augment it to do things it's never been designed to do before it's going to take a lot of time patience hardware and lots of guides there's also going to be a healthy amount of risk but the results are going to be a machine that's reliable and face meltingly fast while retaining that PC level of repairability I'm Brad the channel is spotted Tango let's turbocharger Mac thank you all right so while I'd love to tell you what to do step by step to get that magical racer of a Mac Pro I'm afraid it's not that simple what we're gonna have to do first will definitely depend on a lot of factors including what exact CMP you've got in front of you there were lots of different configurations in years for the cmp51 with different Hardware that can affect the advice I'll give you in the video so let's start off by showing you the three best places to find the information you'll need to make decisions on what to do with your Mac number one about this Mac if you can get your perspective editing rig booting you can check the about this Mac pane in any version of Mac OS to get the basics but if you want to know more of the specifics without having to stare at its guts the system report button on the lower left will spill out almost every detail you need to know we'll be in here a lot later number two Crack the Case open simply lift this latch on the back and the panel comes off revealing the juicy insides of the 5-1 while we're going to need to take a look at the system report for more details on how to approach our upgrades later nothing beats your own eyes for examining the health of what's inside the system look for signs that it was well maintained like not a lot of dust buildup in the heatsinks speaking of which check the CPU heat sink screws with a flashlight are they stripped used at all if they look new that might be a bad sign that the systems never had a thermal paste change if they're stripped that's obviously going to be a nightmare too so maybe avoid a Mac like that also if you can see this part of the board here take a picture this is your system firmware chip and its model number will be important later in the video finally number three the model sticker it's right here at the bottom of the PCI Express i o while this spot will give you the least information on what you've really got in front of you it can at least tell you if what you're looking at is a Mach 5.1 or an older model now before moving forward there are important things to take note of about the five ones Hardware we should start with the limitations and move on to what to look for the 5 1 lacks SATA 3. it runs drives at a slower SATA 2 standard which is half the speed of SATA 3. only 300 megabytes per second can flow through the SATA 2 interface another important note the PCI Express Lanes are all PCI Express 2.0 meaning that no matter how fast a GPU or other accessory card you add your cards will be limited to one gigabyte per second per 1X of connectivity roughly or 16 gigabytes for a 16x card with all that understood let's take a look at the CPUs or CPU plural or singular CPU upgrades for the 51 are cheap but replacing a single CPU card with a dual CPU card could be an expensive Prospect so getting a 5-1 with a dual card already installed is definitely recommended Ram or as it's called in the system report memory a healthy pool of 16 gigabytes or more is desirable the Mac Pro actually works best with six of its 8 slots populated assuming you have a dual CPU card otherwise it would be three of the four slots but overall it's a small performance Improvement so I'd say as long as you're rocking at least 24 gigabytes of ok reported ECC DDR3 at 1333 megahertz life is good in your memories graphics and OS version now having a fast GPU or graphics processor is nice but having a stock card that comes in the 5-1 that might be more valuable for you know Diagnostics it's a complicated topic for the 5-1 the long and short of it is can your Mac display a boot screen also what is a boot screen the boot screen is what the Mac displays before loading the operating system sort of it's everything you should see after the chime and before the OS itself boots and loads the graphic driver a great way to test if your Mac has boot screen support is by holding the option or ALT key depending on whether or not you have a Windows Centric keyboard while it's booting if you see a bunch of boot options appear you're good if you see nothing well we'll talk about fixing that later if your 5-1 has Mojave or a later operating system on it and control a boot screen with a non-mac Edition GPU it's likely been modified already but it could also have a more rare re-flashed GPU without going too much deeper into the weeds here I'm going to talk about GPU upgrades later in the video but for an initial purchase a High Sierra locked cmp51 with a stock Mac edition GPU is fine and that's what I'll assume you've got on hand check the description for a GPU reference post it'll be labeled GPU reference post last thing to look at here is boot ROM version or system firmware version your sfv can be found in the root of Hardware overview this tab of the system report it's also tied to your operating system version long and short of this one is it'll likely be taken care of by the natural upgrades to the operating system we're gonna make on this long journey of a video but you should double check your firmware version and it will be in a link in the description labeled boot ROMs from there click your current reported boot ROM version and the form will give you a guide on how to apply the latest version from your current version it's important how to know how to do a firmware flash by putting the system in flash mode but I'll touch on that later in the video too all right so with all that out of the way let's talk upgrade Parts selection I've got a pair of x5690 xeons they're the best in class for the 5-1 they only cost about 70 us for a pair of them on eBay so it's a no-brainer upgrade for the 5-1 I mean at least at the time of this video next is ram my system came maxed out with all of its slots populated at 32 gigabytes so I'm covered there but places like OWC otherwise known as Otherworld Computing offer kits that work with the 51 to this day ECC DDR3 is getting harder to find out in the wild and its price is starting to creep up so I tried to buy a system with an amount you're already comfortable with running now we've got GPU upgrades this Sapphire Nitro plus RX 588 gigabyte was available on eBay for only 75 USD now that being said there are more modern gpus that will work just as hard while using less Power Cards in the newer rx6000 series come to mind by AMD there are a couple Nvidia cards that might be able to serve your goals as well but generally speaking the RX 580 is tested and true and it's what most people recommend so it's what I've got to power that GPU we're gonna need some more PCI power connections than the CMP shipped with this little dinky six pin to six pin isn't gonna cut it so I ordered these two mini six to eight pen cables just off Amazon Prime they shipped fast the quality of the gauge of the wire seems to be okay and they only cost seven bucks a piece can't go wrong I hope finally it's down to peripherals you can run whatever you like here but I grabbed the model ugt Dash M2 pc200 that's a mouthful m.2 and SATA m.2 add-in card from vantech this card is Slim it will fit above my GPU with no required modifications because the back of the card has no exposed amount of components it's just flat and it also holds two m.2 key drives one is SATA two and one is PCI Express off a 4X 2.0 link perfect you can't really fit anything else above the GPU unless it has no components on the back so this one will fit nicely I also grabbed a model ugt pc3a2c card from fantech as well it's got three type a USB 3.2 ports as well as two type c although due to the 2.0 PCI Express link and the lack of SATA power connections available on the Mac Pro it'll likely not be capable of running as fast as it could in a more modern PC it'll still be a substantial upgrade over for the stock USB 2.0 ports in the 5.1 though and finally we've got my custom subsystem hacked Intel x540-82 10 gig copper networking card I made a separate video going over how to flash this card to work with the Mac Pro you can check it out here if you've got an Intel card you're dying to throw into your Mac and with that said our Hardware selection is done it's time to focus on the software side of the Mac now to start with we've got to get our 51 off High Sierra and working with Mojave this requires a metal API compatible GPU to be installed and it also probably requires a firmware upgrade so that makes the first and only component we need to buy to strictly do this upgrade a GPU it just so happens to be the most complicated to get working properly but what is the metal API well starting with Mojave Apple decided to revamp how Mac OS renders Graphics to improve efficiency and thus metal API unfortunately though it means that the stock gpus that come in all 51 Max are not powerful enough or new enough to run the new API but remember that boot screen thing I was talking about earlier well aside from reflashed or specific Mac edition gpus normal off-the-shelf PC gpus can't display the boot screens of Max that's a complicated problem that has a lot of different reasons for why it exists but it's a problem we can fix and we'll get to it but first we got to install Mojave so once you've removed your stock GPU at this point you definitely should take a picture of your system firmware chip located here we're going to need to modify our system firmware to allow regular PC gpus from off the shelf to display the Mac Pro boot screen and knowing your specific chip is crucial to not bricking your Mac essentially turning a small problem into a dead Macintosh so pay attention this is the most dangerous part of the upgrade but as long as you aren't just guessing or pressing random buttons it should work fine I've done it and mine works no problem next we need to install your GPU and boot the machine you should hear the chime but your screens will stay dark until you finish booting into High Sierra there's no need to panic just let it do its thing from here run the installer for Mojave it should prompt you for a firmware update [Music] read and follow those instructions carefully the installer will shut down your machine [Music] then you need to power on the system by holding the power button until you hear an annoying series of beeps now the system is in flash mode we'll learn more about this mode later when we're fixing our boot screen issue but for now patiently wait with your screens blacked out until the system reboots by itself your system from there should now be running the latest firmware and the Mojave installer will allow you to proceed as normal from here all you have to do is install Mojave once you've upgraded to Mojave you could just keep your 5-1 here Mojave works with a lot of software still and is considered to be a really stable version of Mac OS that a lot of professionals like if that's really all you want then I see no reason for you to go any further but assuming you want to go all the way to Monterey oh wait Monterey I thought the latest version of Mac OS was Ventura well here's another caveat Ventura stripped out some of the underlying USB support the community is working hard to restore it but at the time of filming safe to say Monterey is the best choice for the 5-1 so assuming you want to keep going the next task in line is getting that boot screen fixed you can run your Mac without the boot screen but let's be honest it's not that hard to fix and you know it it's just it's nice to have for Diagnostics and other problems you could run into down the line so a written guide will be in the description it's labeled boots screen fix the part we care about is the post right here at the bottom appendix native boot screen support this is where that picture I told you to take of the firmware chip really comes in hand if you haven't taken a picture of your firmware chip by now do it it's crucial essentially what we need to do is disable sip then dump the five ones firmware into a file with DOs dude's ROM tool splice in DXE inject and enable gop.ffs then enter flash mode and re-flash that modified firmware to our chip with ROM tool it sounds complicated but with the guide in hand you should have no problem doing these steps and getting your boot screen working with your Mac with that done you should have a working boot screen with aftermarket gpus of any kind in your Mac now we need to use a program called open core Legacy Patcher to create an open core based installer for Monterey I really recommend dual booting between Mojave because it's the latest natively supported operating system and an open core OS of your choice this is because open core won't boot Mojave or anything lower that means that in the event where you need to troubleshoot something because you have a dead Drive you'll need to be able to boot those older os's and without boot screen support you won't be able to deselect the EFI boot slash open core option giving you a rock and a hard place kind of situation if you can't see your boot screen you can't select the normal installer for installing High Sierra or Mojave so this gives purpose to that hack we did to our firmware earlier that allows boot screens to work other than the fact that it's just nice to have the open core Legacy Patcher app should be able to construct a pretty much perfect Bootloader for you out of the box so hit create Mac OS installer to build a flash drive into an open core enabled boot drive for installing Monterey or whatever you'd like really with that done you'll want to copy over the open core app you use to make the installer over to the installer flash drive you'll need it later next you'll want to reboot the system holding option or alt depending on your keyboard like we did before to check if our machine had a working boot screen then select EFI boot it should be a removable Drive option once you select it the screen should go black and you'll have a new boot option for install Mac OS Monterey from there the procedure is pretty much like any other OS install but once it's complete you'll need to install open core to the drive you installed monorail on in order to boot it without needing that flash drive every time so download or run that copied version of opencor Legacy Patcher again from Monterey and then select build and install open core from there follow the prompts and then select the drive you installed Monterey on for the one to patch open Core 2 and install you'll also want to run the post install root patch option now and that's pretty much it you did it enjoy melting your face off bye foreign [Music]

Channel: SpottedTango

Views: 29,015

Keywords: Mac Pro, Upgrade, How to, Guide, Firmware, Mojave, Ventura, Monterey, OS X, Mac OS, RX580, GPU, CPU, Install, SpottedTango

Id: n-SvbD7ULOg

Length: 15min 58sec (958 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 02 2023