Is the Mac Pro 5,1 from 2012 still worth it in 2023?

I mean I just couldn't let it die hello and welcome to mancave media on this channel I'd like to talk about beer sneakers Tech and toys if you're new here please feel free to hit that subscribe button and hit that notification Bell also please connect with me on social media I'm on Instagram at media.mancave and on Facebook and Twitter at mancavemedia org and finally if you enjoy listening to podcasts please check out the league of sedentary gentlemen we're available wherever you get your podcast or direct from our website at man-cave-media.org all right uh I rescued an old cheese grater 2012 five comma one Mac Pro from the scrap pile was it worth it let's find out [Music] all right when it comes to the old cheese grater Mac Pro um I have a weird thing with them I I really I can't watch them die whenever I see one on a scrap pile uh I always you know I pick it up try to see if I can get it to boot try to see you know what the configuration is and just I try to save it I don't know what it is with that particular machine I just I can't let it go um probably because in my humble opinion it was the last like really good upgradable Mac Pro and it was so good on so many different levels so I I just don't like to see them die so recently one of my co-workers brought one to work to put on our scrap pile for disposal and I saw it and of course I had to pick it up and so I ended up just bringing it home and it turned out to be the the Dual uh six core Xeon so 12 cores in total uh which was really good configuration and I don't remember what it came with as far as RAM is concerned um for the stock config but I did add my own Ram to it and and also it didn't come with any hard drives uh one of my other co-workers had pulled the hard drives out for her and destroyed them uh so that you know because Data Theft is a thing uh so I've supplied my own hard drives but other than that it was a complete working system so what I did was I threw some upgrades at it and using open core I was able to get it up to Monterey now technically using open core you can get the Mac Pro mid 2012 all the way to Ventura now but I I kind of held off because there's a little bit of trickery you got to do with the USB because Ventura killed support for USB one and so I think you gotta add like a USB 1.0 hub to get it installed that that could be different by the time I post this video because they you know they they make improvements to open core all the time and so this could be completely different by now but at the time of filming this video uh Ventura was possible but you had to use a USB 1.0 Hub in order to get it to work and I got it really stable on Monterey it works really well and so I kind of just let it be uh for now maybe you know in the future I'll I'll continue on to Ventura I honestly think that Ventura is going to be the end of the line for the 2012 Mac Pro as far as the open core is concerned but anyhow we'll see how that goes but let's talk about the upgrades that I did uh first and foremost this thing only has USB 1 and USB 2. so I added a USB 3.0 card I found one on Amazon the brand is sonnet Allegro I apologize if I'm saying that incorrectly but it has it has excellent reviews it's a little bit pricey because it has a controller per Port which is um really good that's what you want to look for in a USB card um so the uh so the price point for that guy was 49 you know a little pricey but worth it I didn't buy one that has a USBC port a lot of people who do these Mac 12 Mac 12. a lot of people who do these Mac Pro 2012 builds they will add USBC connectivity I don't have a ton of USBC devices so I didn't feel like it's necessary so all the ports on this card are USB a so I'm going to back up a little bit I should have mentioned this in the beginning a lot of the things that I'm using for this build are things I already had laying around I had two ssds and two four terabyte spin disks that I had from my previous file server that I recently retired I also had a Radeon RX 580 from my main office PC that I retired recently if you watched my review on the RX 6750 then you you heard me speak about that and you heard me mention this project so I'm repurposing that for this build and I also had a bunch of ram from my file server that is not the recommended speed for this Mac Pro but it will work so I'm gonna go ahead and use it because I don't want to buy I don't want to spend money on Old Ram I'm trying to spend the least amount of money possible for this project and so that being said uh besides the USB card other things that I purchased for this project um I did purchase an upgraded Wi-Fi and Bluetooth card and I actually purchased two of them so let me explain uh right off the bat to start out I went with I went with an expansion card that I found on Amazon by a company called yubo I apologize if I'm pronouncing that incorrectly um links for all this stuff will be in the description by the way but anyhow um it is an expansion card and it is approved for use in the Mac Pro so it is a 802.11 and Bluetooth 4.0 and it worked fine um I also had to buy an adapter cable because there's no the Bluetooth gets its power from the USB header on the motherboard and for the Mac Pro there's no it's not like a PC there's no header to tap into so I bought an adapter cable that changes it to a standard USB a plug and I just ran it out the back and that's where we get into the why I bought another one so I ended up finding one on eBay that I learned about from another YouTuber who was doing a similar build this one utilizes the internal Wi-Fi port to upgrade both the Wi-Fi and the Bluetooth and this is Bluetooth 4.1 uh so it was a little bit better um it was really pricey uh but I did it mainly for the cleanliness so the the expansion card worked just fine but uh having that cable run out the back to a USB port I didn't really like the way it looked too much it's just a you know a weird thing um the expansion card would work fine it's a half the price of the internal one the internal one costs 109 so a little bit pricey but again so I I'm sorry I said 4.1 it was 4.2 Bluetooth 4.2 on the internal card and it's really cool it's like a it's a stackable card and the Bluetooth and the Wi-Fi module are one and it comes with an extension cord so you can plug in the antenna to the the Mac Pro's Bluetooth internal antenna and so it really looks a lot cleaner than the expansion card and it works really well and the reason for doing this upgrade by the way is not just for better wi-fi connectivity but also with Bluetooth 4.2 it now has the ability to do airdrop which is huge it's the whole reason why I wanted to do this project in the first place so I use my MacBook to control one of my cameras and if I have the ability to airdrop from my MacBook to the Mac Pro for editing it's just uh it's it's a great experience if you've never dealt with um if you've never experienced the Mac ecosystem it is great in a lot of ways and airdrop is one of those things and so it was really important for me to have airdrop capabilities and that's the other reason why I want to do that upgrade so besides that um those are the upgrades that I paid for so other than that I used my own ssds I have both of them are 256 and I've used one as the main boot Drive of course and then a second one is a working disc so one of the four terabyte drives I'm using is long-term storage and the other four terabyte drive I'm using as a dedicated space for time machine for my other Mac devices in my house I have a MacBook Pro my wife has the MacBook Air and she has a Mac Mini and we also have an older iMac that we both use and so the four terabyte drive is going to be you know time machine disk for all those devices and it works really well I'll leave a link in the description to a video showing you how to do that if you want to do that it's really easy to set it up and allow your Macs to back up to another Mac so it's it's Again part of that that Mac ecosystem that just works really well uh so anyhow uh one thing I want to mention too before I get into it uh I did have a lot more footage of me cleaning and installing things in the PC but I had a memory card go bad on me it happens um so I did lose some footage but I do still have a fair amount of stuff uh footage doing the install but one thing that I did lose and I'm really upset about this was when I installed the second Wi-Fi card the internal one so I'll leave a link to the video that I saw um of how I discovered that card and it shows you know how to install it the instructions are very straightforward anyway for doing the install but I'll leave a link for that video just in case because I lost that footage but I do have the original footage of installing the expansion card and like I said if you if you don't care about how clean it looks then it works just fine but um Link in the description for the install instructions for the internal card all right that being said let's go ahead and get into it so first things first I pulled out the RAM and CPU tray which pulls out really easy there's two levers on the end there and this was covered with a lot of like sticky dust and grime and so I really wanted to uh to get this clean so I grabbed the toothbrush and some electrical contact cleaner and just kind of went to town with it there was a lot of a lot of dust and grime concentrated around like the ram slots and whatnot and so I wanted to make sure that I got all that cleaned off because I didn't want any Ram issues so after that I went ahead and just wiped off all the surface dust with a with a wet towel um again just using uh using that electric contact cleaner uh really uh worked really well so I highly recommend that it's made by WD-40 if you don't have any I recommend you go and uh and pick some up because it works really well all right now moving over to inside the chassis um going ahead and installing the wireless and Bluetooth card right now so this is the included cable which would normally just go to a USB header when you're using this in a PC but as I mentioned in the beginning of the video there is no USB header that you can tap into so I bought that adapter cable which I'm going to go ahead and plug that in right now and I'll give you guys a look at you know how I routed it through the chassis out to the to the USB ports for power go ahead and get the USB card installed really quick it's a very straightforward and back in with the original graphics card just for the moment like I said once I get the Mac OS installed on the new hard drives and get it updated as far as it will go I will start I will uh throw the new graphics card in and start playing around with open core but for now we got to throw this little dinosaur back in and also if you're doing a project like this once you upgrade the graphics card it is important that you hold on to the old one because if you ever need to access your boot menus you're going to need to pull out your uh your upgraded graphics card and throw the stock one back in unless you you know were able to afford uh one that's bios flashed for Mac all right here's how I routed that cable out through the expansion slots to the USB ports and now I'm going to go ahead and throw in my hard drives now they do make an adapter for an SSD for the Mac Pro but I didn't really want to spend the money for it I didn't think it was completely necessary because it's not a laptop I'm not going to be banging this thing around number one number two I mean it is an SSD so there's very you know there's no moving Parts there's very little that can happen to this thing and so what I did was first I kind of did a test fit to see how much play there was in the plug itself which there is a quite a bit of play so maybe a little bit nervous so um I went ahead and oh wait one thing I did not mention at the beginning of the videos I actually have two ssds um I I only mentioned one but anyways um so once I did the test fit saw how much play there was I went ahead and threw the hard drive sleds back into the chassis and then with the sled in I went to see how much play there was in between the celed and the drive and there's there's not a whole lot but there's still a little bit so I went ahead and grabbed some double-sided tape and cut it to to so I could double it over to kind of fill the Gap from the sled to the drive itself and then threw the drive back in there and stuck it down to the tape and this worked really well so if you're doing a project like this and you didn't want to buy the adapter you can just use double-sided tape there is different thicknesses of tape you can buy but the tape that I had I just had to make sure I cut it long enough so I could double it over and that was more than enough to cover the gap for between the hard drive and the actual sled and the the other two hard drives of course they're just spin discs there was no adapter needed they just uh bolted right up to the sled no problem and there's another look at the cable how I routed it through the expansion card uh really quick while I was hooking this up to to get started installing Mac OS it powered on right away and it immediately booted into windows and so I wanted to give you guys a look here on how it runs it ran Windows uh really well actually and so let's get a look at the hardware so this is a version of Windows that was installed on my server out in the garage so there's the uh the CPU and the ram this is after um I added my own Ram so that's not what it came with let's have a look at what graphics card this thing came with from the factory so it looks like a Radeon HD 5700 yeah it's pretty that's pretty old not bad for for it today but it's pretty old all right so now we got we got it booted into OS X utilities let's go ahead and format our drive so there's no more um confusion uh no more booting to Windows so we'll go ahead and go into Disk Utility here and I'm gonna format all these drives start with the ssds and that's what I'm going to rename Macos Mac OS so that there's a no confusion when I go to install I'll know which one I want to install it to format the spinnies this is going to take a little bit longer because of course they're spin drives and they're huge four terabytes each so let's take a few minutes go ahead and Skip ahead there's one the other one knocked out here all right so now we're ready to rock and roll let's go back and install Mac OS I'm sorry OS X so they don't they don't start calling it Mac OS yet in this version so it's going to go ahead and install Mac OS El Capitan this is the version of Mac OS that shipped with this machine [Music] so go ahead and choose the drive that I named Mac OS and there goes all right uh it's just about done here it just rebooted so we should be in shortly gotta do some uh standard setup really quick and here we are Mac OS XL Capitan in all its Glory so one thing that I you know one oversight on my part was in order to get this thing fully updated to the latest Mac OS that it can run I do have to go ahead and throw the video card in early I wanted to wait until I had it fully patched but because of but because more modern versions of Mac OS require a metal enabled graphics card or metal capable graphics card I should say not metal enabled I had to go ahead and throw the RX 580 in early so I'm gonna go ahead and do that now out with the old and with the new um so we can go ahead and get this thing fully patched and start playing with open core so I'm gonna install that new cable that I bought that will allow adequate power for the RX 580. so there are there are um uh Factory locations on the board I'll get a better shot of this after I get the cable installed because my lighting isn't great in this shot cable plugged in there's the RX 580 get that seated nice and snug in here get that new cable plugged in and I'll go ahead and uh get a better shot right here so you guys can see what that cable looks like on the board so there's the new cable there is the Factory Connection so the factory cable uses only one of those connections so you'll use both of them to get adequate power to the RX 580 and yeah looks uh looks really nice in there so now I'm going to go ahead and upgrade this to a Mac OS High Sierra which is the furthest this thing can go without open core so we'll go ahead and uh get that done and okay once that's done we can go ahead and go to GitHub and download the whatever the latest version of open core is is what you're going to want to go ahead and launch that and you're going to want to create Mac OS installer and then download Mac OS installer if you don't already have one and then it's going to present you with some options um those two were the available Mac os's for my Mac Pro and I selected Monterey of course for this build so once that's done we're going to go ahead and install it and then it's going to reboot and we're going to be presented with an install screen I'm going to go ahead and click on install Mac OS Monterey hit continue gonna get the beach ball of death for a little bit I went ahead and skipped forward and of course you know you gotta agree you can't agree to disagree and I'm going to select my install disk continue and away we go all right now I have Mac OS Monterey running on a cheese grater five comma one Mac Pro foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] just so we know there's no funny business this is the 2012 Mac Pro [Music] under this guy this is the Puma mbo1 video that I posted the other day we're gonna go ahead and render this right now already one to two three and go on the stopwatch there we go not exactly one for one but close enough we'll see what we get moving right along all right we're getting down to it almost there this is about 33 seconds left we're three minutes and 28 seconds in not bad I didn't notice it struggle a little bit where my PC uh did not but I mean this is much older Hardware so still not bad it's about there stopwatch so three minutes and 47 seconds for the 2012 MacBook Pro for rendering so now let's go ahead and set up an export and we'll time it again all right so I like all my videos we are going to do YouTube full 1080p ready steady hoop hold on let me unlock my other phone I'm out all right Ready Steady and go oh no no no no all right so it's got a little bit extra time I forgot to clear it out so remember that when we go back to it but all right it's uh it is exporting the video something tells me this is going to take like forever oh it says estimating time remaining oh it says estimated time remaining four minutes and 19 seconds all right so this might not take as long as I think uh but it does take my PC quite a quite a while to uh export and so uh no I don't know I don't know we'll see how this goes so the estimates jumped all around um which it does not do on my PC but for some reason uh it shot up to 15 minutes and then as high as 18 minutes and then it kind of leveled off at five minutes so um yeah we'll see if it continues to jump up and down but seems to be uh leveled off now and we're a minute 40 in all right we're getting down to it it says about 15 seconds left we are only three minutes and 47 seconds and it did that a lot faster than I thought it was going to we are just about there [Laughter] 100 [Music] four minutes we'll call it four minutes even because you know I didn't reset um uh what's it called I didn't reset the stopwatch before I started it so we'll call it an even four minutes um no that's too generous four minutes in 401. I'll call 401. all right so um after all that my opinion is a 2012 Mac Pro still worth your time and effort in 2023 my answer for that is Maybe um I I believe it is but it it comes with stipulations right uh if you can get one super cheap or free like if you see somebody throwing one out like I did and you snag it and it doesn't cost you a thing then yes absolutely I think it's worth it I did some searching around on eBay and they're selling for too much money in my opinion I've seen some completed listings for the same spec as the one that I got for between five and six hundred dollars that's crazy I don't understand why people would pay that much for this machine when you can buy an M2 Mac Mini for 5.99 and it's gonna just destroy the 2012 Mac Pro as far as performance goes so I don't understand why people are paying that much I did see some listings on there still for under 200 which that's still kind of stretching it out a little bit uh if you can get it under 200 and you've got the stuff laying around like I did like the RAM and the hard drives and a graphics card sure then it's still worth your time it's still worth the effort but if you are going to pay 200 for the for just the system itself and you gotta buy RAM and you gotta buy graphics cards and you gotta buy hard drives nah don't don't do it just buy an M1 or sorry just buy an M2 Mac Mini 5.99 on Apple's website all day long um if for some reason you need something with an Intel chipset and you know the M1 is just not for you or you can't use it for whatever reason then maybe it's Justified to spend that kind of money um but then again you can get a much more modern Intel based Mac Pro those have dropped in price significantly so that might be a way to go but again the purpose of this video was is it still worth it in my opinion yes if you can get it super cheap or free if you've got stuff laying around like I did then yes it's worth your time and your effort um as far as like performance goes it performs like a machine from 2012. and you saw how long it took to render that video which that was impressive though by the way so for a 10 minute video like that rendering it on my PC uh it took about the same amount of time so that being said everyday use it is still worth your time and your effort all right that's all I have for this one thank you again for stopping by please smash that like button if you enjoyed this video and help feed that algorithm I hope you have a great afternoon and like always thank you for watching

Channel: Man Cave Media

Views: 17,205

Keywords: 2012 mac pro upgrade, 2012 mac pro monterey, 2012 mac pro 2022, macbook pro, 2012 macbook pro, macbook pro 2012, opencore legacy patcher, opencore legacy, opencore legacy patcher ventura, open core legacy patcher monterey, Apple, Mac

Id: vhLop5HEURc

Length: 31min 44sec (1904 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 04 2023