Mac Pro 2009 5,1 CPU upgrade dual Xeon 5690s issues, fixes, benchmarks!

hey guys it's lance at mac sound solutions and today i'm going to be doing my final cpu upgrade on my mac pro 5.1 which was a 4-1 it's a 2009 dual cpu 4-1 which i then firmware updated to a five one uh i originally installed 5660s in it that was one of my first mac pro upgrade videos done i don't know quite a while ago now it's got 98 000 views um and i think i was one of the first to do that online and then people definitely beat me with their production values and whatnot but anyway and got way more views but i think i was the first if not close to the first but anyway the 2009 model is trickier because you don't have limited cpus and you don't have the nice little clamps that they have on the 2010 and 2012 mac pro models instead you have to just put the cpu in there and then you got to get that that damn heatsink on there just right and the pressure has to be just right i had to do some modifications because when i did it i put it in with the heat spreader on i did not have deleted cpus now this company dq upgrade was nice enough to give me two free 5690s that's the only reason i'm doing this i don't think i ever would have spent the money myself to go from 56 80s 3.33 gigahertz to 56 90s it's just not going to be that big of a speed increase but it should be a marginal increase and these are the fastest cpus you can put in your mac pro 5.1 so why not do it right so these are deleted uh my cpus in there right now the 5680s are littered so there is a height difference and i originally modified my heat sinks to the little connector on there i modified them so that they could have a little more leeway to sit up a little higher i don't know if i really needed to do that i've seen people say since then that they didn't bother doing that and that does make the install quite a bit trickier and the other thing is you just you know with the 2010 you put in the cpu you put on your thermal paste and then you put the little locking door down and that's basically got the right pressure on your cpu instead with the 2009 model you're using the heatsink as the pressure on the cpu to spread that thermal paste and to get all your ram chips to mount if it's not perfectly even and you don't have the right amount of thermal paste on there and the right amount of pressure you might not see all your ram mount and i had that issue last time i did this upgrade and i had to take out the 5680s redo the whole install and it worked the second time around but i was sweating a little bit so i'm really hoping this is going to be an easier upgrade because i've done this twice before they're 56 90s as fast as we can go so let's get to the install okay so here's our cpu tray removed from the mac pro again this is a dual cpu system and on the right we have cpu a heatsink a and on the left cpub and each cpu has its own four rows of ram xeon processors use triple memory channels which means they can access three ram chips at once so you really only want to fill up the first three slots for bay one and the first three slots for cpu two and that will get you your best memory performance if you go stick another ram chip in each of the last slots in the fourth slot you will then slow down your memory performance and your geekbench score will go down so now i'm going to remove heatsink a and when you remove the 2009 heat sink the cpu is going to stick to the bottom of the heatsink because of the thermal paste if you're doing a 2010 you have that clamp holding down the cpu so it will take a little more force to remove the heat sink but we're doing the 2009 so what's going to happen is my cpu is going to be stuck to the bottom of the heat sink and as you can see i'm doing sort of a little crisscross pattern going from one screw to the next i probably could have just unscrewed them all the way on the first try but i kind of went around and did them a little more gradual the screws stay in the heat sink they will not fall out of there so you don't have to worry about flipping the heat sink over now i'm going to pull out all three ram sticks for cpu a just to have them out of my way cpub they're behind it so you don't have to pull them out of there now one thing i want to talk about is the modification that i did to my heatsink there's a power connector that goes from the heatsink to the logic board here so i'd have a little more slack when i put on lidded cpus but now i'm putting on deleted cpus so i don't need that slack anymore but i am stuck with the clips permanently have been modified so normally if you were doing this for the first time you would just lift up and the heatsink would completely disconnect from the cpu board but for me you see i'm reaching under there i have to unplug the connector because i removed the clips that held it to the heatsink so if i were to do this all again i probably would not have done that modification because i think other people have done it with lidded cpus and it still was connecting here you see the cpu is stuck to the bottom of the heatsink so i'm just going to give the cpu a little twist and off it comes and as you can see it's got the old thermal paste on it kind of nasty it's a good idea to put new thermal paste on your cpus every once in a while maybe once a year so now i'm going to clean off the old thermal paste on the heat sink and i'm using a guitar pick just to get the bulky chunky stuff off first this stuff is very greasy it's some form of grease not sure what it is who knows if it's highly toxic or not i don't know um but anyway got the bulk of it off then we're going to use the chem pad which is just rubbing alcohol to get the remainder off get it nice and clean and i'm going to use another little chamois cloth you want to make sure it's lint free and grease free just a nice clean shiny surface so the other thing i'm going to do because i'm using d lidded cpus now is i'm going to remove a little piece of thermal pad i had on there for the sensors because when you use lidded cpus your thermal pad the original one is not going to reach the sensors and you could burn out your logic board so i had to add thermal pads and you can see that they were actually touching those sensors so now that i'm not using lidded cpus anymore i can remove that and go back to the original thermal pad that's on there and i gave it one more wipe down just to have it nice and tidy now we'll move on to installing the cpu okay so we're going to remove the cpu out of its packaging we can skip ahead here so as you can see these were not brand new processors without lids on them they were littered processors that have been deleted and i gotta say they're not super shiny anyway we're just going for it here and as you can see there's two little indents on the cpu that's where you line up to drop it in make sure you're lining up the two indents okay so you can see a huge amount of dust that has piled up next to the heat sensors and the reality is like i'm not cleaning that up until after i get the cpu back in the socket like i have it now you would not want to go dust your board without the cpu in there because there's a good chance some of that dust is going to fall into the cpu socket and that could just be an absolute nightmare you also want to make sure when you're removing these processors that you check the cpu socket make sure nothing like old thermal paste has fallen down into the socket and then you go put the new cpu down on there and guess what you got problems so the other thing is you know lucky for me i kept these little spacers in my desk drawer with the original cpus that i removed from the mac pro the first time i did the update so obviously you don't need those spacers if you're putting a lidded cpu in but since i'm putting deleted cpus i need that spacer sitting on top and they have the same little indent like the cpu so you know exactly which way to put it on top okay so now we got it all cleaned up and i'm gonna apply the thermal paste and on intel's website if you look up xeon processors they say to do it in a line because as you can see the processor is actually a rectangle it's not a square so you don't put a p shape dot in the middle you put a line across the processor even if it has the integrated heat spreader on it the lid so one more thing i want to talk about is the north bridge processor which is something i wasn't really that familiar with but there it is the arrows pointing at it you see the heat sink and you see how it's held down those are two plastic spring loaded pins and what people say is they eventually wear out and they pop out of their hole and then the heatsink comes loose and basically you're screwed so it's not a bad idea when you go to do this upgrade to also find new pins replacement pins and it's it's kind of a bigger install you have to flip the whole tray over and remove the silver bottom of the tray to be able to get at these pins and use needle nose pliers i mean there's videos on this so i'm not going to go into it too much but the fact is is yes you can open up the north bridge put new thermal paste in there and put new pins to hold it down because eventually from heat these pins could wear out pop up and then your mac pro is not going to be booting until you fix it and the northbridge is sort of the center communicator to the cpus the pci slots and the ram so without northbridge you got no bridge and it also runs hotter than the cpus so it's not a bad idea to put some new thermal paste on there which i did not do okay so i connected the connector of the heat sink first and now i'm easing the heat sink back down if you don't have a loose connector you just want to put it in straight down you don't want to do it an angle i have to kind of go in at an angle because i'm already pre-wired then you want to do a criss-cross pattern screwing in the screws tighter and tighter and eventually you won't be able to turn the screw anymore and you can just give it a nice snug tightening at the end there you don't really have to worry about over tightening when you're using deleted cpus like you do have to worry about it when you're using lidded cpus so the process is the same i'm not going to bother showing the whole install of the second cpu i did exactly the same thing that i did with the first and we're tightening it down doing the crisscross pattern and then we're gonna put it in and boot up and see what we got sorry for the shaky camera work here but there was my open core boot screen so we are booting folks after installing two 56 90s into big sur running open core 0.7.7 and what we got is a kick in the ass one of my ram chips is not showing up the row on the left is cpu a and the row on the right is cpu b so i'm missing my third ram chip there and slot seven um yeah so this sucks so i took the logic board back out and removed the cpu from cpub slot and look there's a little dust bunny in the socket not cool so i got my little blower tool and got it out of there without having to touch the socket myself so one cool thing i learned after having to do this multiple times is that i don't have to disconnect the heatsink if you're like me and you used a lidded cpu on your first upgrade on a 2009 only mac pro and you removed the heatsink connectors from its housing so that it's now a loose wire it's loose enough so that you can just stand up the heat sink and i put something under it to keep it sort of flat because you have very little slack but the reality is i don't have to try and disconnect the connector from the heatsink to the logic board i can leave it connected and there's enough leeway for me to stand up the heatsink so i thought okay i had a dust bunny in there i'm going to put the cpu back in and i'll be good and all my ram will show up but as it turns out that was possibly not the problem because once it was clean i still did not have all sticks of ram showing up and then i opened it up yet again and look what i noticed one of the gold contacts on the bottom of the cpu is not gold it's gray so as it turns out i had a bum cpu which i returned and they sent me another set of two and i gotta say the second set was much shinier and cleaner looking than the first set so i'm putting in cpu b yet again and and as you can see cpu b's indents are not in the same place as cpu a they're reversed so you've got to make sure you're lining up those indents on the chip to match the logic board okay moment of the truth do we get the boot chime and do we not get little sorry for the handheld little error lights we'll show up in here if there's a memory problem wait where am i yeah so far so good rebooting and no memory lights went on it would have lit up by now so i stole this photo from the internet and this poor bastard has six memory lights on so don't know what's going on for him i only had one memory light on and you see it right away when you hear the boot chime all of a sudden these things light up now the one thing i should have checked which i didn't was to see if the cpu light was on i did not check that and i should have there's one error light for cpu a and for cpub so i boot it up and bingo all my ram now shows up this seems to happen to me every time i do this install i have an issue with one ram stick but this time it turned out to be the cpu because i returned the cpus i got two new ones and everything mounted the way it should all the ram shows up and uh i am now good to go going from my lidded 56 80s to d-lidded 56 90s so on the left we have the 56 80s and on the right we have the 56 90s squeaking out a little bit of an increase nothing to write home about really are you going to see the difference in your day-to-day you're probably not going to notice the difference too much but uh hey it is faster and what do you expect you're going from 3.33 gigahertz to 3.46 gigahertz and in cinebench you can see that the 5690 again beat the 5680 by a tiny margin um now why they show the 5650 in the single core being faster than a 5690 i have no idea it's showing like it's much faster which is really odd because that's the original chip i had in my mac pro that was the first upgrade i did was the 5650 and you can see down below number six on the left there is a 5650 and it's quite a bit slower than the 56 90 and the 5680 as it should be why it's on the top there saying it's blazing fast i have no idea okay thanks for watching we did it 5690s are in anybody want a pair of 5680s let me know in the comments and i'll see you on the next mac sound solutions video video video

Channel: Mac Sound Solutions inc.

Views: 18,721

Keywords: macpro, apple, opencore, Bigsur, monterey, upgrade, cpu, cpuupgrade, xeon5690, macsoundsolutions

Id: ZLf-xNSE_C4

Length: 18min 28sec (1108 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 26 2022