Mac Pro 5,1 Thunderbolt 3 0 Titan Ridge pros and cons

hey guys it's lance at mac sound solutions and today i'm going to be installing this bad boy the gigabyte titan ridge 2.0 thunderbolt 3 card how many upgrades can we do to a mac pro 5 one you know it just keeps going now other people have done this already and this card was given to me and it came pre-flashed if you buy this on new egg or something you're going to have to flash it yourself but these guys have a store on ebay they sell deleted cpus for the mac pro they sell this card pre-flashed for the mac pro and they also sell the wi-fi bluetooth 4.2 card that i recently did a video on and installed into my mac pro which has been working great ever since you also have to have open core installed i recently just updated to martin lowe's open core package 0.7.6 just this morning and as you can see behind me it's working great i got pro tools running you know unfortunately i don't have a thunderbolt interface to try out with this and i don't have a thunderbolt monitor the titan ridge comes with two mini displayport inputs and you have to connect your gpu to the titan ridge using the included mini display port to display port cables and then you can connect up to a 5k thunderbolt monitor i think it only works with certain monitors and not others but i'm not sure about that the main thing is i'm going to see if i get speed improvements connecting my sandisk extreme pro directly to the card right now i have a sauna usb 3.1 card installed i'm gonna have to remove that i've only got two spare slots in my mac pro aside from my graphics card because my rx 5700 xt eats into the second slot so i've got my usb 3.0 card and i got my nvme boot drive this has to be in slot 4. you also have to connect a little jumper cable i'm going to show you how to do that but it's a very simple install connect the jumper put it in slot 4 and boot up and then the one last thing you have to do is edit the open core config p list and set one of the things for thunderbolt to true so you can hot swap peripherals like hard drives so that's it let's get to the install okay so the video got a little longer than i was expecting so i have broken it up into these chapters and if you want to skip to the next chapter you can do so because you know most people have installed pcie cards before they know how to do that if you want to just skip to the speed test you can skip to chapter five or chapter six so step one just unplug the mac pro from power and then lay the mac pro on its back and discharge any static electricity that you might have lingering on your body and remove the side door okay so i set my mac pro down on its side as you can see i have my rx 5700 xt graphics card which eats into slot number two so all i can fit in there is that little antenna extension for my bluetooth card and then i have my nvme card and then finally my usb 3.1 card which i will be removing to put in the titan ridge okay so here's the card with a little tag on it saying this card is not guaranteed to work for all devices if it doesn't work for you please contact us for help or return with reason of doesn't fit thanks for your purchase from dq upgrade so for me all i need out of the box here is the little jumper cable but if you have thunderbolt displays you're going to need these mini display port display port cables that come in the box okay so we're going to connect the jumper cable to pin 5 and then loop it over and connect it to pin three you wanna be in that second bay there and the reason i believe we have to do this is because with the jumper in place it allows the titan ridge to get power from the mac pros pcie slot as opposed to having to use external power connectors to the card so now that we've got the jumper going from pin 5 to pin 3 we can now install the card but before we install it there's one more mod you can do if you got the balls and right now i don't have the balls i'm not gonna do it but i am maybe gonna have my friend do it down the road and i'm gonna call it the sleep mod and i found this on mac rumors somebody came up with this i'm guessing it works because a couple other people seem to try it and it seems to be working for them the issue is if you want to be able to sleep your mac pro with this card in it you're not going to be able to it's going to go to sleep and then it'll wake right back up and all your hard drives or connected peripherals will be ejected which you don't want so this little mod by removing this one little jumper will allow your mac pro to go to sleep and your hard drives will stay connected so i flipped the card over and i removed the four screws that hold on the face plate and i removed the face plate and judging by looking at the original picture i thought there was going to be a little jumper i could just pull off of there but no you have to remove a solder jumper and it's so tiny i don't dare do it myself because it's just so freaking small but that supposedly goes to pin number 11 on the pcie card which controls sleep so you can do this at your own risk you know i never put my computer to sleep before so i don't know if i'm gonna bother but i might so i'm sure you've all done this stuff before but anyway i'm just gonna show it in the video we gotta remove this little bar that holds down all the pcie cards it's always been difficult not so much taking it out but when you go to put it back in if you don't have all your cards lined up perfectly it's a real pain in the butt to get it back in so whenever i pull that thing out of there i always set it down on the table the way it came out if you have it flipped around and you go to put it back in you're going to be spending a long time trying to screw it in and it never will get screwed in so there's my usb 3.1 card which was 10 gigabits per second now we're going to be putting in the thunderbolt 3 card which is 40 gigabits per second so we're putting the titan ridge into a pcie 2.0 slot and it's a four time slot and from what i understand the maximum speed you're going to get with any hard drive possible with the pcie 2.0 four-time slot is 1500 megabytes per second so you just want to take your time make sure you've got the pins lined up properly to the slot and ease her in i use my hand on the outside of the mac to help out so now we got to put in the forsaken bracket that holds the pcie cards down i kind of bring it towards me and then i bring it up towards the hard drive bay there's a little lip there which you want to go under that lip if you have it too far forward towards you it's not going to screw in you want to have it backed into that lip all the way i'm sure most of you have all done this already but you know it is a pain and then i have to push my graphics card forward and sort of inward to be able to get it to screw in but i got that one in now i'm going in for the second screw and uh i had to fidget around with my nvme card here and finally i found that little spot you need to find to get it to screw in so i'm just doing the final turns on that okay so we put the lid back on we plugged it in we booted it up and now we are going to edit the config p list in open core so that we have hot swap ability with the thunderbolt ports on this card this is something that is normally turned off in martin lowe's package because a lot of people don't have thunderbolt so we now have to go mount our efi and make the little change to the config plist or config program list i used to call it the playlist that was incorrect i have since been corrected so i'm opening the config p list you can use any text editor to edit these things i have bb edit which is nice because it gives me those number lines on the left so as you can see at line 11 it says thunderbolt in line 13 under enabled it says false i want to set that to true and then you want to hit save it's always a good idea to reopen the config p list after you've done an edit to it to make sure you typed it in properly and that it did get saved because any typos could lead to big problems with open core so with blackmagic speed test and this is when i still had the older usb 3.1 card installed i connected the sandisk extreme pro which is rated at a thousand megabytes per second direct to the card and i only got 649 megabytes per second right and 678 read so now let's see how the titan ridge stands up with the sandisk extreme pro connected directly to it and we have a nice bump our read speed is 905 megabytes per second and our right is 837 and i had it run this several times and i was getting very consistent results so that's pretty good we're getting about a 200 megabyte per second bump so i couldn't help myself i really need to know how fast the titan ridge can go and i'm sure anyone else considering buying this for their mac pro 51 would like to know that info as well so i decided to buy one of these phantom drives it's a thunderbolt 3 drive rated up to 2 800 megabytes per second and here is the miracle folks and i know people already have this going on with this card but the mac pro 2009 2010 2012 we're never supposed to work with thunderbolt yet here we are in the year 2021 and there it is this is the first time i've ever connected a thunderbolt drive to my mac pro and it comes up under port 1 or rather it says receptacle 1 and then down below you can see phantom drive extreme thunderbolt 3 nvme and we are looking at the thunderbolt bus not usb that's very important but it's not all fairy tales and unicorns we now have to do a speed test and see how the drive fares in a pcie 2.0 four times slot okay so we're getting 1400 megabytes per second read and write those are the exact same speeds i get with my internal nvme i also cloned my system onto the phantom drive the thunderbolt drive and i'm able to boot up off the external drive now after saying that and thinking i had booted up off the external drive i have since returned this drive i am told that that is virtually impossible it can't be done i would swear that i did it i showed you the picture where it does show up as a boot choice but maybe it reverted and booted off my other system because it was just a clone i don't know i remember grabbing it in the open core boot picker and hitting boot so i would swear that it did boot into the external thunderbolt drive but i'm told it's virtually impossible to do that with the mac pro 5.1 okay so while these speeds are pretty sweet the reality is is you can put in an internal card into your mac pro and get much faster speeds if you rate zero four nvmes together on a card like this owc card you can then get almost up to like 5 500 megabytes per second read and write speed but it has to be in that 16 times slot which is the second slot next to your gpu if you're really in need for speed that is the way to go there is a major quirk using this card and thunderbolt now if you want to use this card just for a usbc device that's fine and dandy and you will get 900 megabytes per second speed but if you want to use it for thunderbolt there's a major issue that goes on with this card when you first boot up your mac from it not being on at all it's called a cold boot you do the cold boot and your drive will mount but it's mounting under usbc it is not mounting under thunderbolt and it will only get 900 megabytes per second speed it will not get the thunderbolt 1400 megabytes per second you have to wake up the thunderbolt port and what i find i have to do is to unplug the drive plug the drive back in so first i eject it then i unplug it i plug it back in and i do a restart and then voila now the drive is showing up under thunderbolt and i can then add my usb 3.1 hub to the other port and they work together i still got thunderbolt speeds on the thunderbolt drive and i got the usb 3 also working if you then go reboot your computer again the thunderbolt reverts back to usbc back to 900 megabytes per second back to not showing up as a device under thunderbolt and the only way to get it back is to do that whole dance again first to get rid of the usb hub that's got to be out of the picture you got to unplug the thunderbolt drive plug it back in and reboot and hopefully it will then show up as the thunderbolt drive if not you gotta shut down all the way do the cold start then do the unplug and plug then reboot and voila thunderbolt is there now for me that's a deal breaker i can't be bothered with that you know my audio interface is usb2 it is not a thunderbolt interface and some devices might act differently than this one hard drive i'm using but i've read on the chats that people do this restart thing a lot to get their thunderbolt devices working you know once it is working you don't have to shut down your computer you can just leave it on but you can't sleep it because the computer is going to wake right back up unless you do the sleep mod that i showed you earlier so long long story short you know i hope you enjoyed this video because i know i didn't making it it was really time consuming and there's just unfortunate quirks with this card i'm going to return the phantom drive even though it's a nice drive and it works well and i get good speeds with it i just can't you know 300 no i'm going to spend less than that money and put a new nvme and pcie card into my mac pro and i will use the titan ridge as a usb 3.1 card and i'm actually getting better speeds with it than i did with my sonnet 3.1 card so i'm getting about 200 megabytes more per second i got the card for free thank you dq upgrades on ebay okay thanks for watching please subscribe to my channel give me that thumbs up i'd really appreciate that and we'll see you on the next max maxsound solutions video

Channel: Mac Sound Solutions inc.

Views: 28,229

Keywords: macpro, thunderbolt, titanridge, opencore, monterey, bigsur, upgade

Id: OpRPHRCTLGA

Length: 16min 38sec (998 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 02 2022