Ultimate 12 core Mac Pro Upgrade! Step by Step in 4k

what's up guys I got a brand new video for you today and today you've seen a bunch of random stuff here you seen eBay seeing random parts random video cards an old Mac Pro beside me and you're probably like why the heck do you have that thing that thing should be in the trash it's so old well you're right it is old it's a 2009 Mac Pro it's considered a 4 comma one which is the model that was before the 5 comma one which was then replaced by the 6 comma one trash can but basically I've been reading on some forums that you can upgrade this thing by flashing the firmware to a Mac Pro 5 comma one because they didn't really change the internals too much and then you can put newer processors in it faster Ram and actually install mac OS high sierra or sierra whichever you want to install which basically lets you bring this thing in the 2017 and that's what we're gonna do and the main reason why i got this is because i'm achieving what the canon see 200 i'm shooting with it right now but i'm not shooting in RAW but when i do shoot in RAW none of the video editing apps can read those RAW files yet until they get updated and so you have to use canons transcoding software and it's crap for pc and that's what I'm using for editing with it only transcode to DPX files and they're just super massive and really hard to work with but if using the Mac version of the software you can actually transcode it to pro res 444 and that's what I'm gonna do so I'm going to use this system to transcode footage I'm going to turn this 8 core system into a 12 core 24 thread system we're gonna put some Xeon processors in it from a server that I got there the X 56 90s which are 6 core 12 thread 3 point 4 6 gigahertz so I'm putting two of those in it and I got some server rams so some 1333 megahertz ECC Ram so that server Ram and then I've got a USB 3 card for it because it doesn't come with USB 3 these were topped out at USB - I've got an MDOT to drive I'm gonna put in it I'm gonna put this Radeon HD 7970 which works out of the box I may upgrade it to something a little bit faster if I decide I want to I could even actually take the 1080p out of my PC and put it in here I got to say 2/3 card I can put in it that will allow me to put some faster SSDs in it and yeah I just got to get some cables and that's basically it this thing is going to be actually probably really fast they may even be just as fast as my new editing PC that I built obviously not the video card but if we look at all the prices of stuff added up most of the stuff was used including the system I only paid 600 bucks for the system believe it or not including all the parts in the system I spent under 1,500 bucks Canadian so that's pretty cheap to drive is the most expensive part because this system if you want to do this yourself nvme drives don't really work with the older Mac Pro's so you have to use an a HCI drive and Samsung made one of those it's called a 951 and it's a little bit expensive because it's harder to find but that does work in here in a slot so that's what I'm gonna use I'm basically gonna do this right from scratch I got to clean all the dirt out of it I got to upgrade the firmware on it first before I want to put the new CPUs in it and you can come along and watch me do it you may hate this I'll put some timestamps if you want to skip the whole build process and then just get to my final thoughts and the benchmarks so yeah let's get into it right now alright so since I have Yosemite apparently there's some error issues so I actually had to download the firmware from Apple's own site and this is it here you just mount it you don't actually install anything from it so once it's mounted here yeah we don't want to click on that then we're gonna open up the Mac Pro 2009/2010 firmware tool and this is the thing we want to use here so open this up I'm currently using a wired mouse and keyboard just in case Bluetooth has issues we go to upgrade the firmware creates a ram disk and this is what's gonna boot the firmware off when we restart here so as the Mac Pro 2010 firmware upgrade procedure is ready to complete the firmware update shut down the system upon restarting hold down the power button until the power indicator flashes or you hear a long tone then release the power button a grey screamed Apple logo and progress bar will appear and so that's where the update is gonna happen so basically we got to restart here so I'm basically gonna shut this down and then hold the power button down okay so I'm gonna shut this off and then once the system actually shuts down then I'll hold the power down okay so it off now I'm gonna hold this the lights just solid and I'm not hearing a tone hope they were go now it's flashing there's the tone I let go okay so the system just shut off it's now restarting to be starting again so everything seemed to go according to plan there the question is does it now say Mac Pro 5.1 okay so now thinks we have a completely different computer because it's asking for iCloud and stuff so I'm assuming we're good here so I ain't about this Mac it's saying that it's still early 2009 but when we go to system report here it now says Mac Pro 5-1 so now we can update the processors on this to the newer ones and yeah that's how you flash it to a Mac Pro 5-1 [Music] okay so these are the two you CPUs I got they're the Xeon X 56 90s basically the top-end cpu for the system we also need a three millimeter hex wrench which is around 6 inches long to fit down through the heatsink we also need some three millimeter thermal pads and also some thermal paste so here I was counting the amount of turns to back the screws off out of the heatsink then I realized that these CPUs are deleted and the ones we're putting in aren't so it's gonna lift the heatsink up higher so it doesn't really matter then slowly wiggle the heatsink off and I think the CPU actually comes with the heatsink because it's stuck to it and there's no retention clip to hold the CPU in so be really careful when pulling this off basically you just repeat the same steps for the other CPU then clean the thermal paste off the bottom as you can see here on either side of the CPU there's some plugs these are where the actual heat sinks connect that control of fans and manage the thermals what we need to do is extend these because we're not going to delive the CPU so I popped these out and I'm gonna take the clips off them so that we can actually extend them down a little bit further so they make proper contact once the heatsink sitting a little higher than normal then you're going to want to pop it back in the same spot you're good to go next we need to put some thermal pads on the VRMs because the old ones will not reach it now since we're adding basically a slightly taller CPU so I had to stack a couple thermal pads on top of each other because I could only get one and a half millimeters but you need three millimeters to actually reach the distance anyway swapping in the new CPU and applying thermal paste then slowly lower the heatsink with the connector plugging in first if this doesn't connect properly the fans will just run at full speed all the time then you're going to tighten these up in kind of a cross pattern don't go too tight just get them nice and firm and then slowly tighten them a little bit more until you get it nice and even and flush we got to do the same thing to the other CPU all right so everything's hooked up moment of truth hopefully this works is my first time trying it please work that's a good sign that's a good sign I didn't put all the RAM back in it boom about this Mac to 3.46 gigahertz six core Intel Xeon and then obviously my 16 gigs of ram so now I just got to install the new Ram and then I can have 1333 Ram and I got 64 gigs to put in it okay so I rearranged some of the memory and it's telling me that all the slots are in the right spot if we go up to about this Mac should see 64 gigs [Music] alright so the first thing I'm gonna do here is put together my M to drive this is just basically a four x card that you can insert the Samsung 9:51 into I can't remember the exact model but I'll put a link in the description now this is my dual SATA 3 card that you can put two SSDs into and I'm gonna put those in the raid zero and next my AC Wi-Fi / Bluetooth 4.0 card so we're gonna pull the tray out here and I'm gonna flip the Mac on its side this system didn't come with a Wi-Fi card but you can see the antennas but we need to remove the bluetooth module first now if the Wi-Fi extension kit we're going to connect the antenna as well as plug in the white connector into where the old Bluetooth plugged in now this is going to extend it down to the other side where we're gonna install the card so I'm gonna take the module out of the other side and I'm gonna connect all the antennas back up as well as the one we extended and then this white connector and then plug it into the socket this will give us AC Wi-Fi and bluetooth 4.0 for like continuity and handoff and stuff like that next I'm going to install my card so the first one is gonna be my SATA 3 card with the two SSDs next my USB 3 card and then the m2 Drive now this next cable special it's 2 mini 6 pin PCI Express 2 1 8 pin PCI Express and instead of using the HD 7970 I think I'm going to use an rx 580 I got a good deal on it and it only requires one 8 pin PCI Express cable so this will work perfectly just hook it up and then we're good to go [Music] I'm gonna have to put the original video card in it in order to get anything when I load up the Installer hard drives are both showing video cards on so I might have to install the original video card before I can install Sierra ok so I got to install the original video card [Music] all right so the video was super long might have been boring for some of you but for some of you that actually want to upgrade a MacPro and find like a cheap one somewhere and do the same thing maybe this video will help you out I did it in kind of a way that you know not too many videos out there are showing how to upgrade these old Mac Pros but basically you're taking something that someone may have thrown in the trash added a little bit of money into it and actually when you take a look at these benchmarks you're gonna be impressed I've been using it for transcoding video and it's been working out perfectly super rock-solid I actually really love OSX for editing photos just that spacebar tapped a preview thing is really nice that Windows doesn't really have and I'm gonna show you some benchmarks with the RX 580 in it and also with the 1080 Ti because I did take it out of my system but spoiler alert before I get to the benchmarks this actually performs similar if not better in some areas than the 1080 Ti that video card is a thousand dollars Canadian there's a massive price difference there and if you're not really getting that much more performance out of the expensive card you might as well put in rx 580 in the system obviously Rx Vegas coming out or is out already and Apple's gonna be putting that in the new iMac pearl so I have a feeling that you can probably put that in this Mac Pro and get even more performance anyway let's look at the benchmarks this is what you came here for I'm also gonna do some stuff and premiere that I did some tests with just exporting 4k DCI 10-bit video file it's only 1 minute long and we'll take a look at that but first let's get into Cinebench with the RX 580 we got a cpu score of 1620 which is actually basically the same as my new risin system my rise in 1,700 X overclocked so that's insane considering I didn't really spend that much money on this thing the GPU got 67 frames per second in the Cinebench score and then when I took out the RX 580 and put in my 1080 Ti we got a cpu score of 1611 so a little bit lower and the GPU score was 58 frames per second so basically 11 frames per second slower in Cinebench with the 1080 Ti than the rx 580 now getting into Geekbench a lot of people love seeing these synthetic benchmarks geek bench we're getting a multi-core score of 25,000 34 which is again basically right on par with my rise in 1,700 X I know there's dual CPUs in here but that architecture is way newer a faster Ram this is old this is like I said this is a 2009 Mac Pro and we're getting scores that are equal to something that's new and costs more money the single core score was three thousand two hundred and fifty eight so the single core score isn't insanely fast and that's just due to the architecture obviously my rise in systems over 4,000 and a lot of the newer systems are starting to push into the 5,000 even looking at the new iPhone it's higher than this so obviously the single core score is an amazing and certain apps that use single core speed like Lightroom you might notice it's not insanely fast on this but other apps that use multi-core you're not going to notice a difference so getting into disk speeds I'm just gonna go over the raid that I built out of the mechanical drives we're getting 500 megabytes a second read and 428 megabytes a second right and that's a 9 terabyte raid 0 right now so that's what I've been saving a bunch of the stuff to that I'm working on and it actually runs pretty good because that's the speed of an SSD and you're not gonna be able to get an SSD that's 9 terabytes for that kind of price now looking at the end to drive we're getting speeds of 1323 megabytes a second read and twelve hundred and thirty megabytes a second right so that's pretty fast that's not as insane as some of the new nvme drives but that's all we can really get out of this system because a PCI Lane is only a 4 x and it's only running at Gen 2 instead of the new gen 3 but I mean that's still really fast for an old Mac Pro like this ok so I talked about encoding video through Canon software can't really give you an apples to apples comparison with the PC because it's running 2 DP X this is rendering to ProRes but this does render actually quite a bit faster to pro res than my PC does to DP X so for rendering video files for Canon raw light files this thing's perfect beginning into something like premiere I know you're gonna be like oh final cut final cut we're not doing final cut because that's not what to use I use premiere and I'm gonna do some tests using a 4k d CI file this 10 bit just one minute long and I'm exporting out of premiere with the RX 580 and we got a export time of 2 minutes and 13 seconds then I put the 1080 TI in this thing and ran the exact same test and that exported at 1 minute and 51 seconds so basically 22 seconds difference so the 1080 TI was 22 seconds faster and then obviously I decided to do the exact same test on my PC with the Rison system into 1080 TI and it exported at 1 minute and 30 seconds so again there was about 20 seconds difference between the 1080 TI in this system versus the new Rison system so obviously Rison is more optimized you've got faster Ram newer architecture it's just it's obviously going to be quite a bit faster so that puts the RX 580 in the Mac Pro versus my PC with a 1080 Ti at around 43 seconds difference between them so obviously the Rison system is quite a bit faster at exporting video anyway that's all I want to get into for the benchmarks again I didn't buy this to do video editing with I just bought to transcode video but I certainly could edit video with this thing one of the biggest things I noticed is that having 64 gigs of ram in it lowered my Geekbench score quite a bit so when I took out two sticks of RAM now I'm running with 48 gigs of memory it seems to increase my speed by quite a bit in the Geekbench scores I don't know if real-world that makes a difference but right now I'm only running 48 gigs of ram in this thing but I mean that's fine for me I'm not gonna be needing 64 gigs of ram so yeah if you have a bit of time in patience and you want to wait for stuff to ship from ebay from China and you basically can do the exact same thing to your Mac Pro and get this thing in the 2017 didn't really cost me that much this system is comparable to something that I spent lots of money on other than the video card obviously I wouldn't say it's the hardest thing to do as far as upgrading a computer obviously the CPUs take a little bit of time and some patience and some know-how that's about the hardest thing everything else is pretty straightforward but yeah hopefully you found this video useful especially if you're gonna do this yourself or you may be like hmm maybe I do want to try something like that there's tons of these old Mac pros out there on eBay and all over the place people aren't used them anymore because everyone's upgrading to like a 5k iMac barely anyone is buying the new trashcan Mac Pro's because they're just terrible value this is way better value in my opinion obviously you don't get Thunderbolt that's about the only thing you don't get on the system obviously we added USB 3 to the system and a better video card but we can't add a Thunderbolt card tube because that's just technology that doesn't exist on this platform anyway I'll list everything in the description what to buy if you want to do the exact same thing some of it was from Amazon some of it was from eBay and some of it was actually just buying here home locally obviously the system was local but you can buy them on eBay and you can find them cheaper than maybe what I even pay the only problem is people are starting to catch on that you can do this and the prices of them are starting to go up anyway if you liked this video give it a thumbs up if you dislike this video give a thumbs down twice see you in the next one

Channel: Lee Zavitz

Views: 777,144

Keywords: mac pro upgrade, mac pro cpu upgrade, macpro flash, 4 1 to 5 1, rx 580 mac pro, gtx 1080 ti in mac pro, mac pro m.2 upgrade, mac pro high sierra, mac pro sata iii upgrade, mac pro x5690 upgrade, mac pro x5680 upgrade

Id: 3Z2ZSie7zeU

Length: 18min 32sec (1112 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 30 2017