Updating old Mac Pro

[RobSmith]

A friend of mine is looking to upgrade his and his wife's old Mac Pro's (both graphic designers) and he has asked me for some advice but I honestly have no clue with Apple products, I'm a PC man.

From what he has told me, one of the Mac Pros is older than the other, here are the specs:

Mac Pro – 2.6Ghz Quad-core Intel Xeon / 8GB RAM / ATI Radeon 2600
Mac Pro – 2.6Ghz Dual-core x2 / 4GB RAM / Nvidia GeForce 7300 GT

I know the CPU is not upgradeable but RAM and the GPU should be (?)

It would be greatly apreciated if anyone could advise as to what the best GPU/RAM upgrades I could stick in these machines without bottlenecking the system.

Thanks in advance!

 

[RobSmith]

Thanks for response guys! Much appreciated.

I'll probably stick a new CPU in the second Mac then now I know its possible - I'll need to find how to take apart a mac :O

Shame about the DDR2 cap, it'll do though.

Any advise on a GPU upgrade? I was looking at ATI 5770.

 

[RobSmith]

You mean TWO new CPUs, as it's a dual processor machine, at least going off what you've put. I just grabbed a bargain, I got my two Xeon Quad cores (literally today on ebay) for £62 inc postage.

Apple's official line is that they will take 16GB, but it has been proven time and time again that they will take 32GB no problems (8 sticks of 4GB). I've got 10GB in mine at the moment.

Thanks Paradigm.

I'll just stick two Xeons in then, I'm sure my friend will be more than happy to pay that instead of buying a brand new Mac Pro.

I'll probably go with 16GB RAM in each, they've given me a fairly decent budget to go on.

 

[RobSmith]

Well I got my CPUs in, and BSEL modded. So that's 8 cores of 2.33GHz for the grand total of £62 (lion doesn't report it right, but windows does, and benchmarking in Lion shows that I have the throughput of 8 2.33GHz cores), some of my AS5 and an ultra small piece of insulation tape.

Add that to the 10GB of RAM it currently has, and the impending Radeon 4890, and it doesn't feel so outdated anymore

Fantastic, I think I might follow suit with those upgrades - thanks for the update Paradigm!

EDIT: By very little effort, what did you mean by that when getting the GFX cards to work? I was looking at this but I cannot find it anywhere on OcUK or other online retailers.

 

[RobSmith]

Certainly for the Radeon 4890 (quicker than one 5770 anyway), it's a case of getting the PC version (with reference design), and flashing it using the Zeus Flashing Tool.

The reason I've not gone for anything newer is that there is quite a lot of doubt that it will run on a Mac Pro 1,1 (like mine from 2006), as they only have a 32-bit EFI on the mainboard, and the newer video cards use 64-Bit EFI ROMs, which is a no-go on a 32-bit EFI board (32-bit EFI just means that the machine boots the 32-bit OSX kernel, but still launches 64-bit apps, and can address the 64-bit memory space above 4GB).

I guess you need to find out exactly what Mac Pros you are dealing with.

They're 2008 models I am told. By the sounds if it, flashing is an easy way to get them to work on OSX rather than spending more for Mac specific cards.

Thanks again Paradigm.