Updating old Mac Pro

RobSmith

RobSmith

RobSmith

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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!
 
The CPUs are upgradable. I'm just in the process of replacing my 2x 2.66Ghz Dual Core Xeons with Quad-Cores.

RAM wise, at least for the 2nd listed Mac Pro in your post, you need some DDR2-5300F, Fully Buffered, ECC, Registered RAM, for which the cost can vary. Keep an eye on ebay for bargains.
 
Think the first one might be DDR2 as well.

I recently added an extra 8gbs to my 2008 model. Was £200 which is a lot more than DDR3 costs.
 
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 said:
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.
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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.
 
paradigm said:
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).
Click to expand...
Just to confirm this - my old work Pro had 24Gb and sometimes I'd borrow two form another machine to make it 32Gb for big jobs.
 
paradigm said:
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.
Click to expand...

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.
 
Was just about to make a post which is simular to this - my friend has the dual quad Xeon, and wants to beef up the graphics, something high ATI 6 or 5 series to play the latest games, boot camp it and use it as his gaming machine.

The thing is, why can't you use a regular 5870 in there, as opposed to forking out the 377 that apple want to anally violate you for. Just seems silly!
 
MasterPlan1 said:
The thing is, why can't you use a regular 5870 in there, as opposed to forking out the 377 that apple want to anally violate you for. Just seems silly!
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The card needs an Apple compatible BIOS. Used to be quite common in days of old < G5 to take a PC card and flash it with a mac BIOS ;)

Not looked into it recently, but I can't see why it wouldn't still be the case.
 
MasterPlan1 said:
Was just about to make a post which is simular to this - my friend has the dual quad Xeon, and wants to beef up the graphics, something high ATI 6 or 5 series to play the latest games, boot camp it and use it as his gaming machine.

The thing is, why can't you use a regular 5870 in there, as opposed to forking out the 377 that apple want to anally violate you for. Just seems silly!
Click to expand...

IIRC, as long as you leave in a Mac graphics card for OSX to use, you can add another non-mac (regular) card that can only be recognised and used within Bootcamp.
 
Did a bit of digging, you can get any of the following PC cards to work natively in OS X with very little effort:

Radeon 4870 1GB
Radeon 4890
Radeon 6850
Radeon 6870
 
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 :)
 
paradigm said:
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 :)
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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.
 
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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.
 
paradigm said:
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.
Click to expand...

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.
 
If you want a GPU, I think the latest officially supported one is the 4870. I've seen the 5770 and the 5870 work just fine in all of the Mac Pros though. Also the GTX 285 works which is a great choice for Mac Pros even now. Especially if you want GPU acceleration for CS5
 
I can confirm that a PC Radeon 5770 works in my Mac Pro 1,1. That's completely without flashing too, still running a PC BIOS ROM on the card. Granted I get no boot screen, infact no video at all until the OS has loaded the login screen, but once into the OS it's fine, running QE/CI and xBench seems to suggest that everything is OK.

This is on Lion 10.7.1 BTW.

In theory, once I flash the EFI/BIOS ROM I have for the 5770, I should get video on boot too.
 
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