old mac, what do u think?

Marci · March 29, 2020

Hello, it is me again, lastly you recommended me to buy a gaming windows pc and than a mac for the apple things, is there any budget solution, two machines, a mac and a pc, pc what could run gta v and csgo in decent framerates and a mac what wont crash using final cut or logic? Mac as my daily machine and the pc for games? I was looking at some mac minis and i dont know if that is a good idea...

Marci · March 29, 2020

Also, off the theme i was talking about, i was looking that an old mac pro (2007 - 2010) is a very upgradable device, is it any usable and upgradable now? Their prices on ebay are really low so i could take this as an interesting one, and try to make my own mac, but not HACKINTOSH

Slottr · March 29, 2020

-Merged-

Regarding your question- What you could do is create a hackintosh, and dual boot between the two OS's. It is a little bit harder to do, but I think that may fit your situation.

DogKnight · April 1, 2020

The only old Mac Pro that can run the latest version of OSX is the 5,1 model (2010 or newer). And that is only if it has a Metal compatible graphics card.

Note that you can flash the 4,1 models to be recognized as a 5,1.

You can upgrade these to a decent spec and there are a few videos out there about maxing out the capacity of these towers. At max spec with 12 cores, 64gb of RAM, a recent AMD graphics card and a PCIE NVME SSD as primary storage, these can still be plenty fast for a lot of purposes. But there is multiple limitations. The PCIE slots are only 2.0. There is no USB 3, so that needs to be added. Bluetooth is version 2.x so some features like hand-off wont work without more upgrades.

And while it may be okay today if you do all this, you'll end up spending quite a bit to upgrade it to current performance levels, and you will have a Mac that Apple could chose to deprecate and remove from being supported with the next OSX release.

As mentioned, watch some of the online videos about upgrading these to see all that is involved and do some calculations to determine if it is worth it for you.

Hackintosh systems have become easier to setup and run. Snazzy Labs even has a video showing the setup of an AMD one not too long ago. At least with this route you have more options to re-purpose the hardware in the future. It's an option anyway.

Raptor_Fawr · April 2, 2020

I think I don't understand properly what you are trying to say, are you willing to buy two computers or just one?

If you need a macos I'd suggest you to buy a mac with enough hard disk capacity and install windows with bootcamp. Every time you turn on your computer you will be able to choose wheter to use macos or windows and it's the best solution for playing games at good framerate.

Me and my girlfriend tested steam games with parallels desktop 15 which is the best virtual machine available for mac on a 5k retina and it works really bad, so I'd suggest you to resort to bootcamp.

If you are willing to buy two computers, are you planning to have a laptop or a desktop for windows? Gaming capable laptops are costly and you probably should look for a second hand computer with an nvidia graphic card.

Nvidia is better than amd because you can customize more it's behaviour trough the nvidia control panel and you can get more fps out of weaker cards by tweaking some options