Arigato - an original Mac Pro upgrade journey

[WhitetailAni]

I recently found two original Mac Pros on Facebook Marketplace for cheap. They looked like they were in pretty good shape - one lacked a GPU and storage drives, but the other had everything required to boot it. So I picked them up - partially because I've always wanted one of these machines, and partially because I needed something to run an Xserve RAID.

 

Listing as it was on FB Marketplace:

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Driving home. They're heavy enough that the car wanted the seatbelt clipped!

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Upon arriving I did a general inspection of the machines. For ease of typing, I'll be referring to the one that isn't missing things as Arigato (the one I plan to keep) and the one that is as Tempo (the one I plan to sell). Why? Those are the names I chose.

Arigato had the default 7300 GT, 8GB of RAM, and a 320GB hard drive. Booting it up revealed it was the 3.0 GHz model.

Tempo is still unknown as I don't have parts to put in it yet.

 

I don't have any pictures of this, but what I did:

 

1. I moved the RAM from Tempo to Arigato, giving Arigato a total of 10GB.

2. On booting it I noticed that the optical drives weren't detected. Checking the bay revealed a partially torn IDE cable, so I removed it and the power cable.

3. I installed a 128GB Samsung SSD (I believe 850 evo equivalent?), a 250GB WD Caviar in bay two, and two WD 1TB hard drives in bays 3 (Green) and 4 (Blue). The WD Green is on its way out - it was originally dead but fixed itself out of nowhere a few years ago. I just have a "new" (pulled from a external HDD from family) 1TB Blue.

4. I installed my PCIe fiber card so I can use it with my Xserve RAID, when that arrives in October.

5. I used a Bluetooth card I took from a dead iMac and put it in Arigato. It works just fine!

5. I installed Lion on the 128GB SSD and started copying the data from the Green to the Blue.

 

Slated upgrades:
1. SATA optical drives

While the 1,1 and 2,1 use IDE optical drives, Apple included SATA ports with them - which work, too! So you can swap the cable from a 3,1 or newer and it works fine. 5.25" bays are standard measurement, so no issues there.

 

2. 7300 GT to a Radeon HD 7950

The 7300 GT may provide a display out, but that's about all it can do. 256MB of VRAM, 4 shader cores, 8 TMUs, and 8 ROPs will not get you far at all. So I'm picking up a Radeon HD 7950 as it supports Mountain Lion to El Capitan with Metal support, and EFI support with a Mac-compatible VBIOS! Increasing the specs to 3GB of RAM, 1792 shader cores, 112 TMUs, and 32 ROPs - a 1200%, 44800%, 1400%, and 400% increase in specs.
 

3. 2x Xeon 5160 to 2x Xeon X5365 (and MacPro1,1 to MacPro2,1 EFI as a result)

There's no real reason for me to do this, I just want to upgrade it to the max as parts are cheap right now.

 

4. 10GB RAM to 32GB RAM

Same reason as above.

 

EDIT: I initially thought 64GB was impossible, but it turns out it is possible.
However, the performance improvement is slim (and there's few things that will use more than 32GB without running into CPU limitations) and the cost is around 2.5x for 8x8GB vs 8x4GB.

 

5. 128GB SSD to 500GB/1TB, so I can install more than one OS without having to use a hard drive.

 

The superseded parts will be going into my second MacPro1,1 so I can sell it, so this will kind of be two logs at once.

 

The machines as they are now:

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As of posting this, the replacement optical drives and cable have been ordered, and the optical drives have been shipped.
 

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[Crunchy Dragon]

Good stuff.

 

I have a PowerMac G5 sitting in my basement that needs at minimum a new PSU that I haven't been bothered to hunt down a replacement for yet.

 

I enjoy messing with the older Macs, I had a similar adventure a few years ago with a 27" 2010 iMac. Will your Mac Pro take Xeon X5650s?

[WhitetailAni]

59 minutes ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

Will your Mac Pro take Xeon X5650s?

Sadly no, the newest it can take is Xeon X5365s (quad-core 3.0 GHz) - which the MacPro2,1 or 8-core config of the original Mac Pro was shipped with. Most people opt to get X5355s which are 2.66 GHz quad-cores, but I prefer the best for no reason other than CPU go vroom

[Crunchy Dragon]

1 minute ago, WhitetailAni said:

Sadly no, the newest it can take is Xeon X5365s (quad-core 3.0 GHz) - which the MacPro2,1 or 8-core config of the original Mac Pro was shipped with. Most people opt to get X5355s which are 2.66 GHz quad-cores, but I prefer the best for no reason other than CPU go vroom

Ha, right on. I get it.

 

I was looking at getting one of the newer Mac Pros(still LGA 1366) and upgrading that as much as I could. Haven't done it yet, but it's still an idea.

[BondiBlue]

Nice find! I have a Mac Pro 1,1 myself, and it's a pretty nice machine. Here are the specs of mine: 

• dual 2.66GHz Xeons
• 9GB worth of FB-DIMMs (can't remember the configuration right now, but I think someone just left the original 1GB set installed when they upgraded it with 8GB)
• 256GB Crucial m4 SATA SSD (added by the previous owner)
• 400GB 3.5" HDD (might be a Seagate? can't remember right now)
• Another 3.5" HDD (can't remember the capacity)
• Stock GeForce 7300 GT (basically a potato being asked to work as a GPU)
• 1GB ATI Radeon HD 5770 Mac Edition (one of the most common GPU upgrade options for the 1,1)

It's currently got Mac OS X Snow Leopard on one partition and OS X El Capitan on another drive. Yes, El Capitan can be installed on a 1,1, but it's not a perfect experience. The speed is relatively usable given the hardware involved, but software support isn't perfect. The power consumption of these machines is also incredibly high for the performance they offer. Mine pulled well over 200W transcoding a simple MP4 file, and the idle consumption isn't great either. 

 

These are pretty nice machines, however, and they're pretty versatile. Depending on the GPU installed they'll run anything from Tiger to El Capitan, and they can also run Windows and Linux pretty well. 

 

Let me know if you ever need any help with them. 

 

14 hours ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

Ha, right on. I get it.

 

I was looking at getting one of the newer Mac Pros(still LGA 1366) and upgrading that as much as I could. Haven't done it yet, but it's still an idea.

That would be the 2009-2012 models. The 2010 and 2012 are practically identical. Those models are MUCH more powerful than the 1,1 model shown above, and they can still offer pretty usable performance for a lot of modern tasks. They're power hungry, but not to the point where it doesn't make sense to use them. 

[WhitetailAni]

19 hours ago, BondiBlue said:

These are pretty nice machines, however, and they're pretty versatile. Depending on the GPU installed they'll run anything from Tiger to El Capitan, and they can also run Windows and Linux pretty well. 

I'm currently eyeing an HD 7970 - I know it breaks Lion support unless I keep the 7300 GT in, but that's fine - I already have an iMac G5 for Tiger/Leopard and a MacBook2,1 for Lion. I plan to run Mountain Lion and El Capitan, each on 128GB SSDs I have from upgrading other systems.

[WhitetailAni]

Optical drive time!

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I don't miss Lion.

 

Packaging of the optical drives. Pretty annoying to get through without scissors, but with scissors you can just cut the packaging in half and slide it apart.

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All the parts we need for this upgrade!

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Well, time to disassemble. The SATA ports are under the front cooling fans, so I'll have to pull that out. The old drives should also come out now so I can easily route the cable.

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Hello sata ports!

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Slight problem - the right-angle cables are the same depth, so only one can be plugged in at a time, so I'll need an extension cable. So for now, only the top one is connected to the computer, and the bottom one is tucked away by the front panel connectors.

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With the cables connected on the bottom, I can install them on the top and wire them in.

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It seems I wasn't free just yet though - the bottom one ejected fine, but the top one didn't. So I pulled them out to test.

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Still no luck - the top one just made a noise like it was trying, but couldn't. I theorized broken belt. So one disassembly later...

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Turns out the tray was just stuck. I pushed the manual eject and pulled the tray all the way out and it works just fine.

 

With that taken care of, reassembly complete!

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I also placed the old IDE drives in Tempo.

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The bid for the HD 7970 ends today... hopefully I win it!

[WhitetailAni]

Some minor upgrades - RAID card and SATA extension cable, to connect the other optical drive. I also got a 6-pin GPU power cable but that's not useful right now.

 

The RAID card:

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I won it for $9.77 in total. It works too!

I have a stupid idea for hooking up 8 total SATA drives inside the chassis, by leveraging that the RAID card works by physically disconnecting the SATA data from the motherboard and connecting it to the RAID card. So with the other drive cable setup from the other Mac Pro and a power splitter cable (parts have been ordered), I should be able to make a frankenstein 8-drive machine.

Yes I know the tab is bent, I bent it back. It bends easily

 

It's a full-length card, so it can leverage the full-length supports that the front fan assembly provides. With the PCIe slot plate on, it's in there very securely.

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Before slotting the card in though, I also ran the SATA extension cable so I can have both optical drives functioning.

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It's nothing too special - just a blue extension cable.

 

However, I went to boot up the machine and all it would do is make a clicking noise in the power supply. I tried pulling the RAID card but nothing...

 

So I pulled off the front fan assembly again (more pain. it's REALLY hard to get off...) and immediately saw the problem. Can you spot it?

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Yeah... I forgot to connect one of the logic board's power cables. Oops!!

I also changed how the SATA extension cable was run since it was pushing on the front fan assembly previously.

 

With that fixed, the machine booted up fine. The RAID card takes a bit to start up, and oddly it breaks System Information while doing so? Error -10810 if it hasn't fully started yet...

But it shows up in Expansion Slot Utility, and System Information works after a minute or two. RAID Utility doesn't open any windows, though I believe that's because I haven't connected the SATA data cable to it (no drives to load).

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Both optical drives work too.

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That's all for now. The HD 7970 is set to arrive Saturday - the ~$14 I paid for shipping is pretty handy, plus it's in Milwaukee (not very far).

 

[WhitetailAni]

GPU time! I also picked up 32GB of RAM for $2.50 (actually 16x4GB for $5) 

 

Don't have pictures of it out of the case so let's just jump into it.

 

Initial test... just "Mac Pro ATI VGA-Compatible Controller Card" was listed. Odd, since the 7970 was supposed to support Mountain Lion. So I decided to just upgrade to Mavericks, since Mountain Lion was giving me other issues.

 

One install later, the 7970 was working fine! Time to flash.

 

Annnnd welcome to  h e l l.

 

1. FreeDOS wouldn't boot on Mac

2. Linux wouldn't boot on Mac

3. FreeDOS wouldn't boot on main computer (after I pulled out the GTX 690)
4. Linux would, but the VBIOS I had resulted in no display in the Mac Pro.

So I went and remade the VBIOS - maybe it screwed up in file transfer.

Thankfully that fixed it, and it works now.

 

However, I'm not quite done. I have the 6-pin PCIe cable, but not the 8-pin one...

so I've had to sit another power supply on top.

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System as it is now:

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Also, the RAID card is fully working - turns out the System Information bugs were just Mountain Lion things. It works fine and shows up fine in Mavericks. SATA cable power splitter supplies arrive Monday!

[WhitetailAni]

Minor update. Turns out that the system does not give display out before OS X loads... unsure why. I followed this:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/guide-to-flash-hd-7950-7970-280-280x-for-mac-efi.2282196/
However, no luck. I used the original BIOS from the card (identical to one on TPU, so I just used that since it was easier) but it displays nothing...

It's a Sapphire blower cooler model.

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My second GPU power cable also came in, so that's now installed. The lighting isn't too great... I had to use my phone's flash.

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You can also see some of the RAM I picked up, my RAID card, and my fiber card. I'm planning to get a 4x USB3 card - it will drop the RAID card to only 4x, but I'm not too bothered. It's only going to be running some small 2.5" hard drives.

 

I tucked the excess cable away in the front fan mount. Fan still spins!

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Software-side, I updated Aperture to 3.4.5 so it opens on Mavericks. My RAID card also properly shows up, but it only does this...

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Searching it gave mixed results. Not sure what to do...

[WhitetailAni]

For fun I shoved another speaker in the Mac Pro (it was just sitting unused in my Power Mac G4).

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Pictured are the wires - the orange and white ones.

 

Originally I put it between the spacers and the power supply cables:

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But it prevented the optical drive tray from fully slotting in. So I moved it to leaning between the optical drives and power supply, facing into the corner.

 

It also sounds much better since the speaker I put in is MUCH better than the old one - mainly because it's just larger. The mini breadboard is used so I can add more if I wish.