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Mac Pro 1.1 Motherboard?

A

aroestenburg

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 18, 2008
2
0
Hello,

I am interested to know what mainboard I have sitting in the 'beastie' next to me?

Model: Mac Pro 1.1 , 2 x 2.66GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon

Graphics: ATI Radeon X1900 XT

The reason I ask is, what options do I have for upgrading (aside from a whole new machine)
ie. swapping out processors
does the mainboard support dual SLI, (can I run another ATI Radeon X1900 XT)

any insights would be much appreciated.

aroestenburg
 
Its a proprietary Apple motherboard with no upgradability and no SLI. Your only option is to buy a new Mac Pro.
 
It is proprietary, but there are reports out there of successful processor swaps. I believe there are links to them floating around the forums here. SLI is not supported.
 
brand said:
Its a proprietary Apple motherboard with no upgradability and no SLI. Your only option is to buy a new Mac Pro.
Click to expand...

yeah, i don't think thats true.

people have upgraded the xeons, for example. they just have to be pin compatible.
 
You can upgrade your CPU's, but keep in mind that it's not at all cost effective. It'll cost you ~$2000 to upgrade to the fastest Woodcrest or Clovertown processors, at which point you're better off using that money to just purchase a new Mac Pro (say the Nehalem model, when it comes out next year).
 
On a slightly different tack: suppose you want to get updated
drivers for the motherboard. Is Apple the only place to go? Or
can we go to a third party?

It does look as though Apple has grouped together third party
drivers in its Boot Camp bundle.

I had some success updating the Ethernet drivers. I now have
some fancy new Ethernet options under Windows :)

http://downloadcenter.intel.com/scripts-df-external/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=12200

I'd like to stay up-to-date with the other drivers and not rely
wholly on Apple, if I can.
 
It is a modified version of the Intel 5000x server/workstation board.

The new Mac Pro is based around the Intel 5400 server/workstation board.

Intel sells their own variant of the 5400, Skulltrail, that includes a Nvidia chip for SLI. That is the only one built with that capability in mind.
 
rockinrocker said:
yeah, i don't think thats true.

people have upgraded the xeons, for example. they just have to be pin compatible.
Click to expand...

You don't have to believe it for it to be true. The motherboard is proprietary to the Mac Pro. It does take Xeon processors that you can replace but the motherboard is not upgradable.
 
They are not water cooled. Another thing I remembered is that speed of the RAM will stay at 667MHz and not change to 800MHz like the 2008 Mac Pros.
 
brand said:
You don't have to believe it for it to be true. The motherboard is proprietary to the Mac Pro. It does take Xeon processors that you can replace but the motherboard is not upgradable.
Click to expand...

:rolleyes:

he asked about options.
"ie. swapping out processors"

it's true that that can be done, is it not? i never said it makes sense economically.
 
aroestenburg said:
So there seems to be many cons not many pros

So say if I wanted to pop in 2 x Intel Xeon X3360 2.83GHz quad cores for around $1200 all up.

http://www.shopbot.com.au/pp-intel-xeon-x3360-price-106735.html

From what I understand:

is this will effectively make it an 2.83GHz 8 Core but will through my cooling all out of whack. I thought these 'beasties' were water cooled?

aroestenburg
Click to expand...



Aside from NOT being water cooled, you CANNOT upgrade to these CPUs with a 1.1 motherboard. They are pin compatible but the EFI firmware wont support the the processors. You have to stick with 53xx or 51xx xeons. In which case you would either want X5355 or X5365 (Quad 2.66 and Quad 3.0 respectfully.)


See my older post https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/453491/
 
QX9775 in a Mac Pro 1.1?

Is it possible to replace the mac Pro 1.1 CPU:s with two Qx9775 CPU:s?
 
brand said:
Its a proprietary Apple motherboard with no upgradability and no SLI. Your only option is to buy a new Mac Pro.
Click to expand...

aibo said:
while they'll run, it won't be at the MHz you're expecting and will set your fans full blast.
Click to expand...

yeroen said:
You can upgrade your CPU's, but keep in mind that it's not at all cost effective.
Click to expand...


The underlined portions of the above statements are emphatically false! Anyone who even spent a few hours reading about this topic would know better than to say those things.

What you can do to upgrade:

  • X5365 processors: A pair go for about $600 ~ $800 these days.
  • X5355 processors: A pair go for about $400 ~ $600 these days.
  • SSD Drives either as singles or in a RAID0 set.
  • HDD Drives in a RAID0 set.
  • There are 6 total SATA connections and 2 IDE connections all of which can be used for RAID0 or RAID10. One IDE Connection is occupied by the ODD.
  • RAM: Upgradable to 32 GB.
  • Video Card: Up to 1GB 4890 under OS X 10.5.8
  • Not to mention a whole host of audio interfaces, MIDI control surfaces, RAID cards, FW 800/400 and USB 2.0 devices, etc. etc.

A 2006 Mac Pro 1,1 upgraded to 16GB RAM, a pair of X5355 Xeons, an ATI 4870, and a nice RAID0 set is faster at many things than a brand new 2009 2.26 Octad that sells for $3,300 and what it's not faster at ends up being almost exactly the same. And "faster" in that sentence ranges from just slightly to blown away!

Swap the 5355s for 5365s and it is faster at everything. And it will be as fast at some things (many even!) as the brand new 2009 2.66 Octad that sells for $4,700. What it's not actually faster at ends up being close but clearly faster at most of the remaining things than a 2009 2.66 Quad ($2,500). And of course always much faster than the 2.26 Octad ($3,300) as stated.

These statements are emphatically true! ;)


I have also read that SLI does indeed work under bootcamp but I've not confirmed it as I'm not a big bootcamp user.



.
 
Well, I'm not trying to burn anyone. But it would be nice if people would check first before they answer up. If ya just want to increase the post count for a better forum title then say something witty and non-declarative or something. ;)
 
I'm just waiting for x5355 or x5365 to pop up on Ebay

I thought I'd chip in here. I have not upgraded my 1,1 Mac Pro yet, but having contacted people who have done is succusfully for a few years, you tube videos on how to swap the Xeon processors, read dozens of articles it is possible to swap out the CPU's.

I have taken my patience pills so I'm just waiting for either a pair of x5355 (2.66ghz) or x5365 (3.00ghz) to appear on Ebay.

I push my Mac Pro quite hard (I like to have multiple apps open) but it still copes. I just want a bigger push as I will be editing HD video in the next months.
 
Yeah patience is the key. That and routine. I think checking twice a week or maybe 3 times a week with two or three different search term is needed if you wanna find them in under a month.

Don't be afraid to buy a system either. I was seeing bare server blades with x5365s in them (and 2GB RAM and a 35GB 1,500 rpm HDD) for like $850 there for awhile. Something like that will do as well.

HD Video is a mixed bag. It's a combination of app, drive I/O, RAM amount, CPU speed, and CPU throughput (no. of cores). Mostly I've found the app is the most important. For example Adobe Premiere is a good three times faster than FCP and etc. Next up is probably a toss-up between drive I/O speed and processor speed. Lastly is probably CPU throughput (no. of cores). Of course all this is somewhat dependent on having "enough" RAM - which I guess is about 8GB and over. 4GB is a little light for sure. On the drive I/O thing I think a minimum configuration is a 3-drive RAID0 where fast drives are used. Again, different apps and how they work cause this weighting to change fairly dramatically. Like, for example, if we look at iMovie - editing in it is extremely dependent on drive I/O. For it to be smooth I guess a 5-drive RAID0 is needed. FCP seems to be more weighted on CPU speed and throughput. For FCP to be smooth I think a 4.5 GHz 4-core system is needed (or maybe a 4GHz 8-core). I chalk it up to juvenile code but it doesn't really matter why I suppose. etc. etc.

GPU and card is a consideration too but I dunno exactly how much of one it is. I haven't seen any benchmark comparisons of video editing where the video card was the primary focus so I dunno specifically.



.
 
Tesselator said:
HD Video is a mixed bag. It's a combination of app, drive I/O, RAM amount, CPU speed, and CPU throughput (no. of cores). Mostly I've found the app is the most important. For example Adobe Premiere is a good three times faster than FCP and etc. Next up is probably a toss-up between drive I/O speed and processor speed. Lastly is probably CPU throughput (no. of cores). Of course all this is somewhat dependent on having "enough" RAM - which I guess is about 8GB and over. 4GB is a little light for sure. On the drive I/O thing I think a minimum configuration is a 3-drive RAID0 where fast drives are used. Again, different apps and how they work cause this weighting to change fairly dramatically.

FCP seems to be more weighted on CPU speed and throughput. For FCP to be smooth I think a 4.5 GHz 4-core system is needed (or maybe a 4GHz 8-core). I chalk it up to juvenile code but it doesn't really matter why I suppose. etc. etc.

GPU and card is a consideration too but I dunno exactly how much of one it is. I haven't seen any benchmark comparisons of video editing where the video card was the primary focus so I dunno specifically.
Click to expand...


Indeed.
It is suprising that FCP3 uses maybe 100-200% proc power when editing,200-300% when doing the playback and rendering in the timeline,compressor is hitting 400% when doing transcoding but suddenly Color is going around 80-120% when doing final renders!!!
Talk about shedding a tear..

And there is weird issues that after importing materiel back from color there might be few transitions that bogs the system but when you redo them,everything is usually fine and dandy.
This is with 1080p/30 proresHq materiel and MP 1.1.


And I wonder how the "good gfx card makes a difference in FCP" argument got born?
I noticed in Color that when doing the color correction with the 3-way that the UI is sluggish and it takes time to think a bit ,but otherwise no lag even with the meagre 7300gt... Wonder if the prog allocates some of the rendering to the gfx card and could help out in that department.
I could understand that in shake when doing big (2k-4k) compostions that a good gfx card could come handy though.
Like,with a laymans reasoning.
 
Macinposh said:
And I wonder how the "good gfx card makes a difference in FCP" argument got born?
I noticed in Color that when doing the color correction with the 3-way that the UI is sluggish and it takes time to think a bit ,but otherwise no lag even with the meagre 7300gt... Wonder if the prog allocates some of the rendering to the gfx card and could help out in that department.
I could understand that in shake when doing big (2k-4k) compostions that a good gfx card could come handy though.
Like,with a laymans reasoning.
Click to expand...

Yeah. I dunno at all really. There must be some difference though. I mean uncompressed frames in RAM must be sent to the card, which must display, flip, display, etc. (double or triple buffered). So the I/O speed to the cards RAM and the card's RAM & GPU speed will have some affect. I assume significant at least to some degree. This assumes an application where the decompression of the stream is performed by the CPU and both CPU and GPU types do exist. Also if the software is using some toolkit (OpenGL, DirectX, other) to draw it's graphics (and some do) then a faster chip will accelerate the process somewhat. In total I dunno how much impact these will have all together but I guess it makes some difference - probably noticeable.
 
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