MP 1,1-5,1 Mac Pro 2006 Bluetooth card questions, and WiFi card screw size?

[EugW]

Hi there.

I recently picked up an old 2006 Mac Pro, and have been updating it. It came with 9 GB RAM, 1 GB Apple OEM and 8 GB third party. However, the third party RAM no-name RAM without the heatsinks and it's unstable, so I've ordered OEM RAM off eBay. I can't use the machine with the third party RAM for more than half an hour before it crashes, but with the Apple OEM RAM I can use it all day long with no glitches, albeit very, very slowly since it's constantly paging to disk.

I've also ordered a BCM94321MC WiFi card which hopefully is the right one. What screws do I use to fasten that in?

As for Bluetooth, right now I have just plugged in an old tiny dongle that's been sitting in my cupboard for the last decade. It's a Broadcom chipset one that I got it off eBay for like five bucks. With that, I have connected an old AA powered Magic Keyboard, and it works fine, but only after the OS boots. I cannot control the Mac Pro at the time of booting, for stuff like choosing the boot drive, etc. If I want to do that, I have to plug in a wired keyboard.

If I were to get the internal Bluetooth card, would I gain control of the Mac during the boot process? Basically all I want is to be able to change the boot drive, or enter target mode. If I can do that with an internal Bluetooth card, I'd get one, but if not, I won't bother.

If I do get a Bluetooth card, which one should I get? I'd want compatibility with both Lion and El Capitan. Also, what screws for that?

 

[Kinkazan Morava]

hi there.
I rescued a mac like yours from the dumpster a month ago. do yourself a favor and disassemble everything to clean and apply some new thermal paste and make sure everything is fine.
I used my MacBook pro 2008 airport which I dumped, so now this beast is airborne. Antena solution was tricky but I used an existing NUC antenna and it worked just fine after adapted at mac's case. anyway given that I have Fios ~1GB/s I wired the network so I get full speed.
didn't bother for BT as you will get version 2.0 which is worthless nowadays. if you really want to ... check eBay.
I use the USB interface to hook up all my gadgets(this Mac has a lot of ports) and listen to music on wired AUDIOTECHNICA, so no need for BT.

upgrade your drives (I threw in an old Samsung sata 250G SSD+toshiba 500GB 2.5 inch 8GB SSD HYBRID+ existing 1TB HDD) and this solves speed on loadiing&computer reaction time and tons of storage.
I found this dude with 7GB of memory (4GB kit+2GB kit+2X512MB kit). bought 16GB (4X4) dell 5300F for $10 @craiglist, which you cant use in this MAC directly due to the high temp they might end up frying, so I got rid of the small modules refitted the heatsinks after cleaning the memory wafers and ended up with 20GB. they run @ the hottest 40+ celsius.
keep Mac Fan's Control program running anyway so you make sure this box runs cool.

Fitted another video card (NVIDIA QUADRO 1GB ram) in spite of the worthless NVIDA one these desktops come with. I do digital graphics and it needs 3-4 HD outputs for design pad Artist Pro xp-pen, and monitor and huge TV displays...

could have upgraded the processors like you did but wanted to spend as little as possible. 4 Xeon cores are more than enough for what I do in speed almost the same with yours. Plus the price for the upgrading Xeons is stupidly expensive
Pretty much the same with the price of the memories they sell on ebay for this model: insanely priced.

these were my 2 cents. The machine is perfect for what I do.