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Suggestion on hardware upgrade for Mac Pro 1.1

L

lockerstone

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 28, 2009
5
0
Hello,

I'm bought a Mac Pro at the end of 2007. It is running on 2x2.66 GHz Dual-Core Intel Xenon, 4G of RAM and ATI Radeon X1900XT video card. I have been thinking of upgrading the hardware for some time, but have no idea where to start and what to get. I do a lot of 3D and high quality rendering on my Mac Pro.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thank You.
 
lockerstone said:
Hello,

I'm bought a Mac Pro at the end of 2007. It is running on 2x2.66 GHz Dual-Core Intel Xenon, 4G of RAM and ATI Radeon X1900XT video card. I have been thinking of upgrading the hardware for some time, but have no idea where to start and what to get. I do a lot of 3D and high quality rendering on my Mac Pro.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thank You.
Click to expand...

If you do rendering, you will want the fastest CPUs you can afford. Upgrading to a new Mac Pro with eight cores (2 four-core sockets) at 2.93 GHz would be your best bet; but if you can wait, Intel's drop-in upgrade to six-core chips is theoretically coming up in the next few months.

If you just want to upgrade, you may want to look for some quad-core Xeon chips to put in your system. The chips you want would be "Xeon X5300-series" chips, the best of which that will work on your Mac Pro is the Xeon X5365, a 3.0 GHz quad-core chip.

For the video card, unless the applications you use are specifically video-card dependent, and/or can use OpenCL to accelerate things, your current card should be fine. If your workflow *CAN* use OpenCL, then you may want to upgrade to the GeForce GTX 285, the fastest video card available for the Mac. Yes, the Mac-edition is ridiculously expensive (the same card for PCs runs $100 to $175 cheaper,) but if your tasks use OpenCL, this is the cream of the crop. (Until the Mac gets Radeon 5800-series cards, at least.)
 
thank you for the suggestions. i do run Open GL 3D modelling. the graphic card i have now would sometimes go haywire after long period of constant using. i have read something of this sort somewhere b4. the only is to shut down the computer and let it rest. would it be advisable to add more ram if i would to get a faster cpu chip?
 
ehurtley said:
If you do rendering, you will want the fastest CPUs you can afford. Upgrading to a new Mac Pro with eight cores (2 four-core sockets) at 2.93 GHz would be your best bet; but if you can wait, Intel's drop-in upgrade to six-core chips is theoretically coming up in the next few months.

If you just want to upgrade, you may want to look for some quad-core Xeon chips to put in your system. The chips you want would be "Xeon X5300-series" chips, the best of which that will work on your Mac Pro is the Xeon X5365, a 3.0 GHz quad-core chip.

For the video card, unless the applications you use are specifically video-card dependent, and/or can use OpenCL to accelerate things, your current card should be fine. If your workflow *CAN* use OpenCL, then you may want to upgrade to the GeForce GTX 285, the fastest video card available for the Mac. Yes, the Mac-edition is ridiculously expensive (the same card for PCs runs $100 to $175 cheaper,) but if your tasks use OpenCL, this is the cream of the crop. (Until the Mac gets Radeon 5800-series cards, at least.)
Click to expand...

He will not be able to "drop" in a 6-core as is uses two different motherboards. Also, the Mac pro 1,1 has just PCIx slots and the 285 needs a PCIe slot so it is not compatible.
 
I've got the same mac pro, the we can only upgrade processor wise to the 5300 series xeon Clovertown 4 cores, which is all the logic board we have will allow. Usually they run about $800 piece for the 3GHz models. Im looking to upgrade my self to those shortly I do a lot of high end HD editing and graphics.
 
Time for some clarification. I'm going to point out Ace's statement for the moment, but its been all over this thread.

Ace134blue said:
He will not be able to "drop" in a 6-core as is uses two different motherboards.
Click to expand...

Correct. The MacPro 1,1 supports only 51xx and 53xx Xeons. Even though its pin-compatible with 54xx Xeons, Apple will not update the firmware for support. Specifically EFI32 to EFI64.

Ace134blue said:
Also, the Mac pro 1,1 has just PCIx slots and the 285 needs a PCIe slot so it is not compatible.
Click to expand...

Eidorian said it best.
"com.apple.facepalm.plist"

My PowerMac G5 has PCIe slots. Apple stopped making machines with PCI or PCI-X slots years ago.

Remember what I said about firmware? Same reason here. The GTX 285 will not work in the 1.1 is that its an EFI64 card. I am certain to believe that many ATI offerings for EFI64 machines work with EFI32 machines. I fact, Apple's 4870 works with the 1,1 despite the specification on Apple's website.
 
It's nice to see I've made an impact somewhere. :rolleyes:

I've grown rather fond of ATI's widespread support of Mac Pro hardware without having to deal with EFI32/64 issues.

The 4870 is a fine card and it's easier if you can flash one. They're dirt cheap now that the HD 58xx line is out. Not that they weren't before.

I wouldn't spend the money or time to upgrade the processors are this point to be honest. 65nm is getting really old.
 
Yes its possible but at that point, your going to spend about just as much as you would buying a new Mac Pro that your trying to achieve by upgrading the logic board and buying new processors, heat sinks, ram risers depending on what logic board you upgrade too...ect ect.
 
Another option for upgrading is ram. I dropped in 16GB and am now sitting pretty with 18GB. Wow, very nice. I can have VMWare running all the time (with a couple VM's running), my favorite 3D modeling program, programming tools, image editing tools and more, and still have tons of free ram. Just makes your whole experience a lot better when you are not waiting for disk swapping to finish.

What series processors are in the Model 1,1? I have 2 dual-core 3.0GHz in mine.
 
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