You've got to do the pixlas mod and you can run the GPU at full power. These Mac Pros have like a 1,000W psu, plenty of power. The pass through on the board for the gpu power leads can't handle the high current, and the machine detects this and kills power in order to save the board. The mod basically bypasses that and wire straight to the psu.
@@DimondDoesTech A 6900XT is possible. A 6800XT is close but the 6900 does edge it out by like 10-20%. You need need to mod these though with a PC which is a downside.
@@vb7200 Honestly I said 6800 as going much faster I would seriously be worried about bottlenecking the X5690s. They may be quick but I wouldn't consider them worthy of a 6800XT or 6900XT
@@DimondDoesTech Yeah the Xenon's are older, but Open Core allows for hardware acceleration, which comes in handy for things like video editing and even gaming in Windows. Some of the CPU instructions are getting sent to the GPU, which will make a noticeable difference in things like rendering times and slight FPS bumps. Having a 68-6900XT would be making good use of that.
Haven't really been a mac guy since my Dual G5 workstation logic board died. Cool to see though. Watching this on a Dual Socket Dell workstation with 2 E5-2650 V2 Xeons and 128 GBs of ECC RAM.
Heck yeah with that rig! But yeah honestly someday I still do want to get my hands on a dual G5 tower (NOT the liquid cooled ones!!!) As I think they look a little nicer internally vs these later Mac pros
I found a 2010 Mac Pro 5,1 for free at my local dumpster. It currently has a single 4 core hyper threading Xeon. However, I would like to upgrade it to dual cpu 6 core hyper threading xeons, with a total of 24 threads!
I have been a Mac Guy since 1994. I got my first Performa 475 from Sears. Over time I have had at least 10 Macs of all different kinds and flavors.....but I am not tech nostalgic. My Daily Driver was a highly upgraded 2009 Cheesegrater...loved it....but ditched it about a week after getting a Base M1 Mini. Simply bought a decent ThunderBolt Hub and external case for my 2 spinning drives.....never looked back. I am ecstatic Apple left Intel/x86 behind
Clearly its working out for Apple with how they moved to their own custom chips vs x86. The M1, M1 Pro, etc all have hardware on board that help with content creator types, mainly having hardware that allows for extreme performance boosts in rendering, editing, and the like. While I am not a huge fan of MacOS I have to say that it is currently better than the garbage pile that Windows is now.
Surprised no one has said this but old Mac Pros (or cMPs, as the community calls them) are finesse machines, there is some tweaking that maximizes performance. They are STILL potent today - especially as multi-core optimization became a thing. This era of Apple is, bar none, the best era of their machines - and, yes, it is because of these machines, specifically the next year AFTER yours (which you can flash the BIOS to, and access the later chipsets). I still have a 2006 that I like to push with modern OSes and SSDs to do cool things, but something capable of 24 threads at over 3ghz per CPU... well... I have 12 cores running on mine, not even at max chipset, and despite it's outdated PCI-e lanes and slow RAM, can tear up stuff... In Windows or Linux. MacOS is designed for obsolescence since Jobs passed, and even he was guilty of fueling that (G5 Quad, look it up if you don't know - that was a kick in the junk). My retro-modern gaming rig is one of the 5,1 2010 Mac Pros, 32GB, with an Asus Matrix 5870 - I love it, and I run it into a 19" CRT at 1600x1200. Good enough to catch the minimums from modern titles, low enough res that the 2GB of 2011 VRAM isn't killing me. These computers are dropping in price as are the Xeons that fuel them - but it takes some patience and a couple screwdrivers sometimes. I'm not gonna trade my modern Intel system in, but as someone who was a "Mac Dude" for decades, this is the reason. These are beasts. Edit: LOL, I am so used to having to give up the secrets, that I posted early - you revealed the secret sauce... Bravo
Thanks! I am rather envious that you have such a nice high res CRT not gonna lie and I intend to eventually shove an RX 580 8GB that I'll flash to be a mac card so I can toss the GT 120 I currently use to access the boot menu to go into windows vs macOS. But yeah the video benchmarking (x5690s... I spent too much money...) is coming at some point in the near future and I gotta say.... expect performance gains in the 40% region over the stock X5550s in this config here.
@@DimondDoesTech I did a tier down, and saved a bit of coin on the lower spec CPUs. I had an RX580 in it for awhile and, yes, it was killer - you'll really enjoy it. Now that you can use RX6000 series cards though... hmmm ;) It took awhile to get that CRT... It was my fourth one in the last two or three years, and the other three all had problems. It takes time to find a good one! Thanks mate for the reply!
Managed to pick up not one but two, 5,1s for well, well under 140 a couple of months ago... One a 12core the other 8. These are impressive machines no doubt... Trying to build up a maxed out beast for as little cash as possible I enjoyed your vid
@@DimondDoesTech Cheers, trust me I'm embarrassed to tell you how much I paid but it was less than 1/3 of 140 for both. Having lots of trouble getting a boot screen/boot picker though - tried flashing my GPU and the OpenCore method, nothing seems to work. (Want to be able to boot into windows) Need to try boot camp again as I couldn't seem to do it in Mojave but I've used dosdude for Catalina.
@@anthonyjackson1853 What I use is the OG GT 120 as it is already flashed to be EFI, and use that go get to the boot menu and go into windows where I then swap the video cable to my Windows GPU.
Well I may just have done the former and might do the latter at some point. (vid coming... at some point. Been struggling with drive to make vids when you can't get a stinkin job)
Quick answer is they only have sometimes issues with 130watt CPU on dual 2009’s… singles handle 130watt cpus just fine and 2010/2012 no issues with any of them
Honestly if I had the single CPU version I would've gotten the w3690 and just overclocked it as much as I could've. Although 3.73GHz for the locked x5690 is still mighty quick
@@DimondDoesTech You have inspired me to start filiming my own tech videos its kinda crazy you only have 94 subs I watched every single of of your videos maybe one day we could do a colab LOL
I had the 2008 model of those, i used it for 2 years, i got it for free from my old job as a thank you for my service. It whas good enough, but i wanted to game, and i gamed on it, i had 22gb of ram, a oem variant gt 620 (has 192 cuda cores instead of 92) that i pulled from a fujitsu pc, and a couple of hard drives for 6tb in total. It whas a good mac, for work i booted it into macos, and for gaming, i ran windows. But the problem with those big towers is, power consumption! Having 2 very old processors consuming around 500 watts, is insane! I picked up a mobo and cpu combo, i whas looking for a case, once i had everything, i putted a pc together, which had almost the exact same geekbench score (single core scores are way better on my gaming pc offcourse), and it uses only 65 watts of power, and i settled on the i5 6500, which is plenty powerfull for what i need it for. The mac pro got sold pretty quickly, and with the money from the mac pro, i bought myself a gtx 1660 right before the prices went crazy. I still game on this exact graphics card. The 4,1 and 5,1 might be usefull to some, but as a regular desktop/gaming pc? I would say no, these macs consume so much power, way more than more modern cpus ever will, plus you need to have a mac flashed gpu in order for you to boot from dvd or usb, which is a pain in the rear end.
(This is my first channel btw) I will say that yeah power consumption is a big deal if you worry about that sort of thing or someone else pays the electric bill. I was running a minecraft server for a while on this mac pro (upgraded to duall X5690s) and my dad was starting to complain about the electric bill a little bit. I feel the real issue is that these macs don't ever go below base clock, at least not from what I've seen. The lowest clock I saw it hit was 2.96GHz while at IDLE so its still drawing a boatload of electricity. However when you consider these machines, when you look around, can be had for cheap... they really aren't bad. Especially these 4,1 macs due to the upgrade path. Most of the ones you find already come with something like a GT 120 so you can deal with booting from a DVD and such. Currently as specced I have an RX 480 and a GT 120 (for boot menu only) and it clearly can do more. However I need to get fans and a shroud for my 480 as it was $25 (video coming for that too at some point :p) -DDT
@@Dimondminer11 That's what i found out about my mac pro as well, 3,00ghz and not lower, in windows i had sort of a intel powergadget thing and i saw that they never clocked down, the gt 120 that whas in my mac whas artifacting so it whas unuseable, luckely there were other mac pro's on the truck (i dissassembled and recycled pc's at my previous job), the 4,1 is a great machine, especially when you flashmod them to a 5,1 which is easy to do. The 3,1 whas also pretty useable, i patched it to mojave and that ran very well with 8 cores. And the rx 480 is still a good card, and you got a deal there i see, nice! You can just jerryrig a fan on there, i did this also to an old agp card for my retro windows 98 pc, the fan on that card made a lawnmower noice, so i had to take it off because it vibrated through the entire case :p
@@bramvandenbroeck5060 Annoyingly after having a really bad night the night I posted my comment it really does seem that my 480 is borked. Not a big deal but still frustrating
Yeah they really are. Its nice for people who want a heckin lot of CPU horsepower for the money in something that is officially a Mac, instead of going the hackintosh route.
Writting this now from my 2010 macpro, never stoped using it and runs great to this day.
old macs are just the best. the nostalgia and power the looks. unbeatable. great vid mate
Yeah there really are some downright beautiful Macs that Apple has made over the years and this is definitely way up near the top.
What a beautiful machine. Very nice to see it still holding up in modern tasks
You've got to do the pixlas mod and you can run the GPU at full power. These Mac Pros have like a 1,000W psu, plenty of power. The pass through on the board for the gpu power leads can't handle the high current, and the machine detects this and kills power in order to save the board. The mod basically bypasses that and wire straight to the psu.
Yep I've seen that mod myself and it may be something I do in the future as the best GPU you can really get for this is an RX 6800
@@DimondDoesTech A 6900XT is possible. A 6800XT is close but the 6900 does edge it out by like 10-20%. You need need to mod these though with a PC which is a downside.
@@vb7200 Honestly I said 6800 as going much faster I would seriously be worried about bottlenecking the X5690s. They may be quick but I wouldn't consider them worthy of a 6800XT or 6900XT
@@DimondDoesTech Yeah the Xenon's are older, but Open Core allows for hardware acceleration, which comes in handy for things like video editing and even gaming in Windows. Some of the CPU instructions are getting sent to the GPU, which will make a noticeable difference in things like rendering times and slight FPS bumps. Having a 68-6900XT would be making good use of that.
Really? Ok now that sounds cool. I'll have to look into that as the 6800XT isn't all that expensive right now
Haven't really been a mac guy since my Dual G5 workstation logic board died. Cool to see though. Watching this on a Dual Socket Dell workstation with 2 E5-2650 V2 Xeons and 128 GBs of ECC RAM.
Heck yeah with that rig! But yeah honestly someday I still do want to get my hands on a dual G5 tower (NOT the liquid cooled ones!!!) As I think they look a little nicer internally vs these later Mac pros
I found a 2010 Mac Pro 5,1 for free at my local dumpster. It currently has a single 4 core hyper threading Xeon. However, I would like to upgrade it to dual cpu 6 core hyper threading xeons, with a total of 24 threads!
Nice score!
I have been a Mac Guy since 1994. I got my first Performa 475 from Sears. Over time I have had at least 10 Macs of all different kinds and flavors.....but I am not tech nostalgic. My Daily Driver was a highly upgraded 2009 Cheesegrater...loved it....but ditched it about a week after getting a Base M1 Mini. Simply bought a decent ThunderBolt Hub and external case for my 2 spinning drives.....never looked back. I am ecstatic Apple left Intel/x86 behind
Clearly its working out for Apple with how they moved to their own custom chips vs x86. The M1, M1 Pro, etc all have hardware on board that help with content creator types, mainly having hardware that allows for extreme performance boosts in rendering, editing, and the like. While I am not a huge fan of MacOS I have to say that it is currently better than the garbage pile that Windows is now.
Surprised no one has said this but old Mac Pros (or cMPs, as the community calls them) are finesse machines, there is some tweaking that maximizes performance. They are STILL potent today - especially as multi-core optimization became a thing. This era of Apple is, bar none, the best era of their machines - and, yes, it is because of these machines, specifically the next year AFTER yours (which you can flash the BIOS to, and access the later chipsets). I still have a 2006 that I like to push with modern OSes and SSDs to do cool things, but something capable of 24 threads at over 3ghz per CPU... well...
I have 12 cores running on mine, not even at max chipset, and despite it's outdated PCI-e lanes and slow RAM, can tear up stuff... In Windows or Linux. MacOS is designed for obsolescence since Jobs passed, and even he was guilty of fueling that (G5 Quad, look it up if you don't know - that was a kick in the junk).
My retro-modern gaming rig is one of the 5,1 2010 Mac Pros, 32GB, with an Asus Matrix 5870 - I love it, and I run it into a 19" CRT at 1600x1200. Good enough to catch the minimums from modern titles, low enough res that the 2GB of 2011 VRAM isn't killing me.
These computers are dropping in price as are the Xeons that fuel them - but it takes some patience and a couple screwdrivers sometimes. I'm not gonna trade my modern Intel system in, but as someone who was a "Mac Dude" for decades, this is the reason. These are beasts.
Edit: LOL, I am so used to having to give up the secrets, that I posted early - you revealed the secret sauce... Bravo
Thanks! I am rather envious that you have such a nice high res CRT not gonna lie and I intend to eventually shove an RX 580 8GB that I'll flash to be a mac card so I can toss the GT 120 I currently use to access the boot menu to go into windows vs macOS. But yeah the video benchmarking (x5690s... I spent too much money...) is coming at some point in the near future and I gotta say.... expect performance gains in the 40% region over the stock X5550s in this config here.
@@DimondDoesTech I did a tier down, and saved a bit of coin on the lower spec CPUs. I had an RX580 in it for awhile and, yes, it was killer - you'll really enjoy it. Now that you can use RX6000 series cards though... hmmm ;)
It took awhile to get that CRT... It was my fourth one in the last two or three years, and the other three all had problems. It takes time to find a good one!
Thanks mate for the reply!
@Ibrahim Anser Very true
Managed to pick up not one but two, 5,1s for well, well under 140 a couple of months ago... One a 12core the other 8.
These are impressive machines no doubt...
Trying to build up a maxed out beast for as little cash as possible
I enjoyed your vid
Holy mother that's a heck of a haul you got there! They are truly beasts even today, disregarding the whole power consumption thing...
@@DimondDoesTech Cheers, trust me I'm embarrassed to tell you how much I paid but it was less than 1/3 of 140 for both.
Having lots of trouble getting a boot screen/boot picker though - tried flashing my GPU and the OpenCore method, nothing seems to work. (Want to be able to boot into windows) Need to try boot camp again as I couldn't seem to do it in Mojave but I've used dosdude for Catalina.
@@anthonyjackson1853 What I use is the OG GT 120 as it is already flashed to be EFI, and use that go get to the boot menu and go into windows where I then swap the video cable to my Windows GPU.
I’d put dual 5690s in it and a flashed 6600xt. That seems to be the best/most modern configuration that actually makes sense with bottlenecks in mind
Well I may just have done the former and might do the latter at some point. (vid coming... at some point. Been struggling with drive to make vids when you can't get a stinkin job)
thank you homie appreciate it dawg
Quick answer is they only have sometimes issues with 130watt CPU on dual 2009’s… singles handle 130watt cpus just fine and 2010/2012 no issues with any of them
Honestly if I had the single CPU version I would've gotten the w3690 and just overclocked it as much as I could've. Although 3.73GHz for the locked x5690 is still mighty quick
@@DimondDoesTech x5690 is the way, just not always on a dual 2009….
Damm that's impressive af for that old hardware
Right? Like honestly for being hardware from 2009 I guess that really shows just how big of a punch Nehalem was over Kentsfield
Sup bro keep it going it's someone you know Samuel
Eyo sam hows it been doin!
I want one of these so much
IKR? These machines are very cool. And thanks for subscribing!
@@DimondDoesTech You have inspired me to start filiming my own tech videos its kinda crazy you only have 94 subs I watched every single of of your videos maybe one day we could do a colab LOL
@@dogfortgaming3183 Wait seriously? Thats AWESOME to hear! I wish you the best of luck with your channel!
I had the 2008 model of those, i used it for 2 years, i got it for free from my old job as a thank you for my service. It whas good enough, but i wanted to game, and i gamed on it, i had 22gb of ram, a oem variant gt 620 (has 192 cuda cores instead of 92) that i pulled from a fujitsu pc, and a couple of hard drives for 6tb in total. It whas a good mac, for work i booted it into macos, and for gaming, i ran windows. But the problem with those big towers is, power consumption! Having 2 very old processors consuming around 500 watts, is insane! I picked up a mobo and cpu combo, i whas looking for a case, once i had everything, i putted a pc together, which had almost the exact same geekbench score (single core scores are way better on my gaming pc offcourse), and it uses only 65 watts of power, and i settled on the i5 6500, which is plenty powerfull for what i need it for. The mac pro got sold pretty quickly, and with the money from the mac pro, i bought myself a gtx 1660 right before the prices went crazy. I still game on this exact graphics card. The 4,1 and 5,1 might be usefull to some, but as a regular desktop/gaming pc? I would say no, these macs consume so much power, way more than more modern cpus ever will, plus you need to have a mac flashed gpu in order for you to boot from dvd or usb, which is a pain in the rear end.
(This is my first channel btw) I will say that yeah power consumption is a big deal if you worry about that sort of thing or someone else pays the electric bill. I was running a minecraft server for a while on this mac pro (upgraded to duall X5690s) and my dad was starting to complain about the electric bill a little bit. I feel the real issue is that these macs don't ever go below base clock, at least not from what I've seen. The lowest clock I saw it hit was 2.96GHz while at IDLE so its still drawing a boatload of electricity. However when you consider these machines, when you look around, can be had for cheap... they really aren't bad. Especially these 4,1 macs due to the upgrade path. Most of the ones you find already come with something like a GT 120 so you can deal with booting from a DVD and such. Currently as specced I have an RX 480 and a GT 120 (for boot menu only) and it clearly can do more. However I need to get fans and a shroud for my 480 as it was $25 (video coming for that too at some point :p) -DDT
@@Dimondminer11 That's what i found out about my mac pro as well, 3,00ghz and not lower, in windows i had sort of a intel powergadget thing and i saw that they never clocked down, the gt 120 that whas in my mac whas artifacting so it whas unuseable, luckely there were other mac pro's on the truck (i dissassembled and recycled pc's at my previous job), the 4,1 is a great machine, especially when you flashmod them to a 5,1 which is easy to do. The 3,1 whas also pretty useable, i patched it to mojave and that ran very well with 8 cores. And the rx 480 is still a good card, and you got a deal there i see, nice! You can just jerryrig a fan on there, i did this also to an old agp card for my retro windows 98 pc, the fan on that card made a lawnmower noice, so i had to take it off because it vibrated through the entire case :p
@@bramvandenbroeck5060 Annoyingly after having a really bad night the night I posted my comment it really does seem that my 480 is borked. Not a big deal but still frustrating
And if you used Tripple Channel instead of Quad Channel RAM it coul be 10% faster!
These Mac Pros do not support Quad channel memory. All LGA 1366 CPUs only had a triple channel memory controller.
@@DimondDoesTech thats correct, but you populated all 4 Slots, thats bad!
@@Bogomil76 All 8 slots are populated. That means that, and I verified this in CPUz, it is running on triple channel mode
Best Mac desktop
Oh yeah hands down. Performance wise the 2019 Mac Pro wins but in terms of everything else, this is the best.
@@DimondDoesTech the only mac with many upgradable compatibility💯🔥🔥🔥🔥
2021 Mac Pro have 8+2 core cpu.
No the Mac Pro has two quad core CPUs, AI least this one did when it was stock
If only it had a standard ATX layout.
LTT did convert a G5 version of this into a PC if I'm not mistaken but yeah building a rig in here would be cool... but it would be very difficult
5.1s are cheap now
Yeah they really are. Its nice for people who want a heckin lot of CPU horsepower for the money in something that is officially a Mac, instead of going the hackintosh route.
GTX 970 master race
Hell yeah. The 970 can still definitely kick some butt