With the PCI slots sorted out, it’s time to turn to the processor tray. This was well trodden territory - upgrading the memory in the 5,1 Mac Pro was something almost everyone did (Apple’s memory prices are…rough, to say the least), and I remember the CPU replacement process dimly from my days in the blue t-shirt (the ridiculously long hex driver has a special place in my heart). We’ve got two things on the docket for us to work on. ...
Day three, fittingly enough, is all about Thunderbolt 3. This was really the key to the whole project; getting Thunderbolt 3 working meant I could easily swap between my work computer and my personal computer. I could use the same peripherals and configuration (no moving monitors around or swapping input devices - just one thunderbolt cable). Ultimately, I was able to get everything sorted such that my Caldigit TS3 Plus and LG 5k Ultrafine work perfectly on warm boot (ie - they are not recognized as thunderbolt devices when the Mac Pro first powers on from a shutdown state, but after being logged in to a user and rebooted, they work just fine). ...
Day two is dedicated to some early annoyance fixes, and some temperature and performance measurements of the NVMe storage. a tiny fan # With a little more burn in time in a quiet room, I noticed a change in the sound profile of the Mac Pro. The addition of the Syba I/O card had added in a high-pitched, whiny fan noise. This didn’t seem to ramp up and down with temperatures on the M. ...
the machine # It begins! First, we’ll verify our day 0 assumptions, and examine the machine itself. Figure 1: A first peek inside All told, it’s cosmetically fine. I’d love a more pristine chassis (this guy has definitely been bounced off some rough corners), but it was relatively clean on the inside. I blew the machine out with compressed air and wiped down all of touchable surfaces before really cracking in. ...
Now that we now what we’re going to try to do here and why, let’s formulate some kind of plan for this project. the plan # I’m going to start with the lowest spec 2 processor tray. I might have been able to find a better deal on a single processor machine and then source a dual proc CPU tray, but from a cursory search of ebay and craigslist, that might take a while, and I’m a little concerned about extra shipping cycles and part availability. ...
In March of 2020, I went looking for a project. I was looking for something that I could focus some extra time and energy on (that wasn’t just frantically refreshing news sites). I was working from home full time for the first time in my life, a change which necessitated some alterations to my workspace. Graduate school was finished, so I could afford some instability on my personal machine, and the 5k iMac that had served as the anchor of my home computing life was now in the way (I couldn’t use it for work, so it ended up awkwardly shunted aside most days, and moving it back into place every night was just annoying enough to be untenable. ...