The parts I ordered for the trashcan arrived right after I got home from work, so instead of eating dinner like a sane person – I tore down a 2013 MacPro to its thermal core…
Initial observation: “Did you have to use six different sizes of Torx bits to assemble this, Apple?”
Overall the 2013 MacPro is pretty easy to take apart – it’s a crap-ton of screws holding an aluminum Jenga tower together… But the engineering of it all is really a sight to behold. Simply amazing.
The CPU swap was a bit more difficult than it needed to be due to the studs in the heatsink for the CPU board coming loose before the CPU board screws did… So there was some tense time with a pair of vice-grips to get everything apart and then the studs back into the heatsink and tightened down.
And getting the CPU retainer back together without the CPU slipping in the socket or the spring tension flinging a screw across the room, with only two hands, is nightmarish… But I managed that as well.
Ultimately the 4-core CPU was removed, all of the dried out and caked on thermal grease was cleaned up, the new 6-core CPU was installed, and I used a little more of my precious Arctic Silver MX4 to make sure the interface between heatsink and CPU was as good as it could be.
All in all, it was about a half an hour to disassemble, swap the CPU, and reassemble. And then another ten minutes or so to pull out the old ram and M.2 SSD, install 64gigs of new ram and a new 1TB M.2 SSD…
The teardown was also a good opportunity to evict all of the previous owner dirt from the machine… There are a lot of tight radius ribbon cables and daughter boards in there, and they all cake with dust over time. So the inside of the trashcan is now as clean as the outside.
Anyway, once I got the outside of the can I place and everything plugged back in I hit the power button to see if I got boot or smoke…
Boot!
With the system running once again, I started another online install of Monterey – which took about a half an hour or so to complete – and then got screen shots of the new config for posterity:
As for Monterey and 32-bit Photoshop – it turns out that with some under the hood fiddling to temporarily make the machine think it’s in the past, I can get my copy of Parallels to run Mojave in a VM. And with a 6-core xeon and gobs of ram in the system, the VM should run just as well as a similar period iMac.
Should… I’ll find out this weekend.
If the VM version of Mojave doesn’t pan out, I’ll just wipe and reload Mojave native and call it done.
Listening to "More Than This" by Roxy Music