It’s been quite the journey to get to this point; sketchy mining cards, shipping complications, undocumented third-party utilities, and a distinct lack of modern-ish Windows hardware at my disposal.
That latter kept me at the office until 8pm last night as I tried valiantly to reflash the new RX 6600 XT with random scraps of PC hardware running Windows 8.1. But I kept getting a GDI32.dll error with the open sorcery VBIOS write tool and eventually had to stop for the night.
Bright and early this morning I started the update process to Win10, assuming that would probably fix it, and got to deal with the usual spate of Windows-isms… Like this one:
Yes, that really is a Razer “driver” attempting to install while Win10 is still installing…
But, after a half dozen restarts to do yet more updates that totaled about an hour of downtime, I was finally able to flash the new RX 6600 XT for use in the 2012 Mac Pro.
About an hour after this FedEx dropped off the new CPU tray in the gravel next to my garage, so I came home, unboxed the tray, loaded CPUs and ram, and shoved everything into the 2012 Mac Pro…
The installation of the CPU tray and video card were literally the least effort part of this whole ordeal – and the Mac Pro fired right up with the new hardware.
And with that I’m free to sell off my MacBook Pro M2 Max…
To be honest? I’m not sure I’ll miss the laptop. The 11 year old machine I’m daily driving now is actually more powerful where the rubber meets the road; mostly because I don’t use any of the handful of apps tailored to use the fancy bits of Apple Silicon.
Apple Silicon does definitely win when it comes to power efficiency though, and I expect the Mac Pro will wind up costing me a few bucks each month in electricity… But I think it’ll be worth it.
Listening to "Rabbit Hole Chasing You (2023 Live)" by morgan willis