I got a chance to mess with the cheese grater a bit last night in my ongoing attempts to make it a daily driver.
See, here at work I have a potential client who wants to test on an M2 Max laptop, and we don’t really keep $3200 laptops just laying around for testing – so they’re okay with us purchasing one, doing the testing, and then just sending it to them after the project.
I happen to have an M2 Max laptop, so I’m seeing this as an opportunity to make a quick $3200 which will offset Bidenomics a bit. And afterward I’ll just use the cheese grater as my personal machine until the economy gets better.
Sure, the 5,1 is eleven years old at this point, but there’s a reason they were $3000 back in the day – they have an amazing industrial design and used a lot of bleeding edge technology for 2012, so they were quite a bit ahead of their PC relatives at the time…
That and technology has stagnated a bit in the last decade… Sure, things are smaller and faster, but in the ways that count all that speed is generally wasted; the OS has become bigger, more boated, and slower and most of the SPEEEEED stuff in hardware is just marketing.
For example, PCIe 4.0 is all the rage and yes, it’s mindblowingly fast – so fast in fact that high-end video cards – the ones that cost like a thousand bucks – only use 8 lanes in the PCIe x16 slot they sit in. New CPUs are pretty incredible, and M.2 storage is stupidfast – so fast that the processors and drives spend 50-75 percent of their time idle because there’s just no real need for that kind of speed on the average user’s desktop.
And this is a problem if you’re a company that makes their money off of hardware sales, so over the last decade there’s been a marked increase in ‘planned obsolescence’ – where the hardware is artificially limited or the software is specifically instructed to stop supporting things to drive sales.
Apple does this a lot more than companies on the PC side of things, mostly because Apple is a hardware company. If no one bought a new computer for over a decade, Apple wouldn’t be a trillion dollar company.
So the MacPro 5,1 and MacOS in general has a lot of little time-bombs in them that artificially age the hardware, but we can fix this with some hackery… And what this means is that with a little massaging, the MacPro 5,1 can still hold its own as a home computer.
Some of this massaging requires some pretty in-depth fiddling with the machine’s internals, like recoding the boot rom, reprogramming the EFI, and hacking the power supply… Not something the average user is willing to do, but stuff I do before breakfast.
Literally. This morning I was pushing some changes to the EFI on the 5,1 before I made breakfast…
Anyway.
The biggest issues with using the 5,1 as a daily driver are:
- Apple dropped OS support for it after Mojave (MacOS 10.14). Mojave came out in 2018 and was EoL’d in 2021.
- Doesn’t understand things like NVME without a boot rom update from Apple.
- Can only use certain video cards for certain OS versions because Apple bakes the drivers into each OS release. Was also a transition model between OpenGL and Metal, so Mojave won’t even install without a video card upgrade that most likely won’t show preboot graphics.
- Uses 2012 peripheral technology like PCIe 2.0, USB 2.0, and Firewire 800.
- Uses 2012 server CPUs that are more dump truck than race car.
The last two aren’t really issues outside of “speed bias”. By this I mean that, yes, PCIe 2.0 is a smaller number than PCIe 4.0 and decade old Xeon processors don’t have big numbers like “13700” after their names – but as mentioned above, this isn’t really as big of a deal as hardware manufacturers would like you to think.
PCIe 4.0 is really fast, but ‘big numbers’ don’t tell the whole story… For example, here’s a quick video showing what the real-world difference is between PCIe 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, and 4.0 is using the same higher-end video card:
Neat huh? This is the reality that exists outside of synthetic benchmarks.
On the CPU side of things, the most installed CPU on the planet as of this post is the 2021 Ryzen 5 5600X – and it’s about 50% faster than the X5690 Xeon’s in the 5,1 in a CPU benchmark – though the 5,1 has two CPUs…
If you need to do some work, the Xeon’s still hold their own. But this is again a benchmark and not a real slice-of-life for the average user. For all intents and purposes the average user will be hard pressed to spot the difference between these two CPUs on the desktop… And if you do notice, the delta will be a few milliseconds at worst.
The other items on the list above can be fixed with boot rom / EFI tweaks that fool newer MacOS versions into continuing to support the 5,1. Even the baked-in drivers can be overcome by injecting them into other OS versions.
And Apple even threw all of the 5,1 owners a bone by releasing a new boot rom (144.0.0.0) in 2019 that taught the old dog how to boot from NVME! Though that was probably a slight apology for both the trashcan MacPro and the lunatic pricing of the 2019 MacPro (a $6000 base model!?)…
Now I’m not saying the 5,1 is the ultimate machine by any stretch, and in a couple more years it will probably be just another relic of a bygone computer era – but until then, like a classic car, it’s a perfectly serviceable daily-driver as long as you don’t mind rolling up your sleeves and getting a little dirty under the hood.
In the end, my 5,1 will have two X5690 6-core Xeons, 128gigs of DDR3 ram, DVD and blu-ray burners, 1.2TB Intel 750 NVME boot drive, USB3, and an ATI RX 6600 XT video card… I definitely won’t be hurting for a few years until I move to whatever the new hotness Mac is in 2025.
Listening to "Never Surrender" by Triumph