Hacking A Apple Mac Pro 1.1

As computer components get faster and more powerful, you may find yourself wondering if your once top-of-the-line Mac Pro can be king again with a little help from a hardware component upgrade. I decided to take an early 2009 Mac Pro and see if a GPU upgrade could bring this once beastly computer back to being on top once more. My inspiration came from NVIDIA's announcement for Mac support for their latest and greatest GPU lineup. The 10xx series, with the uber powerful Titan Xp as its flagship, is the fastest gaming GPU on the market today. Even if macOS isn't considered a gaming OS, could I make it hardware-ready enough to play some Mac-native games decently and perhaps run Bootcamp to setup an impromptu VR gaming rig? Let's find out!

Jun 10, 2015  This tutorial will show you how to bypass apple EFI on any Macbook Air, Macbook Pro, iMac, etc. Macbook efi password removal, remove efi password macbbok, macbook, macbook pro, macbook air, imac, mac pro, mac mini, apple efi icloud bypass, ghostlyhaks, thaGH05T, how to remove efi password from pre-2011 macbooks, efi chip, efi icloud, remove efi icloud, how to, tutorial. A Mac Pro 1,1 or 2,1 Cheese grater desktop with OSX Lion 10.7.5 system drive; 8GB USB drive; A graphics card better than a GT120, I used a Radeon HD 5770, original mac version with its appropriate power cable. There are flashed PC cards out there, but they won’t display a boot screen. I like a boot screen, so I purchased a proper Apple card. No Mac OS after Lion will install on a MAC PRO 1,1 without editing the original install file. Apple places checks in the installer so that it will only work with certain motherboards. Part of the tweak to the installer involves adding your system's board ID to the installer so it will pass a check and install. Apr 23, 2020  The Mac Pro is widely considered to be one of the best computers for professional use. And this is not surprising, because it is a modern, unique and the most productive computer which is available in the mass market. Unfortunately, even such powerful machines are not immune to performance loss and lagging. So I decided to see into it and share. Re: Original Mac Pro(1.1) and OSX 10.8 If memory serves, the official reason why the original Mac Pros aren't supported is because EFI on them is only 32-bit. That said, it's apparently possible to hack the Mountain Lion installer to work on those machines.

Aiming for the sky!

The plan was to go big or go home. I wanted to get a super powerful GPU in the aged Mac Pro and I wanted to be able to compare capabilities with my Windows gaming PC. I use my Windows PC for VR gaming as it's paired with an HTC Vive. Since my home PC has a monstrous NVIDIA 1080 ti, the Mac Pro was destined for the same GPU. I purchased a Founders Edition version of the 1080 ti from MSI. Although the Mac Pro has 2 old but venerable 2.26GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5500 series processors, I figured that even if they weren't powerful enough to keep the 1080 ti fed with data, the 8 cores could make up for some of the performance deficiencies. More on that later. Here are the complete system specs of the Mac Pro.

• Early 2009 Mac Pro running OS X El Capitan
• 2 x 2.26GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5500 series processors
• 12GB 1066MHz DDR3 ECC SDRAM
• ATI Radeon HD 5770 1024 MB
• 160GB SSD, 640GB sata HDD

Just plug in the hardware and go! Right?

Wrong. There are a bunch of requirements to be met to get new hardware working on a Mac. Unlike Windows or Linux that can accept hardware ubiquitously, Macs can only use hardware specifically designed for Mac OSes and with Apple's blessing (kind of — again, more on that later). In this instance, NVIDIA has already worked with Apple to create drivers for the 1080 ti in beta form. Just double-click the installer and away we go!

Or not. The beta drivers from NVIDIA require macOS Sierra. Not a problem! Just head to the App store. Search for macOS Sierra. Click download and…

Looks like my Mac Pro is too old for macOS Sierra. I could have just done a search on iMore to discover that the cut off date for Sierra on Mac Pros was 2010.

Never give up!

Not to be deterred, I found a number of tutorials on how to install Sierra on an unsupported Mac! This involves disabling SIP or System Integrity Protection and makes your Mac less secure. Therefore, I do not recommend you doing this if you have sensitive data on your Mac. I, however, decided to press on and after some time… success!

Install the drivers and swap in the GPU. What could go wrong?

Plenty. With my new macOS Sierra freshly installed, I was able to successfully install the NVIDIA beta drivers without issue. I shut down the Mac Pro and proceeded with the hardware installation.

1. Flip up the lock.

2. Remove the side panel.

3. Disconnect the 6-pin power cable from the old GPU.

4. Unscrew the expansion card retainer plate.

5. Carefully pull out the old GPU.

6. Slide in the new GPU.

7. Re-attach the retainer plate.
8. Plug in the 6-pin and the 8-pin power cables.

Except the 2009 Mac Pro doesn't have an 8-pin power cable. It only has two 6-pin cables. Each 6-pin power cable provides 75W plus the PCI connector bus provides another 75W for a total of 225W. The 1080 ti needs 250W. No matter! It's only missing a measly 25W. I plugged in the two 6-pin power cables anyway and closed the side panel and fired up the Mac Pro and I waited for the login screen… and waited. Nothing but black. The Mac Pro powered on, but it didn't make the familiar Mac 'bing' on start up.

Really. Never give up!

I powered off the Mac Pro and put the old GPU back in and it booted up without issue. I made further google searches and there were a few things I could try, but, frankly, I think that this Mac Pro is just too old to properly power the 1080 ti. After a bit more googling, I came across an excellent tutorial on installing an AMD RX 480. The AMD RX 480 is a recent generation mid-range GPU that is good for 1080p gaming and entry-level VR. This GPU is also not supported on macOS, but at this point I figured I'd try to exhaust all of my options. So instead of going 'big' with the NVIDIA GPU, I pivoted to go 'medium' with an AMD RX 480. I have a second gaming PC on which I run an Oculus Rift running two MSI Rumor RX 480 4GB. I took one of the RX 480's and placed it into the Mac Pro as per a www.theITsage.com tutorial.

Even though the MSI RX 480 needs an 8-pin port, I know that the reference RX 480 from AMD only uses a 6-pin port, so there shouldn't be any problem powering the GPU.

It's alive! Alive!

Although the Mac Pro boots up without the familiar Apple logo boot screen, the login screen popped up and I was able to log in and run a few before and after benchmarks comparing the old ATI Radeon HD 5770 to the new AMD RX 480. Some benchmarks are synthetic while other's are canned benchmarks from games that run natively on macOS. All benchmarks were run at the most complex graphical settings.

Heaven - 1080p

As you can see, there are some very strange results here. Although the RX 480 has some much better frame rates, the variation of FPS was very high. This means that the Xeon CPUs from the Mac Pro are far too weak to properly supply data to the RX 480 GPU. It would have been worse with the 1080 ti.

Was it worth it?

Hell no! Even though I got a new GPU to work in the Mac Pro, the other components being so weak make this a moot point. There is a reason why Apple decided not support some older hardware from being able to be upgraded to newer OS revisions. Even though the 2009 Mac Pro is capable of running macOS Sierra (as proven by me hacking it onto the system), there are myriad other aspects that also have to be up to spec for full functionality. The lack of proper power cables and the weak Xeon CPUs on this Mac Pro make upgrading the GPU nearly pointless, since gaming with such a highly variable frame rate would prove maddening. This is not to say that upgrading your GPU on other Mac hardware is a lost cause. In fact, I've decided to order an eGPU (likely the AKiTio) so that I can pair it up with a modern MacBook Pro and remove the issues of CPU bottlenecks and power delivery.

So, my attempt at bringing new life into an old Mac Pro wasn't a complete failure. At the very least, I now have the latest version of macOS running on the box.

Have you tried to upgrade your Mac Pro? How'd it go? Let me know in the comments below!

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So we received a couple of Mac Pro 1,1′s which were having issues and decided to see what we could make from them. The idea being to make a powerful, modern Mac as cheaply as possible. The Mac Pro 1,1 is a great place to start – it has masses of internal expansion, and can be grabbed cheaply second hand sources, often for less than £ 100.

The basic issue with the Mac Pro 1,1 is that as factory setup and running it will not run above Mac OS 10.7.5 – this limits it’s usability; especially with Applications like Adobe CC or even modern apps like Photos or iTunes. It also limits some upgrade options; especially with Graphics cards like our R9 – as these earlier OSes do not have the drivers needed.

To start with much of this work has been done by others; I will try and link back to sources as much as possible. That said many people have done similar things in different ways – so I will try and justify my methodology as well (or at least explain the logic behind the decision).

The short short version:

Mac Pro 1 1 2006

1) Upgrade the firmware to Mac Pro 2,1 (add support for newer CPUs)

2) Upgrade the CPUs to 2 x Quad Core 3.0Ghz Xeons.

3) Upgrade the RAM to above 16GB (we went to 32GB but anything above 16GB should be fine)

4) Install 4 x HDDs (defiantly Matched in size – preferably matched in brand, model etc) – Setup as a RAID 0 – and Test.

5) Upgrade the Graphics Card (we used our R9) – you need to have at least 512 MB VRAM.

6) Install Mac OS X 10.11.6 onto the RAID and modify the boot.efi and <supported platforms> list

7) Boot and enjoy!!

So these steps in detail – with reasons and processes.

1) Upgrade the firmware to Mac Pro 2,1 (add support for newer CPUs)

There is a useful forum here: which has a utility to do this. I followed the instructions and rebooted with the long tone and off you trot! This is needed to add support for the newer CPUs we had in store.

2) Upgrade the CPUs to 2 x Quad Core 3.0Ghz Xeons.

We had these in store from a failed Mac Pro 2,1 which had logic issues – but they can be purchased from eBay very cheaply – there is a great list here on MacRumors which can help you decide which suit your budget / needs. If you want to run lots at any one time then going from Dual Core to Quad Core can be helpful (I wanted to get virtualization working to support legacy OSes at the same time) – otherwise going for higher clock speed is more helpful for processes such as video encoding.

3) Upgrade the RAM to above 16GB (we went to 32GB but anything above 16GB should be fine)

If you trust the second hand market; you can pick up some real bargains for 667mhz RAM for these Machines (we do see some customers with issues from second hand RAM but would image it is a small number given how much it appears on eBay etc) – we do sell new modules here.

You MUST have above 12 GB RAM to run El Capitan without it falling over at random intervals – when we had it up and running with 8GB (waiting for a stock delivery) it would fall over every 10 mins or so at random times – since the upgrade it is up for days without any bother.

4) Install 4 x HDDs (defiantly Matched in size – preferably matched in brand, model etc) – Setup as a RAID 0 – and Test.

I had 4 x 3TB HDDs from a previous project which were no longer being used – a bit of a miss match of brands (a pair of Seagate 3TB, and a pair of WD Green 3TB drives). Once these were installed in the Mac Pro I used Target Disk mode via Firewire to a Mac Mini and setup as a RAID 0 using SoftRAID. Using target mode meant that we could install the latest SoftRAID drivers and not have issues later with older versions etc.

This RAID gives over 500MB/s read and write speed (as tested with BlackMagic Disk Speed Test) – and you could expect more with newer and matched drives. Not bad for 12TB of storage!

I used RAID 0 as this Mac will be backed up to a Time Machine server and also be acting as a Media Backup – so failure accounted for.

5) Upgrade the Graphics Card (I used our R9) – you need to have at least 512 MB VRAM.

Video Cards with less than 512 MB VRAM cause issues on these early Mac Pros with the later OSes. I replaced the stock GT with a flashed R9 270x 2GB VRAM. Other cards will work; however the 270x is within the Max power draw spec, has nice out of the box driver support in 10.11.6 and full Dual-link DVI.

6) Install Mac OS X 10.11.6 onto the RAID and modify the boot.efi and <supported platforms> list

I used the Mac Pro in Target disk mode attached to a 2012 Mac Mini running 10.9 – this allowed me to install 10.11.3, create an account and complete all the usual upgrades to 10.11.6 so that I knew it was a fully working install. – Effectively using the Mac Pro as a big hard drive enclosure!

Hacking A Apple Mac Pro 1.11 Desktop

Once it was all working I booted back into the Mac Mini and followed the instructions here:

This involved replacing the boot.efi and adding a line item to the <supported devices> plist. (I went for grey as I am a traditionalist!).

A tentative reboot with the “Alt” key and the 10.11.6 RAID appeared – selected and then the login appeared! It lives! Make sure that the hard drive is selected in the startup disk panel to avoid a long delay on boot and it has been up and running ever since!

So now I have a Mac Pro, running El Capitan 10.11.6 with 32GB RAM, 12TB hard drive operating at similar speeds to a modern SSD, the wonderful R9 270X with 2GB VRAM and two displays. Daily it runs four web browsers with approx 10 tabs in each, Parallels with various older OSes from 10.6.8 server upwards, Photos, eMail, Facetime (with a USB webcam), iTunes, iWork and all the usual office tasks and all for less than the cost of a iPad!