Mac upgrade success !

Finally got hold of a heat-sink to go along with the Quad Intel 2.8gig processor
I bought a month ago.
Fitting it required almost the whole Mac Pro to be dismantled !!

Done and booted up first time .... PHEW !!

Now I have a monster 8 x 2.8gig processor workhorse

MM.

;D
SWEET!!

8 x 2.8gig processor.. ??? ??? ???

is it fast?( I gues it beats my old dual 1.8 G5... or maybe few of them) ;D ;D ;D

is it fast?

Click to expand...

On my dual 1.8 PPC it takes me 25 minutes to convert a 25fps pic to 24fps.

On a new 8 core it takes 6 mins  8)

A bit faster.....

Testing it out this morning and it's SUPER quick to do everything from "boot up" onwards.

Had a Logic "test" song that was loaded up with almost 30 softsynths and samplers ( nasty CPU hungry stuff too, not simple things )
And several power hungry reverbs etc etc ...

On the previous "4 core" it was running the processors to over 80%

On the "8 core" it runs all 8 at around 22%  !!!!

That is some speed bump  ;D ;D ;D

I'm happy now for a few more years

One CAVEAT :  DON'T do this without the Apple service docs as there are some very tricky things to remove
and it would have been impossible without the "tips" and "photo's"
I would have snapped plastic and lost screws "down the back" otherwise !!

MM

MartyMart said:

Finally got hold of a heat-sink to go along with the Quad Intel 2.8gig processor
I bought a month ago.
Fitting it required almost the whole Mac Pro to be dismantled !!

Done and booted up first time .... PHEW !!

Now I have a monster 8 x 2.8gig processor workhorse

MM.

Click to expand...

Marty, so you had a 4core Mac and replaced the CPU with an 8core that you can buy from a PC store? Is this right?

got confused when you mentioned "8 x 2.8gig processor". Thought there was some magical special octocore for macs only.

Then I realised you counted the virtual "hyper threading" cores along. They actually mean very little in terms of performance, less than 10% boost at best.

So you really had a dual core with hyperthreading, and now you upgraded to quadcore with hyperthreading.

excuse the semantics interruption.

carry on.

No, I had a late 2008 "Single Quad 2.8Ghz" Mac pro V 3,1

It was available as the following :
Single quad 2.8 / Dual quad 2.8 ( 8 cores ) or Dual quad 3.0 and a "top of the line" Dual Quad 3.2

So I had a spare processor slot and fitted a second quad 2.8Ghz processor .... giving me 8 cores in total
.... 2 x quad 2.8's

No Virtual cores
Make sense ?

MM 

oh, didn't know they had a mac like that. So I take it you got some Xeon CPU for the upgrade?

Kingston said:

oh, didn't know they had a mac like that. So I take it you got some Xeon CPU for the upgrade?

Click to expand...

Yup, a used but working Xeon E 5462 chip, cost me 140 Euro's as compared to almost 800 from apple !!
They can only be about €30 to produce .....

MM

One CAVEAT :  DON'T do this without the Apple service docs as there are some very tricky things to remove
and it would have been impossible without the "tips" and "photo's"
I would have snapped plastic and lost screws "down the back" otherwise !!

Click to expand...

and where can we get those?

reanimatorstudio said:

One CAVEAT :  DON'T do this without the Apple service docs as there are some very tricky things to remove
and it would have been impossible without the "tips" and "photo's"
I would have snapped plastic and lost screws "down the back" otherwise !!

Click to expand...

and where can we get those?

Click to expand...

I PM'd you but I just "Googled" it and it was on line in some documents "blog" somewhere !!
As is almost everything these days ......

What?? You can upgrade the processor in Intel mac towers??  That is great news. (Or at least it will be in a few years...)  Thanks for the tip - I'll read up on it...

kato said:

What?? You can upgrade the processor in Intel mac towers??  That is great news. (Or at least it will be in a few years...)  Thanks for the tip - I'll read up on it...

Click to expand...

Yup, not many have done it as processor prices were always high, but they have come down, I picked
up a used one .... so long as it wasn't "over clocked" you can't damage them if careful.
Original series quads ( that have 2 x dual processors ) can be fitted with 2 x quads too !
socket 771 seems fairly open to the right "pair" of matched spec CPU's
Google to find anandtech and a few other peoples info on this process.

If I can do it then anyone can ... I'm a big clumsy oaf !!

MM.

Do you have any recommendations for hard drive upgrade - addition. I still just have the single 640G hard drive it came with, and those three empty bays are taunting me.

All I know is it's got to be an SATA drive. Is it as simple as that?

kato said:

Do you have any recommendations for hard drive upgrade - addition. I still just have the single 640G hard drive it came with, and those three empty bays are taunting me.

All I know is it's got to be an SATA drive. Is it as simple as that?

Click to expand...

Yup - SATA II 3.5inch 7200rpm
Pick up a couple of 1 TB drives .... yum

MM

I just purchased a Seagate 1T, SATA 3 for $90 from Amazon!
Wow, these have gotten cheap!

One CAVEAT :  DON'T do this without the Apple service docs as there are some very tricky things to remove
and it would have been impossible without the "tips" and "photo's"
I would have snapped plastic and lost screws "down the back" otherwise !!

Click to expand...

You need a manual to take that thing apart, Marty? ;-) ;-)

Nice of you to say ... but honestly it was a bit of a nightmare.

"unscrew this, then bend that and twist this, then use a magnetized screwdriver here"  etc etc !

MM.

While we're on the subject, I should point this out - Mac Pro tower buying tip:

If you're OK with the stock configuration (i.e. do the upgrades yourself), the base mac tower is cheaper at Amazon.

7% less at Amazon
and also another 7% sales tax saved. That 7+7 = $350.

I was on the verge of ordering it from the mac store just to get the airport wireless. Unfortunately, that's an upgrade you "can't" do yourself, according to the geniuses at the mac store.