Mac Pro Upgradability

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Mac Pro Upgradability

Hi everyone!

Hope you're all well.

I'm relatively new to the Apple world of computing, but i'm keen to dive into it a little more (on a budget). I previously bought a unibody Macbook Pro and did the usual upgrades i.e. SSD + RAM. Now though, i'm looking to own my first desktop computer. For obvious reasons, a new Mac Pro is completely unrealistic, but i've seen a few videos of people taking the older model Mac Pro's and doing some serious upgrades to them.

I've seen a few Mac Pro's online selling roughly for about £200, and i'm tempted to pick one up and breathe some new life into it to use as my new desktop computer. The problem is, I don't know which year/models to look out for as well as what my options are in terms of upgradability.

Ideally, I want to achieve (at least) the specs below as cheaply as possible:

Minimum of 6 processing cores
Minimum of 16GB of RAM
A graphics card with at least 2GB of VRAM
2 SSD storage units
IO with HDMI and possibly USB 3.0 ports etc etc

If the price is right, i'd happily spend a little more to beef up the performance more than what i've stated above. Overall, if someone could recommend a year/model of Mac Pro and the potential upgrades for them that I could do, that would be fantastic!

Thanks,

Jack

Mac Pro

Posted on Jun 11, 2020 1:37 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Phil0124

Community+ 2024

Level 10

199,351 points

Jun 11, 2020 1:52 PM in response to JWally_

If you are planning on running the current macOS 10.15 Catalina, then nothing but the 2013 black Cylinder or the current 2019 cheese grater will do.

If you can live with macOS 10.14 Mojave or earlier then a 2010 or 2012 Mac Pro can work with the appropriate video card.

The specs you state are pretty basic for a Mac Pro. The 2010 and 2012 Mac Pros can be upgraded with more RAM, SSDs, and a new video card to support Mojave.

The basic configurations of the 2010 and 2012 Mac Pros start with 4 cores, so you'll need to look at the upgraded 8 core or 12 core versions.

See here for Graphics cards that can work with Mojave for the 2010 and 2012 Mac Pros: Install macOS 10.14 Mojave on Mac Pro (Mid 2010) and Mac Pro (Mid 2012) - Apple Support

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Answer 2

Jun 11, 2020 3:51 PM in response to JWally_

Hobbyist firmware modification:

If snooping about Mac Pro later models, the 4,1 2009, the 5,1 2010-2012, you need to understand that some users have force-installed the Mac Pro 5,1 firmware into the MacPro 4,1. This allows it to be extended to the 6-core processors of the 5,1 line, but somewhat unexpectedly allows it to continue to get official updates as if it were a 5,1 model.

Such a modified Mac Pro can run Mojave (with a proper Metal-capable graphics card, while unmodified is limited to El Capitan.

Apple does not support such upgrades, but they could have moved to disable them and have not done so to date.

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Mac Pro Upgradability

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