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Seeking professional/expert/experience advices on Mac Pro 2008 3.1


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After a few years with Hackintosh scenes, I've decided to plunge and get a dinosaur Mac Pro 2008 3.1.  I got a really good deal but I think it will still have a few more good years in the bag, especially with a few upgrades.

 

Running Yosemite at the moment.  Wondering if anyone can help me with a few things:

 

1) replaced the stock ATA DVD Rom with a SATA DVD Rom.  Noticed that whenever the MP boots up, the dvd rom door pops open.  The ATA ROM never did.

 

2) right now have 14GB of DDR2-5300 667Mhz.  Planning to max out to 32GB.  Should I add on another 18GB @ 667Mhz or would 32GB @ 800Mhz will make a noticeable difference that it's worth shelling $$$ to upgrade?

 

3) put in a SATA PCIe 2.0 controller card (in the x16 slot) to drive a 512GB SSD.  Unfortunately, the power to drive the SSD is in the DVD rom area so I'd have to run an extension power cable to where the pcie slot.  Planning to get an Apricorn Velocity Solo x2 Extreme (Amazon.com) to eliminate sata and power cables.  Anyone have any experiences with this? or any suggestions to improve my current setup?

 

Thanx.

 

kd

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I am purchasing a Mac Pro 3,1 for $100.00, and have been doing some research, from what  I read, using the less expensive 667Mhz Ram won't be a noticeable difference over the 800 Mhz.  The SSD upgrade will have the greatest performance impact.  I am going to get the Apricorn Solo, ( Unless I find something better), i have 5 SSD's 2 SATA III, and 3 SATA II's. I also have a Nvidia GTX 650 Video Card that should work OOB.  I plan on using its as an audio workstation using my Personus Audiobox iTwo audio interface.

 

Good luck on your upgrades, I look forward to your future posts, with the upgrade progress.

 

I get my Mac Pro 3,1 on 3/31/2015 :)

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I am purchasing a Mac Pro 3,1 for $100.00, and have been doing some research, from what  I read, using the less expensive 667Mhz Ram won't be a noticeable difference over the 800 Mhz.  The SSD upgrade will have the greatest performance impact.  I am going to get the Apricorn Solo, ( Unless I find something better), i have 5 SSD's 2 SATA III, and 3 SATA II's. I also have a Nvidia GTX 650 Video Card that should work OOB.  I plan on using its as an audio workstation using my Personus Audiobox iTwo audio interface.

 

Good luck on your upgrades, I look forward to your future posts, with the upgrade progress.

 

I get my Mac Pro 3,1 on 3/31/2015 :)

WOW, you got an even more of a deal for your Rig!!  LOL.

 

I will mainly use mine for video and photo editings.

 

so far, I have a 512GB SSD running through a SATA PCIe controller card (Not the Apricorn Solo YET).  Not sure why I don't see much diffference in speed as compared to my old hackintosh rig....Quad Core Q6700, 8GB RAM with the he controller card plugged into PCIe x1 slot since I only have 1 x16.  Wheres on this MP, I am using x16 slot but don't see any in speed.  Two things different, I had TRIM enabled on the old system running Mavericks.  This MP is running Yosemite 10.10.1 WITHOUT TRIM since I've been reading TRIM causes Yosemite to crash....become unstable.  Not sure if it's true so I didn't even bother to try enabling TRIM........could this be the difference........*bluh*, don't know.

 

as with most nvidia graphics card, they should work with mac os x OOB.  No boot up screen but don't bother me.  I can put back the original MAC graphic card as per needed.

 

Other idea to why there is no improvement in speed is maybe of my ram.  The old system has 8GB of 800Mhz vs this one 14GB of 667Mhz.  That's why I'm considering of getting 32GB @ 800Mz.  The ram came with the system when I bought it.  Not even sure if the RAMS are approved by Apple with proper heatsink or not........overheating?

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  • 1 month later...

I've just fixed a MacPro 3,1 2008 model and put it into service by swapping out a faulty video card with one I had on hand. It's got 6Gb of original RAM which I believe is the 800Mz. A couple upgrades that worked out well included an iMac wifi/BT card with a mini PCIE adapter from ebay that gave the unit functioning handoff and continuity, as well as airdrop and AC wifi. This unit did not have a wifi card so all I had to do was pull out the old BT card and insert the new card and plug in the wires which were tucked under the mobo. http://www.ebay.ca/itm/191505214504?_trksid=p2060353.m2749.l2649&ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT

The other improvement was to install an SSD. I had a new 850 Evo 120gb ready to go in, and plugged it into the second slot from the front. For some reason it took forever, like 20 minutes, to format and stalled out when I tried to install Yosemite. So I pulled out my older 840 Evo 120gb and it worked fine which was a surprise. The read/write speeds are decent for a sata2 machine, around 200kb/s or so rw using Blackmagic Disk speedtest app so I left it at that. But if you want more speed on one of these I would go the cheapo route and install 2 or more SSDs (ones that work ok obv) and format them as striped Apple RAID. I've tried that using hard drives and you can expect a 50% speed increase using 2 drives. No need to buy anything.

Good luck with your resurrection!

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I'm thinking of getting 3,1or 4,1 with 8 cores it still has a lot of punch.Upgrading from 667 to 800 mhz doesn't make  economical sense as you will never feel any difference. Dual E5471, SSD and good Nvidia GPU is a must.

 

 

I had problem enabling trim on my MBP 2012 with Trim Enabler app, it froze my machine and locked the drive. I had to force erase the drive!!!

 

In the end that patch worked like a dream :

 

https://gist.github.com/return1/4058659

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