Frankly, these are fine for my purpose but note that the standard SATA connections on the motherboard of the Mac Pro would make getting a larger SSD an easy upgrade. Both the physical dimensions of the card and the connector are specific to the Cylinder Mac Pro.The system came with a 160 GB SSD drive and a SATA 640 GB HDD. These graphics cards are custom designed for the Cylinder Mac Pro, and although they use a PCI 3.0 x16 interface, the Cylinder Mac Pro is not compatible with any standard Mac or Windows compatible PCIe video card.Read the Mac Pro Essentials Guide.Luckily for me, I have two eGPU enclosures both housing AMD RX 580 GPUs. Take a tour of all the ports and connectors, learn how to configure your Mac, explore the built-in security features, and more with the Essentials Guide. If you're editing 4K video, using 3D titles, or editing 360 video, 1GB of VRAM is recommended.Mac Pro Essentials. Final Cut Pro, Motion 5, and Compressor 4 require a graphics card that supports Metal, an Apple technology that lets the system and apps efficiently tap into the capabilities of today’s graphics processors (GPUs). August 9th, 2017 - The 2017 iMac 5K vs 2010 Mac Pro running a Metal game.Graphics card requirements.
At this point I was amazed with how I could reasonably upgrade hardware components such as a modern GPU (let alone two of them!) in such an aging system. Since I was able to already install macOS High Sierra, the upgrade was literally plug and play (with some caveats I'll detail in another article). Was the 2009 Mac Pro capable of housing my pretty decent and modern GPUs? I decided to find out.I put both of my AMD RX 580 GPUs into the Mac Pro to hopefully get higher fidelity for gaming and hardware encoding. The 2009 Mac Pro has two PCIe x 16 slots. The reason I suspect was due to the fact the the bus speed of the Thunderbolt 3 connection to the eGPU enclose is only 1/4 of a full PCIe x16 bus. Although I was able to install two modern GPUs in this machine, there are a couple of allowances I had to accept. Yes crossfire worked (mostly, but I'm not certain if the issues I had were due to the Mac Pro or due to crossfire itself).Don't get me wrong. In fact, as I mentioned previously, since I was able to install the latest AMD "Adrenaline" drivers, I knew I had the latest and greatest software those GPUs could offer. The system worked surprisingly well. I went from 1 GB of onboard VRAM to 2x8 GB. So far, it seems like it can.Another issue, while gaming specifically, is that due to the relatively weak single thread capabilities of the CPUs, is that although average frame rates were decent, the fluctuation of the highest frame rates to the lowest frame rates in a single game could vary wildly causing jarring stuttering at times but not enough for me to state that the game was unplayable. I'm seeing if along it's lifespan, various upgrades and updates can keep it within an acceptable performance level. Remember, I'm not looking to see if the 2009 Mac Pro can best a modern equivalent. Benching between various tests the difference was only a few percentage points lower when using reduced power but the benefits of having both GPUs was still apparent. In fact, in order for me to have stability, I had to reduce the power draw on the GPUs so that it didn't shut off my Mac Pro since the power draw was too high. Up to 128GB of it if so inclined. Memory wise, I could now install faster 1333 DDR3 memory. However, seeing how promising the dual GPU upgrade went, I started researching the possibility of purchasing an upgraded CPU and memory.The firmware upgrade that I performed taking the system from 4,1 to 5,1 made this CPU and memory upgrade an even better proposition. Up until I actually tried using the machine, I never even really considered upgrading the CPU or memory. Memory and CPU upgradesSo far I have not spent any extra cash on updating the 2009 Mac Pro. If you're hard pressed and can't afford the newest system, you can STILL get by on this machine from 2009. Free photoshop for mac alternative no downloadThe most amazing part is that would bring the 2009 Mac Pro on par with the Mac Pros sold up until the release of the 2013 "trash can" Mac Pro and in doing so, giving the 2013 model a run for it's money.And it's this ability to upgrade it to Westmere that again shows that although not the fastest, not even the most efficient, but still is relevant for today's workloads. The system could be upgraded to 12 cores running at 3.06 GHz. Not only do they have faster clock speeds, but they also have more cores per chip. ![]() Again, the purpose of this retro review is to see if the venerable 2009 Mac Pro still has it in this day and age if you were to have upgraded components over the years instead of buying a whole new system. In fact, I'll be using a variety of more modern hardware to compare the various workloads to the 2009 Mac Pro. 2 x 2.26GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5500 series processorsAlthough I'll be showcasing some metrics here it is not intended as a scientific comparison between systems. I also had access to a 2017 iMac Pro with a 3.2 GHz Intel Xeon W 8 core 16 thread CPU and 32GB of 2666 MHz DDR4 RAM. I'm using the HandBrake Fast 1080p30 preset and I'm placing the 22GB file onto the desktop so each machine reads and writes to their respective SSDs.I ran the 2009 Mac Pro against my current work computer, a 2014 Retina iMac with an i7 4970k 4 core 8 thread 4 GHz CPU and 16 GB of 1600 MHz DDR3 memory. The starting file size is 22GB in size. Transcoding HD VideoFor my transcoding comparison, I converted Star Trek VI: Undiscovered country from a Blu-ray dump I made a while ago. An upgrade to the CPU and memory is looking more and more enticing rather than getting a completely new system. This is also using the slowest available processors for the Mac Pro. In fact, I'd even deem it pretty good even if not considering it's age. 2017 iMac Pro transcode time: 16 minutesThe 2009 Mac Pro is not the fastest and yes it's 7 minutes slower than the 2014 iMac but it's far from being outclassed. 2014 Retina iMac transcode time: 35 minutes 2014 Retina iMac with M295x 4GB GPU: 1 minute 36 seconds 2009 Mac Pro with 2x RX 580 8GB GPUs: 9 minutes 45 seconds The export of the edited video was encoded in h.264. Final Cut ProAlthough we've seen that the 2009 Mac Pro can still keep up with more modern hardware when encoding using the CPU, can it feed the GPUs hardware encoding via OpenCL?A 10-minute 1080p video was edited with transitions and other effects. LuxMark OpenCL testAs a result of the poor FCP performance, I decided to test OpenCL capabilities using LuxMark to see if the system is actually using the GPUs. And if we get the OpenCL issue ironed out, it'll likely be way superior to the 2014 iMac in this regard. When doing actual editing pre-export, things such as the scrubbing, the adding of effects and transitions, importing files drawing clips, etc…I could detect no discernible difference in these aspects from any of the machines. If finances are a thing and upgrading to the latest and greatest is not an option then this will do your editing and rendering just fine. However, I'll keep on researching to see if I've set up everything so that the OpenCL capable GPUs are being properly utilized.This being said, the 2009 Mac Pro not unusable for FCP by any means. But if you use OpenCL, then the dual RX 580s in the 2009 Mac Pro have much better performance than the mobile GPU in the newer iMac or even the "entry level" iMac Pro. Why FCP didn't take advantage of the GPUs is as of yet unknown. As you can see the two RX 580s in the 2009 Mac Pro have beastly OpenCL compute capabilities. The 2009 Mac Pro blows all of the competition away with its dual GPU setup. 2014 Retina iMac OpenCL CPU+GPU score: 1862Wow. 2017 iMac Pro OpenCL CPU+GPU score: 4467 4K Video Card Pro 2010 Windows 10 Using APlease note that under macOS the tests did not utilize both RX 580 GPUs in the 2009 Mac Pro. In any event, here are some synthetic results for the GPUs in a few macOS running systems. Mac graphics scores at 1080pI'm not a big Mac gamer, but I wouldn't mind being one if the hardware is capable and the games exist. This is not to be an apples to apples comparison but to give you an idea of how the 2009 Mac Pro with its updates compared to other more modern machines. Gaming and VRBeing OS agnostic I've run some quick graphics benches on macOS and Windows 10 using a variety of hardware.
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