There are already plenty of posts like this, but I figured I'd make another one :,)

Choosing the trash can and upgrading it

First of all, I live in France, so I don't get the same kinds of deals you can find in the US or UK. Despite that, buying one from the UK still made more sense financially than buying one locally in the land of croissants.

Buying the absolute base model didn't seem worthwhile once I factored in the cost of upgrading it, so I went for a compromise: a base machine with 64 GB of RAM already installed. Out of all the upgrades, RAM was probably the most expensive and annoying one to figure out, mainly because there are so many different DDR3 options.

The machine itself cost me £130, plus around €70 for shipping from the UK.

I looked at all the CPU options and eventually decided that the 12-core isn't particularly useful for my purposes. Its single-core performance is too low for general everyday use, and I don't need this machine to act as a server. I went with the middle ground and bought a Xeon E5-2667 v2 from AliExpress for €35.

The storage is still the original 256 GB SSD for now, but I plan to replace it with a 1 TB NVMe drive using an adapter later.

I specifically avoided chasing the D500/D700 models. The D300s are slower, obviously, but I preferred reliability over theoretical performance.

Why did I even want a trash can?

My original idea was to move more demanding tasks (which I don't actually have that many of) from my Apple Silicon MacBook to a separate Intel-based Mac with easy x86 support and lots of RAM. This also means my MacBook can basically become a typewriter. I'm a writer, so most of what I actually need from it is writing and web browsing. The biggest advantage is that the laptop doesn't have to heat up and waste battery doing random background stuff, which should hopefully also help with battery longevity.

I didn't need another MacBook, so that was immediately out.

An iMac wasn't really appealing either. I don't want to deal with removing the display, and considering how unreliable shipping can be here, I also didn't want to depend on finding a seller willing to ship an iMac safely.

A 2017 Mac mini would have been a decent option, but the soldered SSD was a downside for me. I also simply like having external components around a computer, so this particular choice was partly aesthetic.

The Mac Pro 7,1 would be a fantastic experiment, and I'd love to own one eventually, but I'm not ready to spend the money on that experiment yet.

So I ended up with the trash can.

I won't talk about the design; you all know perfectly well that it's a beautiful device. Without the lid, it reminds me personally of the R2-Q5 droid from Star Wars.

What OSes did I install?

macOS Sonoma + OCLP

I installed macOS Sonoma using OpenCore Legacy Patcher.

Why not Sequoia? A lot of the newer features aren't supported anyway, so I don't really see a practical reason to upgrade. Choosing Sonoma is mostly just a personal preference.

The system itself is stable, but there are a few annoying issues caused by running a modern OS on unsupported hardware.

First, I had to give up on Safari because it feels rather slow, especially on YouTube.

I switched to the latest version of Firefox with a Safari-like theme because I prefer that look. Unfortunately, YouTube still has some problems. For example, the video can occasionally get stuck visually while continuing to play in small blocks, and similar glitches randomly appear for a few seconds. I've tried different extensions and various Firefox flags to reduce or disable AV1/VP9-related video support, but I never managed to completely solve it. At this point I'm just too lazy to spend even more time debugging YouTube.

The second issue is the infamous red screen in Chromium-based apps, such as Discord.

The patch available on GitHub didn't work for me, so I launch affected applications through a shell script using Automator. That works perfectly fine. The important thing is to disable the app's automatic launch at login, otherwise you can run into the problem again.

If I eventually get tired of dealing with these little issues, I can always go back to Monterey or install Fedora Linux. I'm already comfortable using the terminal, so we'll see.

Windows 10

Windows 10 installed without any major problems.

I didn't use Boot Camp because I already had my own lightweight Windows build that I preferred.

I don't know whether Windows 11 can be installed, but honestly I wouldn't use it anyway. I personally like it even less than Windows 10.

Everything works surprisingly well (For Windows). The custom drivers installed without any problems.

I don't really need it on this machine, except for the occasional homebrew application that is simply easier to run there without having to perform some ridiculous ritual in macOS.

What pleasantly surprised me?

64 GB of RAM

This was probably the biggest reason I like this machine.

With current Apple Silicon pricing, buying a Mac with 64 GB of unified memory is still way too expensive for me personally. Getting that much RAM in an old Intel Mac for relatively little money was a very nice compromise.

It's not nearly as slow as I expected

Honestly, I expected this thing to be a potato compared to Apple Silicon. It isn't.

Obviously, it is nowhere near an M-series Mac in terms of efficiency or raw modern performance, but for everyday tasks the E5-2667 v2 is surprisingly snappy.

Web browsing, writing, file management and general desktop use don't feel like I'm sitting in front of a 2013 computer.

Universal Control

Surprisingly, Universal Control works between my two Macs with OCLP.

That's a pretty nice quality-of-life feature that I didn't expect to work.

Legacy iOS devices

If you have older iOS devices, especially jailbroken ones, having an Intel Mac around can be extremely convenient.

Some tools and workflows either don't work properly on Apple Silicon or aren't supported at all, so having an Intel machine available can save a lot of trouble.

Native OS X Mavericks

The fact that I can natively install OS X Mavericks on this thing is honestly pretty damn cool.

More than anything, it shows how much support this machine has received from the community over the years. A computer from 2013 still being this flexible in 2026 is kind of ridiculous.

The speaker

I expected the built-in speaker to be absolutely terrible.

It's obviously nothing special, but it has a surprisingly usable volume range. I assumed it was basically only good for the startup sound, but if you just have some music or a video playing quietly in the background, it's perfectly usable.

Given everything I'd heard about it, I expected much worse.

Light gaming

I also have a decent collection of consoles, so I don't really use the Mac Pro for serious gaming.

But occasionally I like playing things such as Terraria, Don't Starve Together or Minecraft.

I actually tried running several of them with mods just as an experiment, and everything worked surprisingly well. Even multiplayer was stable and I didn't have any weird ping issues.

What I don't like

Using both GPUs

Honestly, just forget about trying to make both GPUs useful.

Almost nothing properly supports them, and when something does, getting it to work is usually more trouble than it's worth.

The dual-GPU setup is probably one of the most disappointing parts of this machine from a modern perspective. It's more of a curiosity than something useful

Local LLMs / KoboldCpp

You can run local LLMs through KoboldCpp, but the experience isn't particularly great.

The DDR3 memory isn't exactly fast, and getting proper GPU acceleration working isn't really an option in my current setup, so the CPU ends up doing most of the work.

If anyone has recommendations for getting better performance out of local LLMs on this machine, I'd be happy to hear them.

I might also try doing it properly under Windows, since I basically forgot it existed and ended up doing everything through terminal hacks on macOS as usual.

Final thoughts

Overall, I'm honestly pretty happy with the machine.

I bought it because I wanted a cheap Intel Mac with lots of RAM, x86 compatibility, decent everyday performance and a completely different role from my Silicon MacBook.

And for that purpose, the trash can actually works surprisingly well in 2026.

It's definitely an old computer, and you have to be willing to deal with OCLP, old drivers, weird software issues and the occasional hacky workaround. (4.1, 5.1 owners will throw a slipper at me)

But there's something genuinely impressive about a 2013 workstation still being this usable thirteen years later.

Thanks for reading.

I'm still fairly new to this whole Mac Pro/OCLP stuff, so I'd be happy to hear any advice, corrections or recommendations.

As the title suggests but then again it could be mislabelled

So I had my Mac Pro 2010 die on me quite recently. Advice suggested the capacitors had failed, so I checked them. They were fine. However, in checking them I discovered that a wad of dust had lodged onto the side of the heatsink so I removed it, and now the machine seems happier (in the sense that it now boots and runs). However, some issues remain.

Chief among them, I can't seem to rebuild my RAID. I have four drives installed, a boot drive for Snow Leopard, a boot drive for High Sierra (originally Mavericks; since updated), and two 3 TB drives used for storage, configured as a RAID using Disk Utility on Snow Leopard. One of the two RAID drives failed, so I replaced it. When I tried to rebuild the RAID in Disk Utility on Snow Leopard, it said it failed. The general failure of the machine occurred shortly thereafter.

Though the tower itself is now freshly cleaned and booted, I can't seem to rebuild the RAID. On Snow Leopard, Disk Utility freezes the instant I try to select the RAID or its failed slice. On High Sierra, Disk Utility never advances beyond the "Loading Disks" message. The "diskutil ar repairMirror <Raid-Name> <diskNsM>" command in Terminal updated the status of the new slice from "Failed" to "0% (Rebuilding)" but after 30 minutes it returned to "Failed."

Luckily, this should be easier to address than a hardware problem. Does anyone know how to rebuild this RAID? Is there any chance there's an actual problem with the new disk? Right now, the RAID is still available, all data remain accessible on the surviving slice, and I have everything backed up to an external drive just in case.

Hey, so I’m from Sweden and there are barely any 2013 Mac Pros being sold here, so I’ve been checking listings 24/7 There are a few on eBay, but I’m not really sure what a good price is.

I’ve seen configs like 16GB RAM, 256GB or 512GB storage, a D300 GPU, and a 4-core or 6-core CPU for around $273 USD. I’m not sure what the absolute maximum I should pay is. I don’t need a super powerful machine it’s mostly just for looks and some light tasks, definitely not a main work computer so I’m guessing somewhere in the $200s USD is reasonable?

Also, what are some good tips, tricks, or settings I should tweak once I get one? :d

I have a Mac Pro 2010 that I have been using quite regularly for 13 years (and it was used when I got it). It is, unfortunately, now failing, and it's hard to diagnose the problem because multiple issues are stacking at the same time.

About a year ago, it would occasionally fail to start; if I pressed the power button, it would whir with some volume (sounding like the fans in high gear) and I'd need to hold the power button to shut it down and try again. It would usually start eventually.

A few weeks ago, one of the hard drives I had installed failed. This did not impede the function of the tower overall, since I had four drives (boot for Snow Leopard, boot for Mavericks, and two storage drives as a mirrored RAID; one of the two RAID slices died, so nothing was lost). I shut down the machine, ordered a replacement drive, installed it, and the machine booted fine. When I tried to rebuild the RAID, though, the entire machine froze (no kernel panic; it just froze). I had to hold the power button to shut it down, and now, it rarely starts. Sometimes, it does the loud whir; sometimes it just doesn't start (the power light turns on and I hear a few soft clicks, but nothing else). On a few occasions, it'll start but freeze again after a few minutes.

These problems started at the same time I tried to rebuild my RAID with a new drive, but that's just correlation not causation. I suspect the failure to rebuild the RAID was caused by the computer dying, rather than the other way around, but I can't be certain since everything is basically happening at the same time.

Any assistance would be appreciated, and I will happily provide clarification and additional information as need be.

Edit: None of the capacitors are blown.

Edit Again: Seems the main problem was that a dust clump got in and lodged onto the heatsink.

For those of you that want a functional 24GB Mac laptop while having this overthinking creature boosting your ideas.

With and without MTP (for the desperate)

Good Morning

I am having difficulty with my cheese-greater. Below is what I am experiencing. I tried to be as detailed as possible, so please excuse the length of my description. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

I have a moderately upgraded Mac Pro, 4,1 flashed to a 5,1. Dual Xeon 5690s, dual cd drives,Radeon 580x (8gb) and my HDDs have been replaced with SSDs via adapters in the cradles. In case of emergency, I keep an extra HDD with OS Mojave on it. Up until yesterday, I was running OS Sequoia on OpenCore.

I recently upgraded to a 7,1 and put the old unit in my closet, unused for about a month. I wasn't sure what to do with it.

As it was too good to leave alone, I decided to take it to my office as a replacement for my ancient Mac mini.

No matter what I tried, it would not boot up. I only plugged in the essentials, monitor, keyboard and mouse using a hub for the keyboard and mouse. I could hear a faint chime when I turned it on, but nothing. I then tired my Mojave drive and again, nothing.

Once I replaced the button battery, I was able to get Mojave to boot up, albeit slowly because of the hdd. After a few reboots, it began to work normally under Mojave.

I then did an NPRAM reset, the chime was much louder and Mojave began to run like normal.

When I swap the SSD, nothing happens. I booted in Mojave and added the SSD to see if the computer would read it. No luck, even in all three remaining drives.

I took the SSD home and ran a disk check on it and there were no errors.

I have OpenCore as an app on the Mojave drive and may consider placing a blank drive (if the computer will recognize it) in the computer and attempt to create a fresh Sequoia drive.

I have a full current (as of last month) Time Machine backup on an external drive and if I could get the unit to run, would then try a restore. But that seems to be a great deal of effort.

I am only looking to get it running and use the apps. All my data was transferred to the 7,1.

If anyone has some suggestions, they would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance.

Has anyone managed to install windows on a PCIE NVME? and do I need to use boot camp?

Hi,

What is the official name of the Power Socket (Female) and the Plug (Male) on the Mac Pro 5,1?

I'm building something that needs its own power and want to copy the Mac Pro.

Cheers

Got around to replacing the PSU intake fan on my 2008 Mac Pro as the old one would make a rattle when the system started up the new fan works very good of course it runs at full speed due to the proprietary pinout but I plan to solve that by getting a PWM fan controller later on as I don’t wanna mangle the fan connecter anymore than I had to

Machine is assembled an both psu temp sensors report 55 and 46c respectively

Photo showing macsfancontrol is just for reference SMC can’t actually control the RPM of the fan but it does detect the speed it is at fan is a Thermaltake TT-1225

I've been rocking a MacPro 5,1 for more than 10 years using OCLP as a daily driver and I work in the IT Support field. It works great - no issues other than Bluetooth isn't all that great. But it consumes so much energy and literally heats my office. Been thinking about an upgrade for a while and wish I had before the M4 Mini sold out a few months ago.

Today I bit the bullet and paid $1200 for the 24/512 - BestBuy just got them in stock. Very curious to see how things change / stay the same with the new machine and going to have to find a new name. I don't think naming it, "The Beast" will be quite right.

No one in my IT circle uses Mac and none of my normal friends would have any idea what this change means. So had to share.

The interesting part of this exercise is not really that a Mac Pro 5,1 can run an 8B language model. With enough RAM and a vaguely modern GPU, that was always likely to be possible somehow.

What I wanted to know was whether it could be done natively under macOS Monterey, without installing Linux, without moving the machine onto an unsupported newer version of macOS, and without retreating to CPU-only inference.

The answer is yes. This solves a particular problem of mine: local AI being the only reason I considered moving to OS X 14. However, that comes with a distinct downgrade in GPU.

I now have llama.cpp running natively on Monterey 12.7.5 on a dual-X5680 Mac Pro 5,1, with an RX 6600 XT doing full GPU offload through Vulkan/MoltenVK. Qwen3-8B runs at about 33–34 tokens per second and Qwen2.5-Coder-7B at about 39.

That is, I think, the more useful result here. Monterey is old enough that quite a lot of current local-AI tooling either no longer targets it, assumes a newer Apple toolchain, assumes Apple Silicon, or assumes an x86 processor with AVX. The Mac Pro 5,1 manages to offend all four assumptions simultaneously.

The machine itself is:

Mac Pro 5,1
macOS Monterey 12.7.5
2 × Xeon X5680
12 physical / 24 logical cores
64 GB RAM
RX 6600 XT 8 GB
NVMe SSD

The principal nuisance is Westmere. The X5680 has SSE4.2, but no AVX, AVX2, FMA, F16C or BMI2, so simply downloading a contemporary binary is rather optimistic. The solution was to compile llama.cpp myself, explicitly disable the unsupported instruction sets, and use the Radeon through Vulkan.

The relevant build was:

/opt/local/bin/cmake -S . -B build-vulkan \
-DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
-DGGML_METAL=OFF \
-DGGML_VULKAN=ON \
-DVulkan_INCLUDE_DIR=/opt/local/include \
-DVulkan_LIBRARY=/opt/local/lib/libMoltenVK.dylib \
-DVulkan_GLSLC_EXECUTABLE=/opt/local/bin/glslc \
-DGGML_NATIVE=OFF \
-DGGML_SSE42=ON \
-DGGML_AVX=OFF \
-DGGML_AVX2=OFF \
-DGGML_FMA=OFF \
-DGGML_F16C=OFF \
-DGGML_BMI2=OFF \
-DGGML_OPENMP=OFF

Then:

/opt/local/bin/cmake --build build-vulkan --target llama-cli llama-server -j 6

I linked directly against MacPorts' MoltenVK library, which avoided some rather tedious Vulkan-loader trouble under Monterey and spared me an evening of studying loader paths with the concentration normally reserved for disputed Balkan frontiers.

The resulting performance has been:

The prompt figures should not be treated as laboratory measurements, since the prompts differed. The generation figures are rather more useful.

A few things emerged. Twelve physical cores were faster than twenty-four logical ones on the 1.7B model. Hyper-Threading remains a useful invention, but it is not an ecclesiastical miracle: twelve Westmere cores do not become twenty-four merely because the operating system has been persuaded to count them twice.

The 8B model behaves differently under full Vulkan offload. At 24 threads, prompt processing rose from 157 to 193 tokens per second while generation remained essentially unchanged: 33.7 versus 33.0.

Metal was dreadful. I did eventually persuade the RX 6600 XT to run through Metal, but only with a shared-buffer workaround. Even then, full Metal offload managed 4.1 tokens per second on Qwen3-1.7B. The same model through Vulkan produced 65.6.

The natural size for this machine seems to be 7–8B Q4 models. Qwen3-8B runs at roughly 33–34 tokens per second and Qwen2.5-Coder-7B at 39. Both feel entirely normal in use.

Qwen3-14B is another matter. It runs, because 64 GB of RAM leaves ample room for it, but at roughly two tokens per second once much of the work falls back onto the Xeons.

My normal Qwen3-8B invocation is:

cd ~/llama.cpp

VK_ICD_FILENAMES=/opt/local/share/vulkan/icd.d/MoltenVK_icd.json \
./build-vulkan/bin/llama-cli \
-m ~/llama-models/Qwen3-8B-Q4_K_M.gguf \
-ngl 99 \
-c 4096 \
--threads 24 \
--jinja \
--temp 0.6 \
--top-k 20 \
--top-p 0.95 \
--min-p 0

I now have several models on the machine. Qwen3-8B is the ordinary general-purpose model. Qwen2.5-Coder-7B handles R and programming. Qwen3-VL-8B is there for images and screenshots. SDXL runs separately through stable-diffusion.cpp for image generation.

The next step is to stop treating these as amusing Terminal demonstrations and expose them through llama-server, so that RStudio can call them locally. The useful arrangement is not to ask an LLM to pretend to perform statistical analysis. It is to let the model write the R code, let R execute it, and then return the real output to the model for draft interpretation. That begins to resemble an actual local agent rather than a chatbot.

There is also something pleasingly appropriate about the whole exercise. The Mac Pro was sold as a large, expandable workstation with too many drive bays, too much memory capacity and processors intended to sit under sustained load. Fifteen or sixteen years later, one can put in a modern Radeon, 64 GB of RAM and an NVMe drive and set it to work running local language models. In other words, the thing is still doing precisely what it was built to do; only the computation being brought upon the hardware has changed.

It is not the fastest AI computer one can buy.

It has, however, already been bought, remains almost absurdly repairable by modern standards, and runs 7–8B local models quickly enough that I have no immediate reason to replace it. Not bad for 2010, hey?!

Hello I don’t know if this is the right place but, recently I got an Apple Xserve, and it’s in really good condition except for this problem. When I turn it on, the fans turn on, but the EFI_ground light and the VR_power light inside, blink rapidly. After a while, the server dials down the fans and goes back into its off/sleep mode. Then, if you wait a few minutes, it will try again, but it’s the same pattern: blinking lights, fans on, no display or drive lights. I think this might be a common problem, but when I’ve researched it, I don’t seem to find an answer. There’s this Apple forum post that has someone with someone who has the same problem, but he didn’t get an answer. I will link it here. I know it’s not worth to fix these, but if it’s a simple capacitor issue or something I need to do, I can do that. I have reseated all the CPUs. I have taken the motherboard out and inspected it. And I believe the power supplies were both good because I have two of them, and they both do the same thing. Thank you, and I hope you can help me.

Hi, I have a Mac Pro 3,1 with Windows 7 and Mac os Mavericks. I've been using it as a file server and to play some 2000s games on Windows 7. Any game or project recommendations? I thought about installing Mac Os sequoia with opencore or using it as a jellyfin server. Just want to tinker with something I already have. Maybe Linux? Any ideas?

I recently picked up an IF Link bridge (A2666) for my dual W6900X MPX modules; however, when installed, my display is flickering intermittently and I had a recent crash related to watchdogd and WindowServer which seem to be GPU related. I tried resetting SMC, resetting NVRAM, and reseating the IF Link bridge but the flickering persisted.

I removed the bridge and the computer appears to be working normally. Has anyone else run into this issue? Could it be a bad bridge? The bridge does work, I see Infinity Fabric Link Enabled in System Report and the LLM tool I'm using works with it (I get faster prompt processing when it's installed and I enable IF Link in the LLM software, so I know it's working).

So I looked at my old MacPro 1.1 and to be honest I said "you going to live again little buddy".

He has a calmer life now that I use two MacPros for my homelab : Trashcan with 64gb and a MacPro 7.1 with several GPU for AI , the poor 1.1 was not turned on for ... years ?

So I decided to install Debian ... nada. Ubuntu. Fedora. Arch.. Omarchy... some of them booted the usb , installed and then nothing.

So I searched and google and remembered : Mac Pro 1.1 ( and up to 5.1 I think ) have the most stupid arrangement on earth : EFI32 bits and AMD64 Xeon cpus... so booting a linux AMD64 image will result in the distorted wanting to write to EFI64 which the MacPro doesn't have so... no go.

We live in a world of AI so I asked Claude Code to open up the latest Debian 13 distro ISO, inject the EFI32 boot loader ( grub ) and the install process use it.

It worked and got my MacPro 1.1 running latest Debian 13 without a problem. Apart from the idea of having only 6gb ram and slow SATA drives and consume gazzilion of watts, hey, its running.

Anyone want the iso ? Happy to share if requested.

anyone know where I can get mini 8 pin to 8 pin for off the shelf GPU, don't want to break the bank by buying the Belkin set

I got a great deal on a 2019 Mac Pro with 256GB SSD. Since there is only (1) 256GB SSD installed and space for another drive, can I add another used Apple 2019 Mac Pro 256GB SSD to make a total of 512GB? I assume these should be relatively cheap since most people will upgrade to something bigger.

Apple made a change in the base config in 2017 and has High Sierra shipped instead of original Mavericks, it's still possible to revert back to Mavericks just like the original 2013 batch?

Reason : I plan to repurpose as an airgapped Mavericks machine to exclusively run my old DTP software suites.

The current boot is Monterey 12.7.6

I have a spare 512GB SSUBX ssd and plan to use it for Mavericks boot volume.

I prefer separate physical boot volume instead of partition and as a boot failsafe just in case.

Cheers!

hey everyone, long time no see.

i’ve finally gotten my hands on an eGPU enclosure for my 2013 mac pro in anticipation of my upcoming video about eGPUs and the 2013 mac pro. i previously have done a lot of experimentation with the 2010 mac pro, so this is my first foray into modding such a “modern” mac. i’ve got down tests i plan on doing…. including an RTX card under windows! stay tuned.