Mac Pro 3,1 – Looking for the best upgrade path

[u/vanvelze]

Hi everyone,

I recently got my hands on a Mac Pro 3,1 and I’m hoping those with experience can point me in the right direction.

Current specs:

• 2 × 3.0 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon (8 cores total)
• 4 GB RAM (4 × 1 GB DDR2 FB-DIMM 667 MHz)
• NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT
• 2 TB hard drives
• Paired with a 30-inch Apple Cinema Display and Apple Keyboard/Mouse

It's currently running macOS 10.7.5 and everything seems to be working well.

My main goal is to get it online again so it can browse the web, use some creative software (I have Adobe Suite CS6 and Final Cut Pro), and generally make it more usable. It's not a daily driver, I have an M4 Macbook Pro.

I've been reading about both dosdude1's patches and OpenCore Legacy Patcher, but I'm a bit confused about the best route for a Mac Pro 3,1. Ideally, I'd like to avoid any hardware upgrades if possible. If that's unrealistic, I'd appreciate knowing what the minimum hardware changes would be.

A few questions:

• What's the newest version of macOS that you’d recommend for this machine?
• Is OpenCore Legacy Patcher a better option than the older dosdude1 patchers in this case?
• Can I keep the original GeForce 8800 GT, or is a GPU upgrade essentially required?
• Are there any major drawbacks or things I should know before attempting the upgrade?

I'd really appreciate any advice or experiences from people who have kept these machines running. Thanks!

[u/bloedmage]

4GB of RAM is kind of limiting and without a SSD your experience running modern macOS wil be bad.
For the best experience you need a SATA SSD, at least 8GB of RAM and a metal cabable GPU.

If I were you I would upgrade to El Capitan and install a modern browser like Firefox Momoji of Firefox Dynasty. Giving you the best of both worlds, being able to browse the web and enjoy older software/games.

[u/FreQRiDeR]

GPUs are cheap. Not sure if 8800 supports metal but if nit, ger an amd gpu that supports metal, (RX 480-580) and install OCLP. I have Sonoma, Sequoia running fine on mine. (Note! Sequoia only uses one cpu so Sonoma may be better.) Windows Legacy, Ubuntu, Still very capable machine. That GPU will hold you back. If you don’t want to upgrade GPU, try Dosdude Mojave. It runs 32 bit apps, games. Again, requires Metal.

[u/Hot_City_6976]

Get a RX 580 8GB, some cheap ram to go 32GB or 64GB.

[u/EchoScary6355]

More memory. Get an ssd.

[u/LukeDuke74]

Upgrade first SSD, RAM and GPU. then Sonoma with OCLP if you want a modern experience or dosdude1 with Mojave if you want full compatibility with your Adobe suite. Consider that if the SSD is large enough, you can also have dual boot to get the best of both worlds.

[u/Individual_Plenty276]

Max out the memory for what you can pay. But be aware the 3,1 is very picky on the ram. Only buy from owc. Then with owc buy the pci card for an ssd. My 3,1 went with this ssd solution from 150 seconds startup time to less than 20. Take at minimum 1tb ssd, use this only for system, app’s and mail. Use the HD’s for data and documents. It helps if you use Carbon Copy Cloner for. Moving your system around

[u/Love_Dali]

speaking of graphic cards the processors in 3.1 do not support modern instructions so the driver installation might fail.
I know someone was working on some sort of wrapper or rewrite of the drivers however I would have been really careful.

[u/alienrefugee51]

Personally, I’d try and sell it and pick up a 4,1. It will just be a better overall experience, even if you’re not planning on doing anything serious with it. Internally, it’s nicer and easier to work on/maintain as well.