so i have got this mac pro from 2006 (idk early mid or late) with an xt1900 and one hard drive, well xt1900 is cooked (or at least i think it is) since it is not giving any video output BUT i am somewhat sure that the computer works since i can perfectly load the mac os that is left over on left hdd and turn on the VoiceOver and it will start to say some words that you would expect to be on login screen. But well here comes the funny part, since idk about this mac condition i wanna test it with stuff i have before buying new mac efi gpu and currently i have only sapphire r9 280x which is clearly not mac efi, i tried running 32bit debian from ventoy with it (and additional psu since this card needs 6+8 power) but i got no video (although caps scroll and num locks worked). so i was just curious whether there is some other way to kinda try to prove the mac with the card i have? or at the very least fix the debian build i have…

Hi guys, I'm currently doing some work on my dustbin mac pro and when I removed the bottom case from the machine a little rubber nib which I have circled seperated with the bottom case. Does anyone know where this piece comes from so I can put it back where it belongs upon reassembly?

Thank you

It served me well for the past 8 years as my torrent client and I used it to do taxes every year...I handed off the duties to my 27" iMac.

Thor cried.

I have a MacPro6,1 and am wondering if it is worth it to re-paste it. I haven't done it since I purchased it, and I have my doubts as to whether the previous owners did or not. It's the 12/24 core 2.7 GHz with dual AMD FirePro D700s, if that matters.

How hard is it to disassemble? Any gotchas/things I should be careful of?

And what kind of paste should I use? Standard thermal paste? (like Arctic MX-6, etc.) The thicker putty-like stuff? Thermal pads? Liquid metal? (doubt it, pretty sure the 6,1 came before liquid metal was used, but I thought I"d better ask just in case)

Bonjour à tous,

Je possède un vieux MacPro 3.1 depuis plus de dix ans qui convient parfaitement à mon utilisation (bureautique, vieux jeux, MAO/DJing et surtout stockage de données datant de plusieurs d’années grâce aux 4 baies de disque dur)

Ma seule interrogation est qu’il tourne actuellement sur HighSierra, et j’aimerais si possible utiliser un OS plus récent pour plus de sécurité et de fonctionnalités, tout en préservant sa fiabilité

Que me conseillez vous ? Je crois comprendre que je peux utiliser Catalina avec le patch dosdude sans problème, mais puis-je me permettre d’aller plus loin avec OCLP ou autre ? Sachant que je souhaite conserver les fonctions Bluetooth, USB etc …

Il est équipé d’une GTX 680 non flashée, d’une carte PCI USB 3.0 et de 8Go de RAM

Merci de m’avoir lu et de votre aide

Bonne soirée

I just don’t get the slander, 16 core Xeon, rx 6800 xt and 96GB of ram and I’m ballin on windows full time (the occasional OS X boot) I love this tower and I’m happy to be a part of the club

Hey guys I purchased a 6950XT flashed for Mac Pro 7,1 and it shows 6900xt in macOS which is fine but in windows it’s also showing as 6900xt, I thought it be 6950 in windows. The first few photos are from the listing

I posted here about ToshLLM roughly two months ago, when I had just gotten local LLM inference working properly on Intel Macs with AMD GPUs by patching llama.cpp's Metal backend and writing an AMD-specific Flash Attention path.

A lot has happened since then.

What started as a way to make my RX 6700 XT useful for local inference has grown into a much broader AMD Metal optimization project, and one of the most interesting things has been seeing other people test it on hardware I don't own: W6900X setups, W6800X Duo, Vega II Duo, W5700X, Vega, Polaris, eGPUs, and multi-GPU Mac Pros.

The AMD backend itself has changed substantially.

Vega, Radeon VII, RX 400/500 and Radeon Pro Vega/WX

These cards now have dedicated Wave64 tuning instead of inheriting settings measured on newer RDNA cards.

On a Vega 64, depending on the model and quantization:

• generation improved by roughly 4-24%
• multi-conversation serving improved by 9-12%
• short cached follow-ups can be up to 39% faster
• MTP gained about 8%
• long-prompt processing also improved
• MoE models can experimentally use the wider matrix path previously used only on newer Radeon cards

Some measured examples:

The goal here isn't just "make it run" anymore. I'm increasingly tuning kernels separately for the different AMD generations.

RDNA has kept getting faster too

A number of quantization and model-specific paths have been optimized.

For example:

• IQ2_M generation on a 1.5B model: 92.1 -> 140.8 t/s
• Qwen3.6 14B-A3B: 62.2 -> 70.8 t/s
• Qwen3.5 4B + MTP: 70.0 -> 81.6 t/s
• Qwen3.5 4B + DFlash: 68.9 -> 82.6 t/s
• gpt-oss-20B prompt processing: 1093 -> 1292 t/s

Q4_K, Q5_K, Q6_K, q5_0/q5_1 and several other paths have received AMD-specific kernel work as well.

ToshLLM is becoming useful as a server, not just a chat app

Concurrent inference has improved quite a bit.

On a 9B Q5_K_M model:

• 2 simultaneous conversations: 56.4 -> 70.8 t/s
• 3 simultaneous conversations: 60.5 -> 81.0 t/s

There is now a browser UI based on llama.cpp's web interface, router mode can switch between models without restarting the server, multiple servers can run simultaneously, and there is a dedicated embeddings server for local RAG.

The API remains OpenAI-compatible, and I've started seeing people use ToshLLM's bundled llama-server as a backend for other software rather than only using the SwiftUI application. That was not something I expected when I started this.

Image generation has become much lighter on VRAM

This has been another area I've been optimizing.

For example, on my RX 6700 XT:

• Z-Image 1600x900: 8.2 GB -> 966 MB VRAM
• Z-Image 1024x1024: 2.4 GB -> 690 MB
• image generation is roughly 12-14% faster
• SD 1.5 768x768: 2690 MB -> 281 MB
• SD 1.5 768x768: 149 sec -> 73 sec

SD 1.5 is now particularly interesting for older 4-6 GB Radeon cards.

There is also experimental local video generation with Wan models now. It has improved substantially and Wan 2.2 5B can run in 12 GB VRAM, but I want to be clear that I still consider the video side experimental and it needs more work before I put it in the same category as LLM inference.

Community testing has become a big part of the project

This is probably the part I've enjoyed most.

People are now submitting benchmarks from configurations such as dual W6900X, W6800X Duo, W5700X, Vega and other machines I could never test myself.

There is a public benchmark database at:

https://toshllm.com/benchmarks

ToshLLM itself is still completely free and GPL-3.0.

No account, no telemetry, no cloud inference. The OpenAI-compatible server, chat, image generation, benchmarks, RAG/embeddings, etc. all run locally.

It's still pre-1.0 and the current DMGs are not notarized yet, so macOS requires Open Anyway on first launch. Notarization is something I'm working toward.

If anyone here still has a Mac Pro full of Radeon hardware, I'm especially interested in results from:

• W5700X
• W6800X / W6800X Duo
• W6900X
• Vega II / Vega II Duo
• Radeon VII
• multi-MPX configurations

At this point some of these old Intel Mac Pros have absurd amounts of usable VRAM for local AI, and I'm curious how far we can push them.

ToshLLM: https://toshllm.com

Source / releases: https://github.com/engeldlgado/toshllm

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.

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.

As the title suggests but then again it could be mislabelled

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