I had a Mac Pro 1,1 that was hacked to run the most current OSX version along with dumping upgraded processors (5365 SLAEGs) and lots of memory. It continued to be a powerful machine up until the time I sold it last year. It really cranked on rendering.
Now I have a 3,1 with an Apple RAID using 15k drives along with 32GB of RAM. It screams as well, but not significantly better than the 1,1, I think. Still a great machine, can’t beat it for $350. Dan > On May 6, 2016, at 12:22 PM, Ed Booher via Mercedes <mercedes@okiebenz.com> > wrote: > > The XW8400 and Mac Pro 1,1 are nearly identical systems, as far as both are > based on the Intel Xeon 53XX reference board. They use the same CPUs, the > same RAM, the same bridge chips. The primary difference is the Apple ROM on > the Mac Pro board vs PC BIOS on the XW8400. Oh, and the XW8400 / XW8600 > have integrated SAS / RAID controller. I had OS X running on the XW8400 at > one point, and it was painful because of that RAID. The disk controller ran > all kinds of hell on the .kext system in OS X. If I remember correctly, I > may have even needed a third-party SATA controller to get the boot volume > up so it could load the .kext to even address the RAID. Been a few years. > > The funny thing is, my wife has a Mac Pro 5,1 mid 2010 (if memory is > serving) and the XW8400 re-encodes video nearly 3x faster. Though hers > doesn't have the dual quad ... believe hers is a single quad Nehalem? Not > home so can't pull up System Information. > > On the reverse side, I do have to say this: I got a 5TB drive from my > parents as a Christmas gift, the XW8400 BIOS can't reference past about > 2.5. So my drive is in the wife's Mac and I'm going to pull her 2TB to drop > in on top of the 6TB (3x 2TB) to fill the four drive bays and reimage with > FreeNAS and ZFS. I was very disappointed with that. I *suppose* I could put > that third-party controller back in there. Eh, whatever. > > EdB. > _______________________________________ http://www.okiebenz.com To search list archives http://www.okiebenz.com/archive/ To Unsubscribe or change delivery options go to: http://mail.okiebenz.com/mailman/listinfo/mercedes_okiebenz.com