Jim, You are a far braver man than I. I have both a single and dual CPU tray for a 4,1. My current cheesegrater (flashed to 5,1, of course) is running the dual tray but with two quad core Xeons running at 2.26 GHz. I would love to do a CPU upgrade just for grins and because it’s a huge bump in processing power for relatively little $$, but I'm not willing to try and delid CPUs. I’ve read and seen too many horror stories about the process going wrong.
-D > On Apr 4, 2020, at 3:33 PM, Jim Cathey via Mercedes <mercedes@okiebenz.com> > wrote: > > Recently I had purchased a dual-CPU MacPro 4,1 (flashed to 5,1) to upgrade > from > my 2,1 running El Capitan. I had to have High Sierra in order to run my > work's > VMware tasks, and the 5,1 is capable of this. (Not, however, without the > 6-core > CPU's.) I'd bought a low-speed 4,1 single-CPU tray, cheaply, one that had > been > upgraded to a 6-core X5650 device. This was 'slow', at 2.66GHz, but honestly > it did a fine job as it was. (This was for interim use while I collected > upgrade > parts, and for testing and as a backup.) > > I, however, was determined to upgrade the dual-CPU card to the max, just as I > had done its 2,1 predecessor. I bought two X5690's, these are 6-core 3.46GHz > devices. Nothing better is available for a dual-CPU configuration. That was > about $150 right there. > > For thermal reasons, though, the heat sinks are different on the dual-CPU 4,1 > machines. There isn't enough room to fit two of the single-CPU sinks, so > Apple > spec'd de-lidded CPUs for the duals, and those are a bit hard to come by. > They're > also more expensive. But, you can de-lid them yourself. (The aftermarket > attempts > to try to fit lidded CPU's in these is pure butchery, and I want no part of > it. Especially > since they've done nothing to cure any thermal problems that were the reasons > for > using lidless CPU's to begin with.) > > I did this. Paranoid, though, I'd bought another X5650 to practice on, $6. > Good > thing I did, I managed to destroy it, two different ways, while de-lidding > it. Having > learned what NOT to do, though, meant that the de-lidding of the expensive > X5690's > went smoothly. I'm typing this on the newly-upgraded machine. > > 12 total 3.46 GHz Xeon cores; 24 hyperthreads. 48GB of 1,333 MHz DDR3 ECC > DRAM. > SSD for booting, terabyte spinny disks for data storage. Blu-ray and DVD/CD > optical > drives, both can burn. It should be good for several years of use. The 2,1 > predecessor > served me for 4 years, and only its inability to run my work VMware prompted > the > upgrade; everything else worked great. > > -- Jim > > > _______________________________________ > 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 > _______________________________________ 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
