I don't believe Mac Pro 5,1s can boot from NVMe, though I only tried it with a PCIe to M.2 adapter board, with an M.2 NVMe drive. You can experiment with faster cards, but there's no guarantee it will work. Sapphire's Pulse card is on the HCL, but other RX580s should work too. Definitely get the 8GB version, the 4GB version is weaksauce. The top card that's officially supported by Mojave (last OS with official support) is an RX580. Too slow for SSDs, fast enough for spinning HDDs, but just barely.
It's exactly the same in terms of hardware and software support, except you'll see 4,1 in System Info. 4,1 is trivially easy to flash to a 5,1 functional equivalent. COMMENCE PROJECT “BUT HONEY IT’S OLD AND CHEAP” I think that’s it, but if I’m missing something I’ll appreciate being told! Thanks in advance. USB-C peripherals, not so much, but hey let’s future proof here if feasible HELP.Ĭonnectivity WiFi? Is it built in? Possible to add USB3, USB C, or both? I do currently use USB3 external drives quite a bit for photo storage. I gather there are options and angles to consider here.
It’ll be driving a 27” 4K monitor in Hi-DPI. Graphics: also completely clueless, I’ve never actually bought a graphics card - just used whatever came with the Mac I had at the time. Next, what about regular storage: am I stuck with SATA2 for any internal HDDs? I’m 100% not up to speed on what’s current in this space Storage: PCI-e Nvme something something? Scratch disks, Lightroom library, boot partition: I want to max them out. Seems like dual processor, 6- 8- and 12-core is what I’m seeing a lot of. What can we get this thing up to before hitting a point of diminishing returns? (for the chassis itself, cost, and the intended use). RAM: I’ll probably go for 32GB, 64 if the cost isn’t a lot different. Are there multiple versions/original specs that I need to be aware of, in terms of what I can ultimately do? Which chassis and year: from what I’m reading, the 5,1 is very upgradeable. I don’t follow hardware releases the way I did years ago (is it just me or do computers functionally last years longer nowadays? It stopped mattering to me.) so I’m not really up to speed on what will reasonably modernize the cheese grater. My MacBook Pro is mostly fine for this, but some actions in PS bog it down. No video editing or rendering, but my photoshop files grow in size pretty rapidly. Use case: photo editing: Lightroom, Photoshop. Mostly a “this sounds like fun” project, but I do want a faster workstation. Hey everyone, I’ve been thinking about something to replace my 2015 MBP as primary photo editing machine, and have been mulling over grabbing a Mac Pro 5,1 chassis and upgrading it with more recent graphics, fast PCI-e/solid state storage, a bunch of RAM, etc.