cornchip

bobolicious said:

zimmie said:

I have a macpro4,1 with updated firmware making it a 5,1. Two six-core Xeons, 96 GB of RAM, terabytes of SSD space. It's a beast of a machine, and I like it a lot. I wouldn't call it the best Mac Apple has ever made, though. The Mac Studio is better, hands-down.

It's surprisingly hard to add Thunderbolt to a classic Mac Pro. It will work ... as long as you boot into Windows first, and don't hot-plug anything. Oh, and it doesn't do USB over the port, which is important for me. I use a 21.5" Ultrafine 4K which accepts DisplayPort over USB-C but needs the single USB 2 channel for brightness control, audio, and so on.

The firmware doesn't support booting from an NVMe drive. Sure, you can boot from a thumb drive or a small SATA SSD then chainload to an NVMe drive, but something non-NVMe must be in the boot path.

The power distribution is pretty weird. The power supply has plenty of headroom, but you only get two aux power connectors for GPUs, and they have a weird capacity (120W each, rather than the more common 75W or 150W each). Some GPUs (e.g, the Radeon RX Vega 64) draw exclusively from the aux power connectors, which can cause the system to brown out, even though it has plenty of power budget left (the 75W allocated to the slot isn't used). Wouldn't be safe to draw more over the two aux connectors, which is why there should have been more than two.

It's also huge. If you haven't seen one in person, it's almost certainly bigger than you expect. And heavy. And the "handles" have fairly sharp edges, which make it unpleasant to move around on a regular basis.

There are undeniably a lot of tradeoffs with the old Mac Pro. They're worth it for me, but they're not for everybody.

I can boot Mojave on a 5,1 NVMe ?  

Beats said:

I thought he owned it already. Saw a few “Elon Musk buys Twitter” headlines.