The value proposition.

For an index of all my Mac Pro articles, click here.

The Mac Pro’s interior – engineering elegance redefined.

The interior of the Hackintosh –
made by the same people who assembled Fiats in the 1960s.

Here I take a quick look at the differences in the cost of acquisition between an used 8-core 2009 Mac Pro and a new Core i7 Ivy Bridge Hackintosh.

I am focusing on differences only. Displays, memory, SSDs, hard drives, GPUs, keyboards, mice, cables and so on are identical for like-equipped machines and can cost as much or as little as you desire.

The comparison commences with an 8-core 2 x 2.26GHz Intel Xeon 2009 Mac Pro, at the price I paid. The only additions to the chassis to make things comparable are a used Airport card, with the GT120 stock GPU being sold. Both machines can use a GPU of choice – it’s not a component of difference.

The stock twin Intel Xeon CPUs in the Mac Pro deliver performance identical to an Ivy Bridge i7. They can be readily upgraded for less than $500 for a 50% boost in performance – the Xeon is not easily overclocked. The Ivy Bridge is pretty much maxed out stock, though the unlocked version can be overclocked for maybe a 25% performance gain. At that point the Mac Pro will be the faster machine, and will be considerably superior on multi-threaded operations.

The Mac Pro is stripped of dated components including its memory, hard drive and the GT120 graphics card, the latter still in production and commanding a good used price. That GPU is a dated slowcoach, not up to modern demands.

Now you can see why a Hackintosh no longer makes economic sense. The Hack’s Corsair Obsidian is a nice case, but at 25lbs of pressed steel to 41 lbs of machined alloy it cannot hold a candle for quality, robustness or modularity to the Mac Pro. For that matter, nothing can. The Mac Pro has to add USB3, built-in on the Hack’s Gigabyte motherboard, whereas everything in the Hack – PSU, motherboard, CPU, cooler, fans and so on, is extra.

Elements of difference – Mac Pro vs. Hackintosh.

The cost is near-identical between the two machines but the Mac Pro owner, in addition to pride of ownership, never has to tinker, hack or worry about OS upgrades. He will never know the misery of ‘Boot0’ errors or arcane fixes to get online to the AppStore. He will also enjoy a resale value exceeding 80% of cost whereas the Hack owner will lose 50% over the next 3 years. While a well engineered Hackintosh can be reliability personified – mine was – any major OS change involves much research, reading and delay before implementation, for fear of breaking something. The Mac Pro user, by contrast, simple clicks on the ‘Upgrade’ box. What’s your time worth?

The Mac Pro buyer’s biggest issue is finding a nice, clean 8-core machine – a task made no easier by my series of articles on the value offered! After that, he’s ahead of the game economically, psychically and operationally.

Better graphics.

For an index of all my Mac Pro articles, click here.

Where we are headed.

The stock card which comes with the 2009 Mac Pro is dated by modern standards. The GT120 is a slow performer and supports only two external displays, one using DVI the other Mini DisplayPort.

My goal was to transplant the Zotac nVidia GTX660 card from my Hackintosh to the Mac Pro and in practice the process proved to be easy.

First, however, as the GTX660 requires a separate power supply cable, I bought one of these from Amazon. You can pay MacSales three times as much for the same cable if you like. Disregard the ‘G5’ designation – this is the correct cable.

Here’s how it looks:

PCIe power cable. The small end goes
in the socket on the backplane board,
the large end plugs into the GTX660.

There are two backplane (motherboard) sockets in the Mac Pro. With the chassis oriented so that the PCIe slots go left-to-right in front of you, with their brackets on the right, these two sockets are found immediately to the left of the rear of the PCIe slot nearest to you and just to the right of the large, grey central fan, abutting the base of the processor cage:

PCIe power sockets.

Undo the two thumb screws atop the PCIe brackets on your right and remove the existing GT120 card. Then remove the adjacent blanking plate:

Ready for GTX660 installation.

The GTX660 is a double width card, so that second blanking plate must be removed.

Depress the slider button atop the central fan enclosure – this is generally referred to as the PCIe fan:

Button on the fan casing depressed.

With the button depressed the outer casing of the fan assembly can now be slid to the left. This moves the PCIe card chromium retaining bar to the left and allows insertion of a full length card:

The fan casing/retaining bar have been moved to the left.

Insert the GTX660 card:

Graphics card inserted. Arrow denotes the retainer bar operated by the outer fan casing.

Check all is properly aligned:

Graphics card sockets properly aligned. Orange = DVI-I; White=DVI-D.
27″ and 30″ displays must be connected to the white or orange DVI sockets
using dual-link DVI cables for maximum definition with displays which have
more than 1920 x 1200 pixels.

Insert the PCIe card retainer and tighten the thumbscrews. Then remember to slide the PCIe fan casing back to its original position, thus locking down the rear of the graphics card.

PCIe card retainer in place.

Insert the other (large) end of the PCIe power cable into the graphics card. The chassis has been flipped through 180 degrees here with the GTX660 sockets on the left, for clarity of illustration. Some later cards require that two power cables are used; the GTX660 needs one. The stock GT120 needs none.

Power cable plugged into the graphics card.

Replace the cover, plug in all your cables and you are ready to go.

I use three Dell displays all with DVI sockets. The GTX660 provides four display sockets – DVI-dual link (for 27″ and 30″ displays as well as all smaller ones), DVI single link (all others except 27/30″), DisplayPort (not Mini DisplayPort) and HDMI. My displays are connected with two DVI cables and one DisplayPort->DVI cable.

How is it in practice?

Anomalies:

With Mountain Lion 10.8.4 (and 10.8.3) Apple started including nVidia drivers for this card as part of the OS. Any OS before the last version of Lion will not cut it with any GTX6xx series card. You must have late Lion or Mountain Lion. My Mountain Lion installation is plain vanilla, downloaded from the AppStore, and the card was recognized out of the box. I did not install any separate nVidia drivers. However, as the ROM in the card is not the officially sanctioned Apple ROM (the ‘Apple tax’ at work), you will lose the Apple-logo splash screen. After a period of blackness on restart, 25 seconds starting from an SSD drive, your display(s) will come to life with the login screen. The other anomaly is that common temperature monitoring tools will not display GPU temperature, another quirk attributable to the ROM.

The way around these anomalies is to fit a ‘Made for Mac’ version of a graphics card – the top end being the nVidia GTX680 ($500) and the Radeon 7950 ($480). Both are overkill for still photographers but great for video processing. The GTX680 is bumping up against the 300 watt limit for power supply from the backplane sockets, using 250 watts, so if you can live with it I would suggest the Radeon 7950 which comes in at 200 watts. You can see the comparisons here.

Another alternative is the Radeon 5770 which costs $250 in the ‘Made for Mac’ version. It is slightly slower than the $200 GTX 660. It can drive up to three displays (one DVI, two MiniDisplayPort), one of which can be 27/30″.

A workaround for the Anomalies noted above:

So the only thing a non-‘Made-for-Mac’ overpriced ($50-200 more for a couple of lines of changed code in the card’s ROM – highway robbery) graphics card has is that the Apple splash screen and spinning gear wheel are not seen at start-up. Often, it has to be added, the performance of ‘Made-for-Mac’ cards is slightly lower than that of the stock items for reasons known only to Apple. Using a non-‘Apple’ card, the system goes from a black display to the login screen in 25 seconds. There is no splash screen or spinning gear wheel. This is no impediment in practice. If you are doing a clean OS X. Stall, nothing is lost or invisible. If you are unfortunate enough to want to boot Windows from a BootCamp partition or separate disc, there is a utility which allows you to specify that partition or disc as the one to start from on reboot. You look it up – I do not use Windows.

Performance of the GTX660:

In a word, a lot better than the GT120 (hardly difficult) but not at the stellar level of the same card in the Hackintosh with an over-clocked Sandy Bridge i7-2600K CPU.

I cannot run the latest Unigine test app on the old GT120 (the card cannot cope) but here is the result with the Mac Pro – click the above link to compare with the Hackintosh:

Unigine graphics test – Mac Pro 2009.

Here, also for comparison, is Novabench:

Novabench for the GTX660.

In summary, performance is 70-80% of that in the Hackintosh and of the order of twice as fast as the GT120.

How is it in practice with Lightroom and Photoshop?

Really no noticeable difference from the very fast Hackintosh. LR5 loads in 7 seconds, file-to-file Loupe review is faster than you can hit the arrow button (I use 1:1 previews). First entry to the Develop module is 6 seconds and 1-2 seconds thereafter. Flipping between images in the Develop module is instantaneous – which is why you install a card of this caliber in the first place.

Export to Photoshop CS5 is 3 seconds or less.

With its twin fans the GTX660 is an exceptionally quiet card, quieter than the stock GT120 and much quieter than the 9800GT which I used for a few days while awaiting the PCIe cable for the GTX660. It makes an already quiet machine near perfect when it comes to noise. 18″ from the front of the case the sound level was recorded at 45dB, compared with 44dB with the MacPro off.

Noise. The 73dB spike is from a birdie tweeting outside my window!

The iPhone/iPad used above is named ‘Decibel 10th’ and is free in the AppStore.

Revised power consumption data:

With the GTX660 card in use with three displays and with the GT120 in the case but not connected to any displays, the static power consumption of the MacPro is 201 watts, excluding the displays. With the Mac Pro in sleep mode the power consumption falls to 10 watts. Moral: Put your Mac to sleep when it is not in use!

Each of my three Dell 2209WA 21.5″ 1680×1050 displays uses 44 watts, so with three displays the Mac Pro is using 333 watts/hour. Not trivial. The displays sleep when not in use as does the Mac Pro. A sleeping display draws no power.

nVidia web drivers:

After I had installed the far faster Intel Xeon 3.33GHz W5590 twin CPUs, it came to my notice that nVidia had made available new drivers on its web site. OS X Mountain Lion had started including nVidia drivers with 10.8.3 so I compared the web drivers with those which come with 10.8.4 which I am currently using. You can download the nVidia web drivers here. Once installed they add a System Preference pane thus:

nVidia web drivers installed.

Running Unigine there is negligible difference:

Native OS X 10.8.4 drivers.

nVidia web drivers OS X 10.8.4.

The only thing learned here is that using a faster CPU does improve Unigine results – compare with the Unigine data above run with the stock Xeon 2.26GHz E5520 CPUs.

So why bother installing these? Well, in the event nVidia should update drivers part way through an OS X release, you will be able to install the improved drivers without having to wait for an update from Apple, so why not install them?

Conclusion:

The GTX660 (nVidia, Zotac, EVGA, MSI, PNY or any other brand) is a great enhancement to the stock GT120 card which shipped with the 2009 Mac Pro, but see ‘Anomalies’ above. The state of the art is to be had in the far costlier nVidia GTX680 or Radeon 7950 which, if bought in the ‘Made for Mac’ versions, will sidestep the anomalies noted.

Repair costs.

For an index of all my Mac Pro articles, click here.

For a machine with a minimum life expectancy of 5 years, and maybe as much as 7-10 years, repair costs are a significant consideration. Well made computers are like cars – it makes much more economic sense to fix them when they fail after a few years than it does to replace. So many car owners will sell a car after, say, the alternator fails at 100,000 miles. They get the part replaced and the new owner has his depreciation paid for and a new alternator into the bargain. Major component failures can then be expected to occur every few years with the average repair/replacement cost being perhaps $500/year. Far, far cheaper than a new car whose value drops 20% the moment you drive it off the lot. That’s a lot of alternators.

Thus it is with computers. While few would argue that it makes any sense to fix a piece of junk like a Dell or HP – indeed, it makes even less sense to buy one in the first place unless your car of choice is the Yugo – things are significantly different with the MacPro and even with the G5 PPC PowerMac which preceded it, in a case of very similar design. These machines are made to last and their high degree of modularity makes replacement of worn parts exceptionally easy and low risk.

Once again, buy the Service Manual referenced in yesterday’s column. It’s $5 for heaven’s sake.

So what parts, absent accidental damage (you drop the Mac Pro on your foot and you spend 6 months in traction; repair of your computer is the last thing on your mind) are most likely to fail and what do new replacements cost?

First up is the power supply. This 980 watt behemoth is not going to blow out on you unless you do heavy-duty video rendering day in and day out in a poorly ventilated space.

The Mac Pro’s power supply.

This runs $290 – just Google the part number. Don’t buy used or refurbished – that’s a false economy.

The other moving, wear parts are the five fans, two of which are in the CPU heat sinks:

The three other fans in the Mac Pro.

Compared to $10 Hackintosh fans, these are not cheap but, then again, they rarely fail.

The front processor cage fan runs $45, the rear processor cage fan runs $38 and the PCIe (case) fan can be had for $59.

The CPU fans are buried in the heat sinks – CPU A costs $148 for fan and heat sink and CPU B is $258.

That’s all for the moving parts.

What’s the worst that can happen? You somehow manage to fry the backplane board (motherboard) or processor board. Those will set you back $344 and another $400.

Unless you are very unlucky, I would doubt that five year repair costs for parts unique to the Mac Pro will be significant. All other parts like hard drives and so on are no different from those found elsewhere and easily found and replaced.

Fixing it.

For an index of all my Mac Pro articles, click here.

You can purchase the full 196 page Service Manual for the 2009 (and other) Mac Pros here. It costs $4.99 and after PayPal sent my money I received an email 5 minutes later with a download link to a perfect definition PDF.

If you are serious about fixing your Mac Pro let me tell you this. Having done more than my fair share of wrenching on some of the finest German two and four wheel transportation for several decades, a reading of this manual – and it is a fascinating read – suggests that this may be the most perfectly designed ultra-complex machine made by man. The extent of the modularity and ease of dismantling is a joy. Here’s a simple test of your capacity to do advanced work on your Mac Pro. If you don’t get off reading this manual, which is as good as it gets, then you really should delegate the work.

Allow me to regale you with some details. For example, that huge 40 pound machine uses but seven types of screw:

Screws in the Mac Pro.

The processor cage screws, which retain the processor cage while simultaneously providing guides for the processor tray, courtesy of the machined collar, are simply exquisite. Is this Jony Ive at work? The design after all goes back to the G5 Power Mac of 2003 and Ive was well on board by then. I do not know but whoever did the work deserves to be applauded.

When the proprietor of the excellent tech site AnandTech, Anand Lal Shimpi, buggered up (engineering term) his Mac Pro after fitting new CPUs, he clearly was ignorant of the exquisitely detailed torque specs dictated by Apple for tightening the Allen bolts used to retain the CPU heat sinks. Nor did he account for the fact that the Integrated Heat Spreaders on his upgraded CPUs made the CPU 1.88mm thicker, mandating a work around – of which more later. A quick check of page 154 of the Service Manual would have told him how to do it:

How not to bugger it up.

What’s that you say? You don’t have an inch-lb. torque wrench? Worried about destroying your processor tray. Hire an expert to do the upgrade.

Click the logo for details of my
2009 Mac Pro CPU upgrade service.

RAM playing up? Why not check the superb memory diagnostic diodes on your processor tray?

Memory diagnostic diodes.

You get the idea. We all know what RTFM stands for. Well Buy TFM.

Reading this masterpiece crystallizes why the forthcoming 2013 ‘dustbin’ Mac Pro is such an abomination. When it goes wrong, there’s nothing to fix. You send it in, some semi-skilled worker replaces everything in one transplant step and you get a bill for $3,000. That’s just not right.

To see Apple’s web site the day of the release of the 2009 Mac Pro, click here. You can go even further back to June, 2003 when the magnificent case design was first introduced in the Power Mac G5 by clicking here, starting at $1,999. The video confirms that Jon Ive was the designer.

Here’s what the Mac Pro cost back then:

From Apple’s 2009 web site.

You think there is no ‘Apple tax’? Think again. Check out the memory and CPU upgrade costs back then – for comparison the 24gB of 1600MHz Corsair RAM in mine cost me all of $225:

Ouch!

Maximizing internal storage.

For an index of all my Mac Pro articles, click here.

One of the most distinguishing features of the design of the Mac Pro is the ease with which drives can be removed and replaced.

Heretofore, my Hackintosh sported two internal SSDs, two internal HDDs and an external Time Machine backup in a cradle, easily removed when travelling as earthquake/incineration protection.

The Mac Pro makes provision for two optical disk drives, with one installed in the upper bay of a stock machine. Obviously there must be a second cable installed by default, allowing installation of a second disk drive.

SATA disk drives use the same connectors as optical drives, a power cable and a data cable, so it occurred to me that the rational thing to do would be to install the backup SSD where the space for the second optical drive is, then move the Time Machine backup inside the Mac Pro’s case. Installed on one of those beautifully engineered carriers, taking it out and on the road involves removing the side panel (one latch – 5 seconds) then pulling out the drive – another 5 seconds.

Difficulty of this process? If you can make a cup of tea this is not a challenge.

You can download Apple’s instructions showing how to remove the optical drive cage by clicking below.

Click to download optical drive cage removal instructions.

My drive cage needed a massive amount of wiggling before yielding to my ministrations, aided by not inconsiderable garage language.

My intent is to relocate the Intel SSD to the optical drive cage. Intel SSDs have a rim plate which needs to be removed to make the surface plane; most SSDs are dead flat. A small screwdriver does the job:

Plate removed from Intel SSD.

The screws are too long to be reused to hold the back plate in place so some Scotch tape does the job. Additionally, thick, heavy-duty, double sided Scotch tape must be procured:

Intel SSD taped shut. Thick Scotch tape procured.

Two strips of the thick double-sided Scotch tape are placed on the front of the drive – frontal placement will allow alignment of the connectors of the optical drive and SSD, thus avoiding any cable twisting:

Thick double-sided Scotch tape in place.

The SSD is now attached as below:

SSD in place. Note alignment of the connectors.

Note on removal: This spongy two-sided Scotch tape is exceptionally strong. Should you ever need to remove the SSD, just pulling up on the SSD’s case risks damaging the drive. Instead, take a piece of dental floss, insert it between SSD and optical drive, and ‘saw’ through the tape.

You can do an even nicer job using an Orico 5.25″ to 2.5″ drive adapter plate which will run you all of $7 at Amazon; there’s no need to pay up for silly priced OWC accessories. Four screws hold the SSD in the adapter plate, four more hold the plate in the optical drive cage. Be careful with the latter – steel screws can’t wait to cross-thread soft alloy threads:

SSD installed with a drive adapter plate.

With the drive cage partly replaced both connectors are reattached; it does not matter which is attached where:

Connectors in place.

Power consumption is of no concern. A DVD burner consumes 18 watts compared with 3 watts for an SSD.

With the backup SSD relocated, its space is taken by the full size Time Machine HDD, and the drive is clearly marked:

Time Machine drive on the right.

Nothing could be simpler. To clean things up, 1/4″ white cable cover is applied to the power wires to the USB3 card (see Part XIV) and 1″ cover is used to organize to all those ugly cables in the back:

Cable covers in place.

Ugly wires have no place in a Mac Pro.

All drives are accessed as before and here they are in System Profiler – the Superdrive, two SSDs, the Data and Data Backup HDDs and the Time Machine HDD.

Drives in System Profiler.

SMART Reporter, which warns about imminent disk failures, reports all drives correctly:

Drives in SMART Reporter.

About that Superdrive:

Apple never misses a chance to hype other’s hardware as its own ‘innovation’ and such has been the case with the ‘Superdrive’. This is a bog stock optical drive (mine is made by LG according to the label) and its performance is dated. My advice to heavy optical drive users is to swap this drive, while you are doing the above transplant, for a current Blu-Ray drive for some $50. For details, see Part XIV. Then pop off the plastic fascia plate from the disc tray and it will look just like …. a Superdrive. Remove the four screws holding the geriatric Superdrive and replace with the Blu-Ray drive.