Hack-a-Mac and other arcana.

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

Today I’m looking at power consumption and firmware updates, and one or two other minor issues. Things get a bit geeky in what follows but as Bill Gates once said “Don’t knock geeks. You may end up working for one”.

Power consumption:

I published power consumption data for the Hackintosh here. Today I interposed the same Kill-a-Watt power meter between the mains and the Mac Pro, running the 9800GT GPU (the GTX660 which will replace it has similar power consumption). The Hack idles at 102 watts/hr and overnight it also ran at the same 102 watts/hr as it was never put to sleep, a function which did not work. Call it 2.5 kW a day.

By contrast, largely owing to the two CPUs, the Mac Pro idles at 188 watts/hr but, as sleep works properly, that immediately drops to 9 watts/hr with the machine on but dormant. That is 1.6kW over 24 hours with an 8 hour working day. For all other tasks, the Mac Pro uses some 50 watts more power than the single CPU Hack. That sums to 2.0kW over 24 hours with an 8 hour working day for the Mac Pro. So overall the Mac Pro will be more frugal on the gas, errr …. coal, using 20% less energy. The Mac Pro has seven fans (including the GPU), the Hack six.

And that’s my limit on this electrical stuff, as all we mechanical engineering types know that electricity is magic, and magic is not to be trusted.

Seating 2.5″ drives properly:

Apple made provision for mounting 2.5″ drives in the Mac Pro from the 2012 model when an SSD option was added. The Apple part number is 922-9629 and is extremely overpriced T some $45 used. Mac Sales offers a $20 aftermarket caddy in blue and it looks like this:

The Mac Sales 2.5″ disk tray – $20.

Two top- and two side-mounted screws provided retain the drive in the holder, which now slides in like any full size drive. The result with my two SSDs and two HDDs looks like this:

Not a wire in sight.

If you are buying a Mac Pro and want to use 2.5″ drives – HDD or SSD – these are a must. Rubber bands and tape simply do not cut it. Until mine arrived I had to place the Mac Pro on its side with the SSDs precariously perched on the connectors. There really is no way of securing these to the stock disk trays in a satisfactory manner.

The Mac Pro before the OWC trays arrived.

There are other alternatives – I like the Icy Dock at under $15, which makes the installation of an SSD especially simple as the drive clips into the black box, only the latter being screwed to the stock HDD ‘sled’. The Icy Dock has the merit of being far less ugly than the ghastly blue OWC part. A more permanent if less convenient option is the Newer Technology Drive Converter which fits the sleds in the 2009 and later Mac Pros, but is wrong if your Mac Pro is 2008 or earlier as the used shorter sleds.

EFI update:

Before you can update the Mac Pro’s firmware to version 5,1 (required to run 1333MHz RAM at maximum speed and required to run 6-core CPUs) you must first check that your EFI is the latest version. The earliest version of OS X which will accept this update is Snow Leopard 10.6.2. Anything earlier (Leopard, etc.) will not work. To upgrade to Snow Leopard from Leopard, you must buy the physical upgrade DVD from Apple for $20. There is no online upgrade available.

To check which version of the EFI your Mac Pro is using go to Apple icon->About This Mac->More Info->System Report. Your EFI (‘Boot ROM version’) must be as shown below:

Latest EFI version.

If it is not, download and install the EFI update from Apple:

Click the image to go to the download site.

Moving to strength.

For an index of all my Mac Pro articles, click here.
Today’s Mac Pro enhancements have been ones of gradual improvement at no cost, using parts transplanted from the Hackintosh.

Enhancing memory:

First the Corsair Vengeance RAM, 4 x 4GB, 1600 MHz DDR3, was removed from the Hackintosh, the 6 x 1GB Mac RAM removed from the Mac Pro and the four Corsair sticks placed in slots 1, 2, 5 and 6, the way Apple dictates. While not ‘Apple approved RAM’, I was confident they would work, and work they did.

Corsair RAM in the Mac Pro. Original ‘Apple’ RAM in the rear.

Here is how Apple says you should install RAM:

Correct placement of RAM.

Do it right and you get this message on powering up:

There was more than enough room that there was no need to remove the blue heat sinks. This is the happy result:

So that’s $132 saved on 16GB of Genuine Apple Ram (made by Samsung). There’s a nice bump in CPU performance, too:

Geekbench with 16GB vs. 6GB.

The Corsair Vengeance Blue RAM I am using is known as non-ECC RAM, whereas Apple recommends and uses ECC RAM. This is the difference:

While mine works fine, a friend with another type of Corsair 1600MHz RAM reported instability and had to switch to costlier MacSales ECC RAM. So if you run into kernel panics or instability on Stress Tests, then a change in memory might be called for. I was lucky, as mine transplanted perfectly from the Hackintosh. Indeed, I added another 8GB for six 4GB sticks in total, six sticks being the optimal configuration. I have also read that mixing ECC and non-ECC RAM is a non-starter, but have not tested that.

There are still four RAM slots open to accommodate up to another 32GB of RAM.

Enhancing wi-fi:

Next up was Airport. Few 2009 Mac Pros shipped with Airport wi-fi cards and up to now the Mac Pro has been using a PCIe wi-fi card. In fact this is a Broadcom PCMCIA wi-fi card, identical to the one used by Apple, piggybacked on a PCIe card with three ugly and fragile antennae sticking out of the back of the Mac Pro. Not very elegant. Plus by relocating it internally you free up a precious PCIe slot – after installing the GPU the Mac Pro has only three slots open. I therefore resolved to remove the PCMCIA card from the PCIe card and installed it properly on the Mac Pro’s backplaneboard (‘motherboard’ in PC parlance).

To access the slot and antennae you have to remove the processor unit (two latches) and the slot becomes visible on the lower left:

Airport socket and three antennae on the backplane board.

The snag is that access is very difficult and the two antennae which need to be connected to the Airport card have the worst connectors ever – very stiff and very small and very easily crushed. So rather than fight them I resolved to remove the processor cage to gain unrestricted access to the backplane board, lots of working room and more heart cycles.

You can download Apple’s instructions for this procedure by clicking below.

Click to download processor cage removal instructions.

This is not for the faint of heart – I would say 7 out of 10 on the difficulty scale. Two things not mentioned in the instructions – the three backplane board clips which have to be removed from the backplane board have retaining clips atop. These must be gently pried up while the plugs are pulled. Second, be sure to press down on the processor cage area nearest to you when freeing up the fans – they have to be moved in toward the center of the cage, maybe 1/2″, to clear the sides of the chassis so that the processor cage can be removed. You will need a 2.5mm hex wrench, a Philips screwdriver, a flat bladed tool and plenty of patience. But she will yield:

The ever diligent hound guards the processor cage.
Note how the fans have been moved in 1/2″ toward the center of the cage.

The antenna wires and the Airport socket are now easily accessed. The wires are numbered 1, 2 and 3. Any two are attached to the two sockets on the Airport card (either way around) which is then inserted, angled slightly up, into the socket.

Antennae attached to the Broadcom Airport card.

You must then fasten the base of the Airport card to the provided threaded posts, so be prepared to hunt around for the right sized screws. I found one in my screw (loose) collection. The right size is M2 x 3mm and the Apple part number is 922-7734. Google that and you can buy a pair for $10-30 if you are stupid. Or go to a better hardware store and get them for a few cents each. It’s your money.

Reassembly is easy and here is the result:

Processor cage replaced, Airport card in place.

And it works really well too. Disregard those who claim that the Mac Pro’s metal case precludes a good wi-fi signal – this is as good as I have received:

Native Airport in Speedtest. Maximum possible is 18 mb/s with my service.

Disassembly took me 2 hours (mostly puzzling over how to dislodge the fans for clearance and playing with Bert the Border Terrier), whereas reassembly was a scant 10 minutes.

If your speeds are mediocre, then one or both of the antenna connectors is incorrectly inserted. If you do not hear a ‘click when you insert these you have it wrong.

Wi-fi for the brave:

Have a steady hand, a long magnetized screwdriver and a chopstick? You can avoid all the dismantling illustrated above:

• Pull the processor cage
• Fasten the Airport card with two screws using a long handled magnetized screwdriver
• Hold the connecting sockets/wires exactly in place over the male connectors on the wi-fi card (this is the trickiest part – get it wrong and you will crush the fragile connector)
• Bear down on the head of the female connector with the flat end of …. a chopstick. (I use a flat head extension on my jeweler’s screwdriver).

I have done many like this and revel in the ‘click’ as the connector meets its mate. But you have to be steady, courageous, accurate and resolute to adopt this short cut, and to succeed at it. Proficient? Call it 5 minutes total while you futz with the correct orientation and placement of the connectors and wish you had a third (very small) hand.

Enhancing graphics:

Graphics next. The stock GT120 card the Mac Pros shipped with is poor by modern standards, returning 13 fps in Cinebench. Pending determination of how to provide auxiliary power to the excellent GTX660 from the Hackintosh, I replaced the GT120 with an old 9800GT which has two DVI sockets and is a known decent performer. It needs no auxiliary power supply. Here is the result – 50% faster than the GT120 and about as fast as the 2013 MacBook Air:

The nVidia 9800GT in Cinebench.

The card drives two of my three Dell monitors fine over DVI. Once the GTX660 is installed I expect a further doubling of speed and all three monitors driven from the same card – one by DisplayPort and 2 using DVI.

Next:

Power consumption tests and GTX660 installation will follow soon, along with details of how to upgrade the Mac Pro’s firmware to increase the RAM speed from 1066 MHz to 1333 MHz and allow the computer to recognise not just 8-core but also the very latest 12-core Intel Xeon CPUs. That’s what ‘future proofing’ is all about. It also gets you Mac Pro 2012 (or even 2013 ‘garbage can’) performance for 33 cents on the dollar of a new machine, and should easily last you the next 5 years.

Goodbye Hackintosh:

The Hackintosh is no more, but it was pretty reliable at EOL:

Hackintosh up time.

Hack Hangover:

That’s not to say your Hack will not haunt you. I had done a clean Mountain Lion install on my MacPro then used Migration Assistant to bring over Users and Applications, yet despite that precaution the Mac was refusing to switch off its fans or front panel LED on Shut Down. After forcing a shutdown (10 seconds hold on the front panel switch – also know as an ‘SMC reset’ – System Management Controller) a restart would result in a ‘bad shutdown’ error report when the displays first came to life after login. Further, the start-up chime was gone. Looking at that report I notice a reference to ‘FakeSMC.kext’ – a driver used in my Hack and in many others. It looks like Migration Assistant must have imported this as part of my user settings. I erased the kext, repaired permissions (Disk Utility) and restarted twice. All was sweetness and light – the chime was back and no errors were reported. Shutdowns properly shut off all fans.

So if you are migrating from a Hack, check System/Library Extensions for any of the following often used Hack kexts and erase them and repair permissions: FakeSMC, hacked NullCPUPowerManagement, RealtekRTL81xx, any Voodoos (HDMI, sound), HDA rollbacks and Atherosfix (Wifi). Get rid of all.

Back to the Future.

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

As instructed by FU Steve yesterday, I dutifully called a Craigslist vendor, and drove down to Palo Alto in Silicon Valley and picked up a 2009 Mac Pro 8-Core. The seller recycles machines from Stanford University and this one is so pristine, nary a scratch, that opening it up disclosed not one dust mote. It even smells new inside.This machine weighs 40 lbs and the thought of shipping it is not encouraging. Try to buy locally, though that’s easy for me to say a few miles from Silicon Valley.

The contrast with my (excellent) Hackintosh could not be more stark:

Beauty and the beast.

At $1,100 it was a bargain, and the 2009 8-core machines are not that easy to find. That’s the model you want if you are going to get radically serious about upgrading.

I quickly set to a fresh OS X 10.8.4 installation on my backup SSD, migrated over the Users and Applications from the main SSD and was up and running with the Mac Pro in a few hours.

It’s a very warm day here – ambient over 85F – and the CPU reported 113F, so the 104F or so I am used to in the Hackintosh should be seen on a regular day. So cooling is excellent, and without the attendant jumble of wires the Hackster requires.

For now I’m running with the stock 6GB of RAM the machine was sold with in 2009, and will see about upping that to 16GB soon. The Mac Pro had no Airport installed so I simply transplanted the excellent TP Link wi-fi card from the Hackintosh to one of the PCIe slots and wifi was up and running. I’ll do a proper Airport installation soon.

A quick Geekbench run reported truly startling performance for a 5 year old machine:

Mac Pro 2009 stock Geekbench performance.

That compares with the 12,500 with the Sandy Bridge i7 in the Hackintosh, which I can get to 15,500 with overclocking. So stock performance of the 2009 Mac Pro is much the same as the Hackintosh. And that’s with only 6GB of RAM and two 2.26GHz processors in lieu of one 3.40GHz in the Hack. Very exciting.

Graphics performance is a different story, as the Mac Pro is currently running the ancient nVidia GT120 GPU, and the awful Cinebench numbers confirm that. It’s half the speed of the 2013 MacBook Air which uses an integrated HD5000GPU and one quarter the speed of the GTX660 in the Hackintosh:

Cinenbench on the Mac Pro 2009.

I’ll fit the nVidia GTX660 from the Hackintosh soon, but first I have to figure out where to tap six-pin power for the card; the source is likely buried somewhere within the power supply section of the innards, all screened away from prying eyes. That should quadruple the speed!

But there is one overwhelming impression I simply must share when it comes to the Mac Pro. I have never seen better construction quality in a computer, and seldom in other machines. Everything is thought out to the nth detail, cams and latches lock or free up removable modules and the whole thing screams quality. The box is so beautiful it’s worth spending a few dollars more for a really clean one, in my opinion.

Once I get the better GPU working and upgrade the two Xeon CPUs to better ones (some $450 for the fastest 8-Core versions), I expect Geekbench will approach the magic 20,000 mark and Cinebench will be much improved.

An important note if you are migrating from a Hackintosh:

Hacks have lots of additional files to work with OS X and it’s important to remove these before migrating your disk to a back-up start-up disk. Once you have done that the original Hack start up disk can be erased and all apps and data restored to it.

Here’s the way to do that:

1. Install a fresh Mac OS onto a clean drive, after downloading it from the AppStore.
2. On your Hack, erase the directory /Extra. That’s for Hacks only.
3. On your Hack erase the directory System/Library/Extensions.
4. On your Mac Pro, after installing a fresh OS, use Migration Assistant to bring over everything from the Hack drive you just modified in the steps above.
5. Test your new Mac Pro.
6. If all is well, erase the Hack drive and use Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper to clone your newly created Mac Pro drive back to the now erased Hack drive.
7. Tell the Mac Pro (System Preferences->Start Up Drive) to start from the drive to which you just cloned everything.

I neglected to follow the above procedure and was getting bad Shut Downs and errors on Restart. After doing the above, my new S/L/E from the clean install contained 213 kexts. The old Hack S/L/E contained no fewer than 247 kexts! Now some of those probably just carried over from the old iMac days which preceded the Hack, but several will have been kexts specifically modified to make the Hack work. Now I have clean starts, shut downs and no issues.

Cable ‘dots’:

Well, that’s what I call them.

Cable dots.

Few areas of industrial design have seen as much to detest as that of computer connectors. Be it USB, Firewire 800 (figure out which side is up with that excrescence), original iPhone, VGA, DVI (a real stinker, especially when you are down on your knees under the desk), MiniDisplayPort and on and on, almost every connector designed over the past few decades has seemingly been intended to make it as hard as is humanly possible to correctly guess the correct orientation. And given that any change to a new computer will involve much plugging and unplugging of cables, something really needs to be done to salve the pain and aggravation.

My solution is above, and all it takes is one of those white ink pens you can get at any office supply store. Once done, the guessing game goes away.