Firstly, the Nehalem CPUs aren't nearly fast enough to properly feed one let alone two of the RX 580 GPUs. Although I was able to install two modern GPUs in this machine, there are a couple of allowances I had to accept. Yes crossfire worked (mostly, but I'm not certain if the issues I had were due to the Mac Pro or due to crossfire itself).ĭon't get me wrong. In fact, as I mentioned previously, since I was able to install the latest AMD "Adrenaline" drivers, I knew I had the latest and greatest software those GPUs could offer. I went from 1 GB of onboard VRAM to 2x8 GB. Truly a testament to the engineering that went into designing the 2009 Mac Pro. At this point I was amazed with how I could reasonably upgrade hardware components such as a modern GPU (let alone two of them!) in such an aging system. Since I was able to already install macOS High Sierra, the upgrade was literally plug and play (with some caveats I'll detail in another article). I put both of my AMD RX 580 GPUs into the Mac Pro to hopefully get higher fidelity for gaming and hardware encoding. Was the 2009 Mac Pro capable of housing my pretty decent and modern GPUs? I decided to find out. The 2009 Mac Pro has two PCIe x 16 slots. The reason I suspect was due to the fact the the bus speed of the Thunderbolt 3 connection to the eGPU enclose is only 1/4 of a full PCIe x16 bus. Recently, I noticed that although the eGPUs allowed for my MacBook Pro to have access to a full-fledged GPU, the performance was nowhere near that of a GPU that is housed on a regular PCIe slot. Luckily for me, I have two eGPU enclosures both housing AMD RX 580 GPUs (opens in new tab). Frankly, these are fine for my purpose but note that the standard SATA connections on the motherboard of the Mac Pro would make getting a larger SSD an easy upgrade. Questions? Comments? Have a fix? Post them below or e-mail us!īe sure to check us out on Twitter and the CNET Mac forums.The system came with a 160 GB SSD drive and a SATA 640 GB HDD. During the installation process your system should reboot at least once, but might reboot multiple times if needed, so let it run its course and do not stop it by pressing and holding the power button.Īs always, be sure to fully back up your system before applying this or any other update. Be sure your system is plugged into a reliable power supply (do not rely on its battery, especially during a firmware update in which the power source controls might be altered), and then wait for the update to finish completely. Once it's downloaded, run the installer and follow the onscreen instructions to apply it. To install this update, you can download the updater through Software Update in the Apple menu (the preferred option), or you can download the standalone installer from the MacBook Pro EFI Firmware Update 2.8 Web page. This fix is only applicable to the 2008 model. The updates were for Mac Mini, MacBook Air, iMac, and MacBook Pro systems.Īfter releasing these updates, Apple has issued another update for the MacBook Pro (version 2.7 was released on Saturday this is version 2.8), which addresses a problem in which 15-inch models from late 2008 developed flickering displays. Last Saturday Apple released a number of EFI firmware updates for various Mac models, which addressed problems with NetBoot features, the use of HD displays for protected HD content, and boot drive selection when external drives are plugged into the systems.
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