Xeon X5680s Now $45... October 2018

[frankf]

Thanks, Michael. It does not seem worth it.

[James Steele]

Well some cool news to report. My upgraded MacPro4,1 quadcore that is now a MacPro5,1 hexcore is now showing that my 24GB of RAM is operating at 1333MHz. So I must have got some 1066 sticks that were actually 1333? Happy Dance!

[HCMarkus]

Well some cool news to report. My upgraded MacPro4,1 quadcore that is now a MacPro5,1 hexcore is now showing that my 24GB of RAM is operating at 1333MHz. So I must have got some 1066 sticks that were actually 1333? Happy Dance!

Told ya! Yippee Zippee.

[James Steele]

Yes... yes you did! I could speculate all day, but I vaguely recall when I first did the CPU swap, my RAM was still being reported at 1066. I wonder if maybe it tried to flip somehow while powered up when I was playing with SwitchResX or something and that let to my weird spontaneous reboot issue. I don't know... but all I know is it appears to be gone now with the total reinstall. Been a big pain however.

For example: I'm clinging to DrumCore3. I couldn't authorize. The plug reported an disk write error when I entered the challenge response. I figured the plug didn't have permission for the directory it was attempting to write to. I couldn't figure out which so I sort of "brute force" made permissions for my boot drive "Read & Write" for "everyone." Took a long time but while it was still in progress in the background, I clicked "Authorize" in DC3 and this time it wrote the file and was successful. I then immediately chose revert and then ran "Repair Permissions" to put everything back the way it was as I got errors about ".kexts not able to load properly." Afterward, the DC3 plug wouldn't let me specify the path to it's data folder (sample library)... again probably couldn't write to the prefs. Permissions thing I suspected. Fortunately, I copied over my prefs file from old drive which is has DrumCore 2 (not 3) as part of its name which is why I missed it before, and all seems okay now. Ugh.

Time to CLONE while everything seems to be working! Yikes!

[Gravity Jim]

I'm doing it. I got a pair of tested, guaranteed-good x5680s coming next Monday, and the paste kit came this morning. By this time next week, my 5,1 2.4Ghz 8-core will have become a fire-breathing 3.33Ghz 12-core! Can't wait. Thanks for all the info here, and for the bug-in-brain from HC.

[Michael Canavan]

I'm doing it. I got a pair of tested, guaranteed-good x5680s coming next Monday, and the paste kit came this morning. By this time next week, my 5,1 2.4Ghz 8-core will have become a fire-breathing 3.33Ghz 12-core! Can't wait. Thanks for all the info here, and for the bug-in-brain from HC.

Very cool, if you have the 5,1 its going to be a lot easier than my 4,1 was to mod! No pulling IHS cpas!

I'm going to consolidate pictures at some point here and upload them. Even though it wasn't easy, the method I used I'm sure is the safest method to de-lid those chips. Safe being a relative term here.

[monkey man]

Any reason to panic yet, Unicorns, as I'm still holding out as I try to fumble my way through the "to AVB or not to AVB" dilemma?

If Apple releases something soon that doesn't necessitate my having to shift all my beloved goodies OTB, then I'll go AVB and grab the cheapest of its new machines (purely for the TB ports).

If it doesn't though, I'll know at that point, whenever it might be, that I ought to rush out and grab a couple of 5680s and keep this machine... and retain the 24I/Os.

[Gravity Jim]

CPUs arrived today. $380 for the pair, shipped, free. Can't hardly wait, but I don't have the ridiculous 3mm hex stick I need to remove the heat sinks. Soon, soon, my precious...

[HCMarkus]

Drum Roll, Please…

[Gravity Jim]

It is finished.

Took only 30 minutes, even with being super careful about cleaning off the old thermal paste, handling the new Xeons with latex gloves, going real easy on wrenching down the heat sinks, blah blah blah. The Mac fired right up, "About This Mac" reported the chips as expected and all my RAM now shows at 1333mhz! Could hardly wait to run GeekBench, expecting at least a 50% increase in general processing juice.

Before:



And After:



Holy cow! This is amazing. Even navigating to this site was breathtakingly fast. Gonna start rocking some DP files right now... can't wait to see it roar! Big thanks to this forum and especially HCMarkus for the nudge.

[HCMarkus]

This is most excellent Jim! Well done; I'm glad to have been able to help.

[Michael Canavan]

Holy cow! This is amazing. Even navigating to this site was breathtakingly fast. Gonna start rocking some DP files right now... can't wait to see it roar! Big thanks to this forum and especially HCMarkus for the nudge.

Almost exactly the same scores I got, and if you want an ego boost, that puts our machines right bellow the fastest Mac Pro available in terms of multi core use with a 64 bit geekebench multi core score of 32081 VS yours at 30679.

[James Steele]

That's awesome. This is the biggest "no-brainer" upgrade there is. I'm super pleased just going from my 4,1 quadcore to a 5,1 hexcore. I think my next Mac will be a used 5,1 eightcore just so I can do the upgrade on it to make it a 12-core. I'd probably want to avoid the de-lidding process. I'm afraid I'd goof it up.

[Gravity Jim]

Mike, that's awesome. I love my aluminum MacPro... I've said many times that there will never be a desktop computer to rival its engineering. What did a 5,1 12-core 3.33ghz Mac with 24g of RAM cost new? Even a refurb would have cost 4 or 5 times what I have in this!

James, you will never regret it if you hunt up a nice 5,1 dual and make this upgrade. Insane value. And I'm with you on de-lidding the CPUs.

I am severely stoked. Thanks to you guys for blazing a trail. I never would have known this was possible if not for MOTUNation (I don't hang at computer hot-ridding forums!).

[HCMarkus]

I feel like a proud papa.