Thinking About Mojave?

[rentadrummer]

Thanks for the info.

Does it make any difference whether you boot from the external drive and upgrade the OS, or download the installer to the internal drive and upgrade the external drive from there?

I'm familiar with selecting the drive from the System Prefs, so at least that's one problem solved.

[HCMarkus]

I did decide to upgrade my video card to a Sapphire Radeon RX 560 4gb. The GeForce seemed good but didn’t render the Mojave transparency effects. But I think I could have held off on that.

Hey Emu... glad to hear your 4,1>5,1 continues to serve you well in the Mojave generation. We certainly can't argue with the endurance of the cheese grater!

The fact your RX560 is working (and it's not the exact one Apple lists as "approved") gives me hope my Gigabyte RX 460 4GB will work, too. I'm curious which port(s) on the GPU are you using; HDMI, DP and/or DVI?

[mikehalloran]

Thanks for the info.

Does it make any difference whether you boot from the external drive and upgrade the OS, or download the installer to the internal drive and upgrade the external drive from there?

Doesn't matter as long as you are booted into OS 10.13.6 or from a USB 10.14 Installer.

[emulatorloo]

The fact your RX560 is working (and it's not the exact one Apple lists as "approved") gives me hope my Gigabyte RX 460 4GB will work, too. I'm curious which port(s) on the GPU are you using; HDMI, DP and/or DVI?

I'm using all three ports of the RX560

DP with a DP to HDMI adaptor to a widescreen LG monitor running at 2560 x 1080
DVI to an old Apple 20" Cinema Display at 1680 x 1050
HDMI to an older 20" HDTV running at 1080p

I bet the RX 460 of yours will work with no problem!

[HCMarkus]

The fact your RX560 is working (and it's not the exact one Apple lists as "approved") gives me hope my Gigabyte RX 460 4GB will work, too. I'm curious which port(s) on the GPU are you using; HDMI, DP and/or DVI?

I'm using all three ports of the RX560

DP with a DP to HDMI adaptor to a widescreen LG monitor running at 2560 x 1080
DVI to an old Apple 20" Cinema Display at 1680 x 1050
HDMI to an older 20" HDTV running at 1080p

I bet the RX 460 of yours will work with no problem!

NIce! Thanks.

[HCMarkus]

As of today, October 8, 2018, the 5,1 Cheesgrater has Official Apple NVMe support!!!

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/mp ... rt.2132317

Very interesting development... Apple keeps surprising 5,1 owners with nice things. Report is all NVMe drives work except Samsung 950 PRO. Suddenly, adding a PCIe SSD to a 5,1 Mac Pro has become less expensive.

[HCMarkus]

Info on Mac Pro Compatible PCIe SSDs:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/bl ... ci.2146725

[mikehalloran]

Info on Mac Pro Compatible PCIe SSDs:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/bl ... ci.2146725

The blades for the 6.1 Mac Pro compatible, for the most part, are compatible with the 2013 on 27" iMac with a few important differences. iMacs do not have enough space to accommodate a heat sink while the nMP does. As a result, NVMe-PCIe performance in an iMac is throttled a bit to 1,500 RW to help prevent overheating (ok... only 3x faster than SATA III—I'll live). Still, a good thread.

[Michael Canavan]

I've got multiple reasons to not run Mojave and reasons to..

09 5,1 modded Mac Pro will need the requisite Metal compatible graphics card.
The three recommended Mac compatible (startup screen works etc.) cards are already at ridiculous prices.
There are a good amount of non mac boot screen graphics cards that will work, but I'm pretty sure that means problems troubleshooting, booting to other drives etc. Ebay has a few seller selling Mac flashed Mojave compatible graphics cards, that's definitely the most reasonable choice besides using a Windows computer and flashing the graphics card yourself if you have the technical skills and time.

Beyond that I'm using a modded NVME driver exresnion in Sierra to run a third party M.2 SSD. That leaves me with Carbon Copy Cloner maybe working to preserve that driver if Mojave doesn't recognize third party M.2 NVME drives like it's supposed to.

Then there's the plug in manufacturers I own saying wait, namely NI with not tested to satisfaction Kontakt 5, bugs in Maschine software, and Sound Toys saying to wait. That was an initial query, I didn't scratch the surface of the list of plug ins that might be affected.

I would like to get rid of the third party NVME driver, but I don't want to lose what I have. So I'm waiting until at least Sound Toys and NI give Mojave a go.

[HCMarkus]

I've got multiple reasons to not run Mojave and reasons to..

09 5,1 modded Mac Pro will need the requisite Metal compatible graphics card.
The three recommended Mac compatible (startup screen works etc.) cards are already at ridiculous prices.

Boot screen... who needs it? Unless you are running File Vault or need to be able to select your startup drive at boot, it is not required. I'd forget about getting a flashed card. The Apple-recommended RX560 is under $150, super quiet (fans don't run unless card is pushed) and offers plenty of performance for all but demanding video editing or gaming workflows. (is "gaming" a workflow?).

I certainly hear you on your concerns re: the PCIe SSD situation... good luck there! You might want to review the above-linked MacRumors thread as there is discussion about which NVMe drives work under Mojave.

I'll probably try Mojave .2 or .3 one day in the not-too-distant future, especially if it becomes possible to run Thunderbolt from my 5,1 (see my recent thread), but I'll be doing it from a separate SSD, while holding on to my Sierra boot drive for disaster mitigation.