MOTUnation.com

HCMarkus wrote:Don't forget to update EFI before using either method, or your new CPUs won't be recognized and your Mac won't boot.

So turns out EFI was not updated by seller. Not working under Yosemite. Happily you've posted solution in the your main thread:

HCMarkus wrote:Updating this thread for the benefit of anyone who might have missed it before or is contemplating what is still the best deal in Mac computing for audio work.

I just flashed another 2009 from 4,1 to 5,1 successfully. Had a little trouble making the EFI update stick initially, remedied by booting under OS 10.8.5 and using a patched version of the updater available here:

http://forum.netkas.org/index.php/topic,852.960.html

See Reply 966 for pigsyn's patched EFI updater.

Michael's de-lidding post:

http://www.motunation.com/forum/viewtop ... 60#p497189

After procrastinating on this for a year, I met up with e-bayer Box185 for coffee and CPU drop off the last week of March 2017.

Paul's a terrific guy and we hung out for a while.

It was fun! He's an engineer by day and he built a rig for delidding these CPU's very accurately.

He said in the early days he did tons of these for recording studios. Demand's gone down quite a bit, but he still enjoys doing them, especially for folks who actually need the extra power for CPU intensive apps.

He had them ready for me the next day and emailed me an excellent guide for doing the install.

I highly recommend him if any of you haven't taken the plunge yet.

I went from 2 quad-core 2.66 GHz X5500's to 2 six core 2.93 X5670's

Before the upgrade my geekbench 3 multi-core scores were 16586.

After the upgrade my geekbench 3 multi-core are 27399.

Definitely able to pile up the plug-ins now!

HCMarkus: Thanks so much for your original thread on doing this upgrade. It is like a damn miracle. And thanks also for pointing me towards Box185.

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I hope to do this soon. Hard part is finding 8-core 4,1 Macs now. There's a guy locally in the San Diego area who seems to set up shop and is doing these mods and selling his services and modded MacPros on the local Craigslist. I suspect he's buying up any 4,1s that hit the market. Plus, thanks to his continual postings offering to do the upgrade, the "secret" is well out. People are keeping their 4,1s and upgrading them, or selling for top dollar.

Can't wait for the new MacPro comes out and make those upgradable machines a bargain again. Of course, the non-upgradeable 3,1 8-cores are dirt cheap. One has been sitting on Craiglist for weeks at less than $400 including a 5770 graphics card installed.