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That was a close shave Bob!

Yeah, I figure I could've almost built a Hackintosh in the time I spent troubleshooting.

Wow... that's a relief! I used the vise method of de-lidding and it probably worked. Where I messed up is the silly sanding thing posted by an anal retentive person who had to get the processor cover shiny like a mirror. Had I not done that probably would have been okay. I ended up so timid that I paid a guy to de-lid them for me and they worked fine.

Glad you got to the bottom of the issue. I hope that shaved capacitor isn't going to cause you issues down the road, but hey... if it's working... it's working...

James Steele wrote:I ended up so timid that I paid a guy to de-lid them for me and they worked fine.

I get it. I was pretty anxious today, even though I've de-lidded before.

James Steele wrote:Glad you got to the bottom of the issue.

Come to think of it, I don't really know exactly what's going on here. Unless I'm missing something, I don't see any cosmetic defects.

James Steele wrote:I hope that shaved capacitor isn't going to cause you issues down the road.

You just had to spoil the party!

Hopefully it'll last till the new Mac Pros are released next year (though I expect they'll be out of my price range) or until I get the nerve to try a Hackintosh.

I am trying to figure out if it is worth it to upgrade from dual 2.93ghz Xeon 5670s to dual 3.33ghz Xeon 5680s. My flashed 4,1 is still plugging away and is still handling whatever I throw at it.

Benchmarks seem pretty similar, geekbench ones are in the middle of the page:

X5680 vs X5670
http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Xeon-X568 ... Xeon-X5670

For what it is worth, X5690 vs X5670
http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Xeon-X569 ... Xeon-X5670

With 5680’s at $100.00 a pair I’d probably do it just for fun. But I’d have to get them delidded which would add another $70.00. The local guy I used for the 5670’s was great and did them in a professional manner, but he’s no longer doing it. (He did several of your delids too via ebay btw, great guy)

Delidded 5690’s are going for $300.00 a pair. That doesn’t sound right either for bang for buck. I hope they come down.

I am just talking out loud but if any of you have any suggestions or comments, I would love to hear what you think.

emulatorloo wrote:I am trying to figure out if it is worth it to upgrade from dual 2.93ghz Xeon 5670s to dual 3.33ghz Xeon 5680s.

Pretty nominal (13%) speed bump there. OTOH, you could try the self-delidding approach...

HCMarkus wrote:

emulatorloo wrote:I am trying to figure out if it is worth it to upgrade from dual 2.93ghz Xeon 5670s to dual 3.33ghz Xeon 5680s.

Pretty nominal (13%) speed bump there. OTOH, you could try the self-delidding approach...

Hey HC, thanks for the reply and thanks for the feedback and suggestion.

Sounds like if I am going to do it, should hold out for 5690’s

Been scared to do the delidding myself, but did find a guy in France on eBay who has a Xeon delidding tool for $50.00 usd plus shipping. Based on vice method, have seen similar tools for i7 demonstrated on YouTube and seem pretty safe.

I do have a quad core 2.9ghx Xeon W3520 left over from my single CPU Mac Pro 2009 that I upgraded to a 3.33 ghz W3680 6-core processor a while back. So I could practice on the W3520 and see how the delidding goes. I think I will go ahead and get that tool and do a trial run.

OTOH I did jump on the Vienna Ensemble Pro 7 presale and got two licenses. After I get to mess with it may pick up a third license.

I already had a Steinberg e-licenser key. Second Steinberg Key arrived yesterday. So that really may be the best futureproofing solution for me, remember all your great posts about it.

Thanks again

You know, the delidding process I don't think is all that bad. I did them myself with the "vise method" and I'm convinced that where I went wrong was that I saw a video on YouTube in which some extremely fastidious character wet-sanded all the old solder off the top of exposed processor and I tried to do it but ended up messing up capacitors around it. I'm convinced it would have been okay if I just didn't go through with the over zealous sanding thing.

I just did the upgrade last week myself. Swapped out my quad 2.8Ghz for the 5680, think I paid $38 for it? At the same time, also added an OWC 1TB SSD for my boot drive (on sale for $120 last week!) and replaced the 4x4GB of 1333Mhz non-ECC memory with 3x8GB of ECC memory, which is now actually running at 1333Mhz thanks to the new CPU. I did the whole Radeon RX570 swap to upgrade to Mojave last November, this made it finally perfect.

It wasn't a 'WOW I just a got a new Mac Pro' bump, but it was nice enough that yes, I do notice it. It makes the OS respond like its supposed to now. Everything is pretty instant, Logic Pro only bounces in the dock once before its asking me what project to open now. Probably going to throw a $20 USB 3.0/3.1 card in it next, one of these days soon I think Im gonna finally swap the old 828MK2 for an 828ES so better have that USB ready to go since Thunderbolt aint happening for me hehehe.

mothra wrote:Thunderbolt aint happening for me hehehe.

Ya' never know...

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=65438&hilit=thunderbolt

It still looks like a long shot, unless one is willing to do the warm boot from Windows thing.

Congrats on the upgrade! I'm running an 828es via USB and it is working perfectly.

James Steele wrote:You know, the delidding process I don't think is all that bad. I did them myself with the "vise method" and I'm convinced that where I went wrong was that I saw a video on YouTube in which some extremely fastidious character wet-sanded all the old solder off the top of exposed processor and I tried to do it but ended up messing up capacitors around it. I'm convinced it would have been okay if I just didn't go through with the over zealous sanding thing.

I used the heating iron and razor blade method. I'm sold on it. I scraped 99% of the leftover solder off with a razor blade, solder is soft; but I've worked in remodeling painting and construction for most of my life so I can't say that using a razor blade is 'easy'; easy for me for sure.

James Steele wrote:You know, the delidding process I don't think is all that bad. I did them myself with the "vise method"

Yeah James, I remember your horror story about the sanding!

I am remembering you ended up going to box185 on eBay, he was the guy who did mine. He had a great set-up, we had a coffee a couple of times to do the processors exchange. Really a nice guy.

Thanks for the tip on the vise method. Did a little research, saw some YouTube vids.

It doesn't look too bad at all!

I wonder where the hell my vise is?????


x

I have no trouble finding my vices.

Hi guys and gals, Thanks to this board, I've got a reason to upgrade my mac without spending a fortune on a new one. My 2009 MacPro has been sluggish running El Capitan with 10 gb RAM and the two 2.8 ghz processors.

I talked with my computer guy and he things that I may just need to upgrade my hard drives to SSD's so just ordered a 120GB for the Operating System, and a 1 TB for the applications where I'll do most of my work in DP. Then I will continue to use my external HD for storing files. I think this will work out fine. He suggests that I do this, see how it runs, then opt for the processor upgrade if I still want a greater speed bump. I may not need that but will wait and see.

I also had to order two drive bay sleds for housing the 2.5" SSDs (one for each). I will probably need to reinstall all my software, not sure if I can do a copy to the new hard drive and expect that to work.

I'm also looking to get a new GPU so I can move to the newer Mac OS. Time will tell. Any suggestions? I'm open to any new ideals or help.

You don't have to reinstall everything. Just use Carbon Copy Cloner (or hell, even Disk Utility can do it) to copy the entire drive to the new one. CCC did everything for me including the recovery drive and EFI partitions, and my Mac booted right off the brand new SSD like nothing ever changed.

If you're looking for more horsepower, the SSD isn't gonna do much though. The OS responds and boots a hell of a lot quicker, but CPU wise, it doesn't really help. 120GB is pushing it for macOS, hopefully you either store your user files elsewhere or don't use the computer for anything other than audio hehe. Just my documents folder and iTunes library would leave about 20GB free on that drive hehe.

For video cards, just stick with the current Radeon RX5xx series. You lose your boot screen but MOST of them should work just fine out of the box. It made the games I play about 1000x better, don't really notice anything special about the OS, but Mojave wouldn't run without it so it must be doing something neat there.