There are a few reasons why older Mac Pros can become so powerful: The essence is people wanted more powerful Macs and Apple didn’t give it to them, so we are.”
But I don’t think the point is really the essence. “I think a lot of people in this group see upgrading the Mac Pro as a cheaper way to get a functional Mac. You cannot go to and find a computer better than these,” Mazzarolo said. “It feels completely ridiculous to be doing this. As an end-around the lack of Thunderbolt Port, people are using 10 Gb/s ethernet connections to directly connect their computers to massive hard drives that store media.īig Little Frank’s business is aimed at the “pro” community who feels like Apple let them down by killing the upgradeability of the MacBook Pro and Mac Pro. Like the Hackintosh community, the Facebook group has a running list of compatible and incompatible parts, shares written and video tutorials about upgrading the computers, and has even found a way to upgrade the Mac Pro 4.1 into the Mac Pro 5.1 with a firmware update. Mazzarolo also has had to find a way to reroute the Mac Pro’s power supply to directly power electricity-intensive modern GPUs (as designed, the power is routed-and limited-by the computer’s motherboard.)īut many of these potential problems have been completely solved by the community. The lack of Thunderbolt ports makes doing this a nonstarter for certain people. Certain newer components are not compatible because drivers don’t exist. There are pitfalls: Installing new CPUs sometimes involves “ delidding” a processor, which means removing a shield from it to make it compatible with the 4.1 or 5.1. "We’re helping the company close this huge stopgap between 2013 and whenever they introduce the new Mac Pro" For some things, it’s better than any Mac offered at the moment.” We’ve found a way to put two good ones in old Macs. To do what a lot of pros want, you just need a good GPU. “With CPUs, nothing drastic has happened in. “We’re using the skeleton of the machine,” Gianluca Mazzarolo, owner of the Denmark-based Big Little Frank, which makes custom Mac Pros for creative professionals, told me on the phone. The Facebook group Mac Pro Upgrade is filled with people scooping up old Mac Pros from eBay and Craigslist and modifying the hell out of them. People are putting new CPUs, RAM, SSDs, and modern graphics cards in the cheese grater Macs that are, in many cases, superior to what you can buy from Apple today. Upgraded versions of the 4.1 and 5.1 are, in many cases, the fastest Apple computers you can buy today. These are the last highly upgradeable and modifiable desktop computer that Apple sold before moving to the much-maligned “black trash can” design that is sold today and hasn’t changed significantly since 2013. The Mac Pro 4.1 and 5.1 are known in the community as the “cheese grater” Mac Pro towers.
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