Upgrade Mac Pro 1,1

 

Mac Pro Rebuild / Upgrade Options - Mac Pro 1,1 / 2,1

2006-era Dual Core CPU Mac Pro 1,1 systems can be found second hand for $100 or less and can upgraded via custom firmware to a 2007-era Mac Pro 2,1 system to support quad core CPUs and a more recent OS with a few tricks. By default Mac Pro 1,1 and 2,1 systems top out at OSX 10.7.5 but with a few tweaks can be made to accommodate 10.11.6 - the highest its 32bit EFI boot system will support.

Firmware Upgrades

The key is to upgrade the firmware to 2,1 BEFORE you replace hardware. You also need to be running OSX 10.6 or 10.7 Lion for these applications to work fully. There is a firmware upgrade tool to do this which can be downloaded here or from our servers here. The tool attempts to reach the official Apple firmware but the URL has been changed to here, but in case it changes again, you can download the file from our server here (known good copy). Open the firmware DMG, then run the updater - it should see it rather than try and reach out to the Internet. Follow the instructions to complete. The upgrade tool appears to work best from Snow Leopard or Lion so you may need to install a version on a partition or thumb drive for the upgrade if you are running something newer already. Read the forums below for troubleshooting and reset the PRAM after the whole upgrade process. (See the resources section below for additional guidance)

SMC Upgrade

From the factory, the Mac Pro 1,1 runs 2 dual core CPUs for a total of 4 cores, whereas we are going to run 2 faster quad core CPUs for a total of 8 cores. The thermal bi-product of more cores therefore means that the Mac Pro fans need to work harder to keep the CPUs and motherboard cool and therefore the fan curves need to be changed and upgraded too. 

By default, the SMC version of the Mac Pro 1,1 is 1.7f10. We need to upgrade this to SMC version 1.15f3 or later. To accomplish this go to the Netkas forums and or simply download smcFlasher.efi and the the smc firmware 'M939.smc' from our servers. These need to be copied to a FAT formatted USB drive. You will also need to download rEFIf from sourceforge or from our severs and install it then reboot (possibly twice). rEFIf creates its own EFI boot image from which you can now run the program to update your SMC. Boot into this and then flash the SMC version. There is a good video on this outlining the instructions and how to remove it afterwards. 

 

Custom OS installation

As stated above, you are not limited to running the officially supported OSX 10.7.5, but can in fact run something considerably newer if you have the RAM and CPU for it. A faster SSD hard drive would probably also help as the slowest part of any system (see the storage page for details).
To install a newer (unsupported) OS post OSX 10.7.5. You may need the support of a second machine. You have two options:

  • Pull down a pre-built 'fixed' image and restore that image to a blank hard drive.
  • Build out an OS version of your choice on another machine and apply some patch files to enable the OS to boot with the 32bit EFI on the older Mac Pro, then insert it in your Mac Pro 1,1 / 2,1.
The restore method involves downloading an 11.56GB image of El Capitan - the last OS that will still work with this machine and restoring it via Disk Utility on your Mac Pro or another machine. This is by far the easiest way to upgrade your old Mac Pro. At the time of writing this I could only find fixed versions of El Capitan online. Versions of this clean fixed image can be downloaded from Google, from Mega in New Zealand or from our servers as outlined in this rather long winded video. Once you have this, simply restore your Mac Pro 1,1 / 2,1 boot drive with the image and reboot and voila! One VERY important thing, do not apply the 2016-004 SECURITY UPDATE as this will break 32 bit boot ability.

DO NOT UPGRADE OR INSTALL THE 2016-004 SECURITY UPDATE OR YOU WILL NEED TO RESTART THE ENTIRE PROCESS.

 
The second 'build-out' method requires the use of a second (newer) machine. You will need to either boot your Mac Pro 1,1/2,1 into Terminal Mode and attach it to another newer Mac via a Firewire cable, or you can pull out your system drive and plug it into a newer system and build it out from there.
  • First download your desired version of OSX from apple or another source. (If you have an old installer image on a file server somewhere you may need to set back the clock on your host machine first by a couple of years if the apple installer certificate has expired).
  • Now install this version of OSX on the target volume.
  • Then replace the boot files with custom ones that will allow the system to boot on your Mac Pro 1,1 / 2,1.
  • When complete shut down the machine and move the drive back to the Mac Pro 1,1 / 2,1 and boot from it or end the Terminal Model session and simply reboot.
You can also use the 64 to 32 too (SFOTT) tool to create a custom install routine. See the MacRumors forum for Installation details or this video.
 
I have had mixed success using these methods - my 10.9.5 install worked, but by 10.11.6 install didn't. It might have been that my 10.11 installer contained the security update 2016-004 that doesn't work with any of the solutions however, so your experience may vary. 

Hardware Upgrade

Once you have your firmware and SMC upgraded, you can upgrade your CPUs to Xeon X5355 or X5365 Clovertown quad core units. The firmware upgrade will also allow you to support 64GB of 667Mhz ECC RAM thereby extending the life of a 2006 workstation. At the time of writing this a pair of Xeon X5365s were running about $70 on eBay and 8*8GB ECC DIMMS (64GB) for just under $100. Unfortunately, you are still restricted to running 667Mhz RAM, but the good news is there is lots of it around on the second hand market or new for that matter.

If your CPUs are not recognized properly, (mine showed up in System Report as Unrecognized CPUs, even though it identifies the correct number of cores and CPUs) you can modify the system using this CPU injector Kext using your favorite kext utility.




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