How to inject new energy into your old Apple Mac Pro

Among Apple's many Mac products, Mac Pro appears to be the easiest to ignore. This poor Mac Pro series was first introduced in 2006 to replace the Power Mac G5, but apparently Apple has now put it in the doghouse and has no faster processors like other MAC products, more efficient motherboard design and such as a lightning interface and USB 3.0. So, if you have a phased out Mac Pro, how can you inject new energy into it to achieve better usage? That's what we're going to explore today.

In fact, as a server-level product, even compared to the current state-of-the-Art Imac,mac Pro, it still has a great advantage in terms of raw processor performance and scalability. However, if you have been using for a year or two, you may often encounter problems such as system cotton, hard drive noise and so on, we can use its high scalability, through the replacement of a part of the hardware to achieve better results. It should be noted that if you have a first generation or second-generation Mac Pro, they will not be able to install the latest mountain Lion (mountain lion) system because it does not support 64-bit EFI firmware.

RAM memory

Mac Pro (Model Mac Pro 3,1), which was launched 2008 years later, will not be limited by memory expansion, so the service life should be longer. It's easy to upgrade memory on Mac Pro, but you might want to refer to the support page on Apple's website, which has all the details. As for capacity, 4GB should be the most basic, 8GB is more ideal. In fact, the 2008 style of Mac Pro can support the maximum 32GB RAM expansion, of course, the price will be more expensive, so first you should take into account the needs of their own use, and then choose.

Hard disk storage

MAC Pro has 4 internal SATA hard drive expansion bays, and with the passage of time some users may have installed multiple hard drives, creating a quick internal raid system. But if there's still room, it's not a better choice to choose an SSD solid state drive. Although compared with traditional mechanical hard disk, SSD is expensive, but as a guide disk will obviously improve the operating speed of the system, the effect is very obvious.

Extended

Don't forget the extended interface on Mac Pro, in fact it can add some popular new features to the host. Of course, the Lightning interface is not supported, but you can install a high-performance hard drive or USB 3.0 by adding an external serial ATA (ESATA) expansion card. Some third-party accessories manufacturers have also made efforts to do so, with a variety of interface expansion cards, including the Sata,esata interface, mini SAS, etc., these accessories can help Mac Pro access to the current popular advanced features.

Graphic graphics card

Mac Pro also has a very good graphics scalability, support 16 times times the PCIe graphics expansion slots, but most of the Mac dedicated graphics performance is more general, the price is very expensive. However, over the years some hardware enthusiasts through the video ROM, so that the PC graphics card can play the best performance on Mac Pro, of course, sometimes there will be compatibility problems, for ordinary users, the threshold is higher.

The good news is that if you're willing to compromise, you don't need to install the cracked PC video card onto Mac Pro. Since the OS X 10.7.5 system, Apple's standard graphics driver has been able to support Nvidia's PC graphics, so it can be used directly on Mac Pro. The disadvantage is that when the boot does not have a logo on the Apple logo boot screen, the screen is always dark until the display login interface, this is because most PC graphics cards lack of support for Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI), can not be recognized at startup.

If you want a fully functional Mac Pro compatible video card and use the AMD graphics driver, Sapphire Technology recently launched the HD 7950 Mac Edition is a good choice. It uses AMD's GCN architecture, with an HDMI port, 2 Mini DisplayPort and a dual-connected DVI port, but it's expensive and costs about 434 dollars (about 2662 yuan).

As mentioned above, even if you have an older Mac Pro in your hand, there are some effective ways to improve its performance. In addition to some hardware flaws, you can tailor it to your budget and requirements to give your Mac Pro a longer life span with full imagination.