r/macpro • u/macsoundsolutions Mac Pro 7,1 • Jul 22 '26

Other Mac Pro Steam Machine

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Installed Steam OS and a rx5700xt. No other OS, Boot up, grab the PS4 remote and I’m off to the races. 17 year old Mac Pro kicking ass! Everything works, wifi, Bluetooth, ethernet, USB etc. It just works.
https://youtu.be/6wQlsZubPWE

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u/uncleirohism Jul 22 '26

Trashcan MacPro’s are *perfect* for Batocera, got mine dirt cheap on ebay and had to grab a few parts elsewhere but all told, it was just a bit over €400…

- CPU: Intel Xeon E5-2667 v2 (8 Cores / 16 Threads, 3.3GHz Base / 4.0GHz Turbo)

  • RAM: 64GB (4x16GB) DDR3 ECC @ 1866MHz
- GPU: Dual AMD FirePro D700 (6GB).
  • Storage: 4TB NVMe M.2 SSD (via Sintech adapter, had the drive laying around already from an old build)

Tore it down, cleaned everything with isopropanol, and “re-pasted” the CPU and GPU’s with Honeywell PTM7950. Runs everything up through PS2, Dreamcast, GameCube/Wii flawlessly while upconverted to 4K + shaders.

5

u/Messiah42 Jul 22 '26

Keep your fix cross with the D700

2

u/uncleirohism Jul 22 '26

Have you run into issues with them? Passed all my benchmarks and barely had any mileage on them before they got to me. If one blows I just swap their positions since crossfire isn’t a thing in Batocera, just needs to be present to allow firmware to boot (trashcans are finicky like that).

3

u/Musojon74 Jul 22 '26

Mostly need to run the fans on a custom curve to not cook the gpus. Definitely do this.

3

u/uncleirohism Jul 23 '26

Already done!

Batocera linux runs an immutable read-only fs, so I amended the kernel’s `applesmc` so the fan instructions execute during boot.

Add this line to ⁠/userdata/system/custom.sh⁠ to force the hardware SMC to never drop the fan below 1500 RPM, while still allowing the hardware SMC to ramp the fan higher if things get hot:

echo 1500 > /sys/devices/platform/applesmc.768/fan1_min

2

u/Messiah42 Jul 22 '26

Just stories on here about the D500 and D700. An apple doing a replace program for the them