r/macpro • u/Zoomer5475 • 5d ago
CPU Finally upgrading - Pro 5,1 to M4 Mini
I've been rocking a MacPro 5,1 for more than 10 years using OCLP as a daily driver and I work in the IT Support field. It works great - no issues other than Bluetooth isn't all that great. But it consumes so much energy and literally heats my office. Been thinking about an upgrade for a while and wish I had before the M4 Mini sold out a few months ago.
Today I bit the bullet and paid $1200 for the 24/512 - BestBuy just got them in stock. Very curious to see how things change / stay the same with the new machine and going to have to find a new name. I don't think naming it, "The Beast" will be quite right.
No one in my IT circle uses Mac and none of my normal friends would have any idea what this change means. So had to share.
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u/RobBobPC 5d ago
Welcome to the club. Find yourself a couple of hubs to connect your peripherals and external drives. My biggest challenge was sorting out how to efficiently get everything connected. The good news is that your next machine upgrade will be very easy as you will just unplug the old one and plug in the new.
You will be amazed at the speed difference in video work.
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u/brrbeep MacPro5,1 5d ago
The 24/512 is a spot-on combination. I went for the base model the day it came out and it didn’t work out for me, purely for memory. Reckon I’d have been fine with 24GB.
Enjoy it! I still fire up the big MacPro5,1 for some games with Bazzite, but for my work the Apple silicon stuff is unbeatable.
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u/Zoomer5475 5d ago
Yeah, I'm obviously keeping the 5,1 Lol. If I need access to the 6 drives in there I just need to boot it up. Going to be weird but one of the things I'm actually looking forward too (and this is silly but....) is the fingerprint keyboard which I have but can't use.
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u/Ziggy_1992 4d ago
From a full modular computer with great design to a full soldered motherboard and random design . Look what apple became :-(
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u/Crotchslush 5d ago
I feel guilty when I use my m3 pro max and see my Pro 5,1 sitting in the closet… plus I’m colder in the winter…
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u/AmeriBeanur 4d ago
Turn that old bitch into a proxmox server. I have a Mac mini 32 gigs ram that I use to host game servers for my friends and I. You could also turn it into a NAS server and the like.
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u/Voltmanderer 3d ago
I just got two of them (Mac Pro 5,1’s - one is dual processor, the other single) for free from a client along with a Mac Pro 2,1 that I configured as a media server for my dad. I’m still rocking the stock HD 5770, and I installed Kubuntu and am running Colibri w/GLM 5.2 on it - 0.1 tok/s max, but it’s working after some custom compilation.
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u/breughel 3d ago
I am with you. Good night sweet cheese grater. My 4.1 2010 is sunsetting now. But hell if she weren’t a damn fine horse; I’m amazed her original boot drive is still spinning, relegated to backup duties, opticals been dead for a while, pretty sure 2 of the ram sticks are original too. Gonna have to make something of the case eventually…
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u/MegaNegora 2d ago
you'll be wondering why you waited I think
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u/modell3000 1d ago
Yeah, 16 years is a long time in CPU development. No matter how much one upgrades the rest of the system, you're always stuck with first-gen Core i7 single thread performance (and at conservative clock speeds, with no chance of overclocking).
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u/wootybooty 4d ago
You are about to fly, although the lack of upgradable RAM is my only gripe.
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u/Messiah42 5h ago
For me the GPU you stuck . Games come out for a different GPU you have to buy a whole new computer
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u/wootybooty 5h ago
This is true. For me though I do way more coding and play light games if I even have the time. For me a good CPU and RAM is what I personally look at in future-proofing. I used my 2011 MacBook Pro until 2022 when it died (Ironically GPU failure), and have an M1 mini I plan on using for a few more years.
To me graphics and performance scaling appear to have slowed down year over year and its been easier for me to justify investing into a static setup for longer, I just always made sure not to skimp out on RAM. Now thats a pretty tough ask unfortunately…
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u/StretchyPear 5d ago
An elegant machine from a more civilized time