Why in the World: A Dual Xeon Machine / Mac Pro 1,1

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I know this sounds weird. "Hey Aremis, you stupid git, why are you talking about keons when you like old big endian chips and pentium 4's?!" BECAUSE YOU SAUCEY PAMF THESE ARE STILL OLD MACHINES!! 10 to 11 years in fact.

So I have 2 of these machines now. 1 is a Dell Precision 670 that I rebuilt and the other is my "new" Mac Pro 1,1. I have talked about Varrock a lot in the 2 months I have been using him as my main machine and now I am off of Netburst completely with this mac pro. I don't have a name for it yet but it's in my mind somewhere.

These are the specs of the 1,1, as for Varrock consider him similar hardware wise but 1 generation behind in architecture.

2 X Xeon 5150's @ 2.66ghz (no HT as far as I am aware, nor boost clock, but that may change)
16 GB DDR2 PC2-5300F, whatever the fuck that is
My SSD and 1 TB HDD setup
ATM an ATi X1900 XT (I can sell this for a stupid amount of money) but it will be replaced by my R7 370
An airport card (it didn't have airport) ABGN
Dual FW 400/800
Dual gigabit lan
5X USB 2.0
4X PCIe X16

The system over all is stable as hell. Runs quiet until it heats up too much then the fans go full power until its decent again. This isn't a bug, thy actually did that originally as well. Now, over all these machines are actually pretty great. For the 160 USD spent on it the fact that nothing is wrong with it floors me. I'm certain that whatever I throw at it it will not have an issue and will definitely handle better than Varrock ever did game and recording wise. The wall is going to hit where it sortof counts when I will need 10.9 and its stuck at 10.7, though any version can be hacked to work with little effort. Ultimately this will run OSX, Linux, and Windows and unless something else comes along this will now be my main machine. I'm good with that.

Edit: Actually I was wrong here. In a hardware update to the machine that I found later on it actually WAS a bug. Since that update the fans work like you expect. However the machines I have seen/used before did also work like this so whether this is a problem between machines or all the machines did this I have no idea. Point is it doesn't go to 100 anymore. Doesn't do it quickly either.

Until I get around to doing HW testing I can only go over some loose specifics. I can say that for a machine like Varrock you won't have a great gaming experience because of the Pentium 4 age Xeons and their limited capacity. While solid, it was hard work o play something as simple as TF2, CSS, and this war of mine. NOT COOL.

I expect that with this Mac, The 1,1? I like the ring of that...... I expect that with The 1,1 I will have better performance over all and have a similar experience to my Phenom. Tests will be soon to come and I will have to report those at a later date when I have the time to do them. But for now, I have a 1,1 and I intend to use it.

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Coin Mining

I wanted to talk for a short moment about mining with these machines. As I am trying to figure out good benchmarks for these kinds of machines, them being built around workloads and not necessarily about FPS in games or the best images ever, I have been looking at Lightcoin mining for the last month or so.

For the record the pool I am using is lightcoinpool.org and it is relatively large (845 - 875 users consistantly) and I am in kilohash where I have hit 8 megahash when a big mining group attached to the site got DDoS'd a few days ago before I got my mac pro, so the exact speeding on the machines I have is loose to label.

So at the moment my average kilohash on my mac pro attached to the pool is 340 kh\s. Varrock is 2 or 3 chipsets behind my MP but it nailed 445-480 kh\s. As I had 8 mh\s at one point I don't know what the exact speed will ever be completely capped out, but I can say that they don't take that much power to run. With just a 370 and only a few hours live to the pool I have almost 0.00085 LTC now. I think I have 6 hours total. Theres a few apps for OSX that are useable but I am going to say that for windows you should use Multiminer. OSX does have multiminer but it may or may not work. For mac theres MMiner, CGminer, BFGminer, and MacMiner. I use MacMiner because of the tight interface. I don't feel like looking at a giant thing. I would also get smcFanControl and put all the system fans as high as possible while mining as it keeps the temps at room temp (current GPU temp is about 40 C).

MacOS / OSX also has AMDGPU-PRO in 10.11.6 and I assume 10.12 and it uses it well for this. OpenCL works which is more to say here than in windows where it would actually randomly decide there wasn't openCL and stop after I was AFK and 6 hours were wasted. OSX seems stable for this and considering that you can get these MP's cheap and stuff them with cards its good for a little mining. As for Varrock he only has 1 PCIe X16 slot. Not the best.

As it seems, if anyone wants to know the amount of accepted shares, I can say for my mac that within 30 minutes I have 199 shares. If you want more specific info you'll have to ask as I don't know much more about mining :P

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Installing Windows to 32-Bit EFI Mac's

Short part here. So essentially one of the good selling points of these machines is to upgrade it as high as possible and make it a gamer for windows 7 (it can only run windows 7) for note much. The way these machines boot from what I can tell is it runs in startup as 32-Bit and in a running mode its in 64-Bit (OSX). Windows is too stupid to be able to do this so there is a modification that needs to be done. it changes the install files and the startup process to do the same as OSX.

http://glennstevenson.com/Blog/TabId/1115/PostId/4/Install-Windows-7-64-Bit-On-Mac-Pro.aspx

I haven't installed windows yet but I have the ISO made. Very straight forward and you will need a DVD. When I do get windows I will do FPS tests as I think it will give me better FPS from an updated line of drivers (I am pretty sure this is patched AMDGPU-PRO from the initial release but at least it has FUCKING 370 SUPPORT, AMD, LINUX, FOR FUCKS SAKE).

And then I had to actually install it

So for whatever reason my CD that I burned fresh last night off of the iso that I made doesn't install all the way. No worries, I had another windows 7 disc and I'm about to find out if it will boot or not. I can CDSwap the install discs apparently so thats fun :I if you have this problem with your install cd you created then it looks like you can just swap discs though I'm not seeing anything yet. I'll write again later if anything happens.

Yoah it installed correctly. If you boot into the first disk successfully that you built with the tool I listed and can't install from it for some reason but you have another windows 7 X64 disk handy get a paperclip and push the button on your cd drive and just swap disks it will work just fine.

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Benchmarks

I'm going to put benchmarks here as I do them but I don't know what are good benchmarks yet for the 1,1 so those will just trickle in. For Varrock I have them down.

Varrock

45-60 FPS Rocket League
12-60 FPS This War Of Mine (when you come back to the shelter on this machine the FPS tanks)
30-50 FPS CSS (even on empty bhop maps)
2 FPS CSGO
35-47 FPS Dota 2
45-60 FPS Cities Skylines
90 FPS Banished (dx9)
56 FPS League of Legends
445 kh\s LTC @ litecoinpool.org (Multiminer)

The LibreOffice test is one I really only use on laptops so thats why I don't include it here.
YT on Varrock I couldn't do 60 FPS video. It would just fail spectacularly.

The 1,1

310 kh\s @ litcoinpool.org (MacMiner, OSX 10.11)
45-75 (jittery) (crashes after 20 mins) FPS CS GO (OSX)
75-80 FPS League of Legends
60 FPS (freezes every 5 mins) 7 Days to Die
Capable of 720p60

Video: Kdenlive -
Photo: Darktable -
3D: Blender -

More tests will come as I do them. With Varrock the ones listed are about all I could get the machine to do. For the 1,1 I'll be able to do more, I think.

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Drive Parity

As documentation for the Mac Pro 1,1, I just learned that each of the slots has a master/slave drive parity built in! You know why this is a pain in the ass? Its 12 now and I've been up since about 8 AM trynig to get my GPU to work. The hard drive that was in this machine when I got it had OSX installed and it has a recovery partition to 10.7 from when I was first testing the machine out. I figured out it was only booting to that recovery partition and not anything else and so I rearraged the drives so that drive is in slot 4.

So as a note to the future reader who has a 1,1 or 2,1, and this probably applies to all MP towers, put your boot drive in slot one and all your other drives everywhere else. It makes shit easier.