[geeks] Mac Pro 1,1 slow death (video)

[Mark Benson]

Shannon,

I've travelled this exact road. I have a Mac Pro 1,1 2.0GHz 4-core.

Exactly the same happened to my Mac Pro 1,1 with GeForce 8800GT. I
dismantled the graphics card to find it had woefully inadequate cooling to
the video memory chips. If you are suffering the same screen corruption
leading to eventual OS lock-up that I did then it's very likely classic
VRAM failure symptoms. I've had it with a few gaming gfx cards in PCs too.
Also a lot of later pre-GTX era NVIDIA

I may have my original 7300GT card spare somewhere as my Mac Pro  now has a
Radeon 5770 in it instead (mine failed a few years back and I replaced it
at super-ridiculous cost at the time when I still used the 'Pro a as my
daily driver). I'm the wrong side of the pond to post to you though, sadly.

There's a store on eBay, can't recall the name, that sells flashed PC gfx
cards with Mac ROMs that do a cheaper Radeon 5770 for the Mac Pro 1,1 but
it's not substantially cheaper than Apple's option, forget where you are
but you may find it cheaper than I did due to shipping costs to the UK.

I replaced my Mac Pro with a new Mac Mini 2.6GHZ i7 in March, which I
fitted 16GB of RAM and a 256MB SSD to myself post-purchase and it's a
trooper, I'm really impressed with it. The Intel 4000 Graphics are not as
lame as you'd expect, especially if you are basing your judgement on older
GMA graphics. That said, I'm running a singe 1080p monitor off it, not 2
screens to YMMV. The biggest bonus is the Mini is faster, quieter and
MASSIVELY smaller, and uses only a fraction of the power and doesn't kick
out as much hot air as a result.
The only areas the Intel graphics will fall down are in things that use a
lot (and I don't just mean the odd lame little 3D game, they seem to run
okay if my experience with Second Life is any indication) of 3D or OpenGL
processing power. I've had no issues running Aperture and Photoshop /
Illustrator CS3 on it, for example, but that's as hard as I usually push
mine. Again, depending what you use it for, YMMV. I just know I debated it
for over a year, worrying about the graphics performance and really I don't
know what I was worrying about.

I haven't turned my Mac Pro on in months. I think that says a lot about the
Mini's performance as far as my needs go.


On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 12:22 AM, Shannon <shannon at widomaker.com> wrote:

> The other morning my Mac Pro died.
>
> After some investigation it seems about a 99% the problem is that the
> nVidia 8800 GPU has died.
>
> In fact, I removed the GPU, and the machine will boot and run fine, I
> just have only ssh access too it then without a head.
>
> I went to several Mac vendors to ask for a replacement, and they all
> wanted ridiculous prices for even the old outdated 8800, and even more
> for things like the ATI 5770 or ATI 5850.
>
> Since this is an original Mac Pro, it has various issues that keep it
> from being able to use any other graphics cards without ugly hacks I
> rather not do.
>
> Anyone got any spare video cards for this thing cheap, or know where to
> look?
>
> So far the Mac vendors and most people on eBay want too much for these
> ancient GPUs. This Mac Pro is just too old to invest a lot of $$$ into.
>
> ---------------------
>
> In case you are wondering, I did consider just letting this old machine
> die. It does have issues like 32-bit EFI and outdated PCIx slots, and is
> in general hard to keep maintaining.
>
> A Mac Mini is in many ways tempting since it will run two displays and
> is almost double the speed of my old Mac Pro.
>
> However, Apple has not updated the Mini in well over a year, and usually
> that means it is better to wait until they do. The main issue I have
> with the current Mac Mini is the Intel HD 4000 graphics are sometimes
> slow, while the new Intel chipset is quite a bit faster.
>
> Just musing mostly... I know if I buy a Mac Mini, Apple will release a
> new one about a month later. If I don't... they'll take forever and I'll
> plod along with my aging Mac Pro.
>
> My car got hit last month, this month my Mac dies... every time my
> gaming rig makes a funny noise now I get paranoid.
>
> [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-keys which had
> a name of 0x5936BC24.asc]
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