The Mac Pro 2013 was an interesting design. The case was beautifully crafted with the shell being cnc machined.
You can upgrade the memory, the CPU, the dual video cards, and internal drive. But unlike the earlier Mac Pro, this model could not be upgraded as much. This release became know as the Trash Can Mac Pro due to its resemblance to a trash can.
I am not going into the merits or the short comings of the Trash Can Mac Pro (TCMP), but I am just going to document the recent acquisition of mine.
I originally bought a used TCMP from eBay with the thought of using the case for a build to install a small computer like a Raspberry Pi or similar in it. It had a 3.5GHz Intel 6-core CPU with AMD FirePro D300 and sans Ram or SSD. It was AS-IS. I paid a total of $90 (including $10 shipping) for it.
At the time I bought the TCMP on eBay, the company I bought it from had a few other TCMPs for sale. All were As-Is. Once I received it, I thought it would be worth a chance to get a drive and some memory to see if it worked. I would be able to use drive for something else if the TCMP didn’t work, but I might be stuck with the memory. So I bought 32gb (two 16gb sticks) of OWC memory for $50. A Kingston 1TB NVMe M.2 drive for $80. A $4 adapter for the NVMe drive to fit it into the TCMP. Apple used non standard drives but with an adapter you could use a regular drive.
Next I downloaded Monterey. Using a 32GB USB flash drive I created a bootable MacOS installer for Monterey on it. I plugged the USB flash drive into my TCMP. I was successful in booting into the Monterey Installer. Which told me that the TCMP was functional. I won’t describe the complete Apple installer process here, but I was able to format the 1TB NVme drive, install Monterey on it, booted up using Monterey, and then ran through the setup of Monterey on the TCMP. I now had a working TCMP with only 16GB. Not quite right. It showed that only slot 2 had memory in it. Even thought I put memory in slots 1 and 2. I shutdown the computer. Removed the memory in slot 1 and then reinstalled it. I booted back up and then had 32GB. Now it was a success.
With the magic of Opencore Legacy Patcher (OCLP) I was going to try to upgrade my TCMP all the way up to Sequoia 15.5, the same version that my Mac Studio is currently at. OCLP is a tool designed for running MacOS on unsupported Macs. It’s part of the OpenCore project, which is an open-source bootloader for MacOS. I installed the latest version of OCLP on my Mac Studio. Using OCLP I created a bootable MacOS installer for Sequoia 15.5 on a 32GB USB flash drive. The next part of the process is to install OpenCore onto the USB installer you just created. This process adds necessary patches to the installer so that your not supported hardware will be able to run the latest MacOS. I was able to boot the TCMP into the Sequoia installer. While the computer is booting you have to hold the mac option key (on a non-mac keyboard you have to use the left alt key) to get into the Mac boot menu where you can select the EFI boot with the Sequoia installer. I ran through the Sequoia installer and I was able to install Sequoia onto the 1TB NVMe drive. When the TCMP booted into Sequoia, the OCLP installed OpenCore onto the drive for me. There were a few minor bumps along the way, but I now have a TCMP running Sequoia 15.5!
The next thing I will be doing to the TCMP is to swap the 6-Core CPU with a 12-Core CPU. That’s what the best CPU that you could get with a TCMP. I got it for $27 from AliExpress. I will have to do some benchmarks with the current 6-Core CPU to see what kind of performance difference swapping to the 12-Core CPU will have.