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TCMP CPU Upgrade

I was waiting for the 32gb memory before I installed the 12 core cpu into the TCMP.  There are a number of videos and guides on how to do it.  Here is the guide from Fixit that I followed.  It was fairly easy to do.  The computer was very well engineered.  Unfortunately the upgrade path was limited.

Cpu has been swapped out and new thermal pasted added.  Time to add the extra 32gb of memory.  This will give the TCMP a total of 64gb.  All of the memory is from OWC.

I did the Geekbench 6 test on the upgraded TCMP.  The test at the top was the latest TCMP test.  The third test on the list was the prior TCMP test.  The only real change was on the multi core number.  The single core actually went down a little while the multi core was 41% higher.  The other two tests are for my Mac Studio M1 Max and my gaming computer.

The GPU test happened to be slightly lower as well for some reason.  I still have the dual D300s in there.  The numbers pale in comparison to the gaming computer with the RTX 3060.  Even the Mac Studio M1 Max.

The TCMP is working well.  I will have to figure out what to use it for.

 

 

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Trash Can Mac Pro

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.

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OpenCore and the Hackintosh II

My original Hackintosh is still up and running.  The big problem is that it is stuck at OS X 10.11.6 (El Capitan) along with my real Apple products (Mac Mini circa 2009 and Mac Book Pro from late 2007).  So that’s been almost 5 years since 10.11.6 was released.  And it has been 4 and a half years since OS X 11.12 (Sierra) was released.  In order to make it to OS X 10.15 and beyond I figured I would build one more Hackintosh.  Which will mostly likely be my last one due to Apple moving to ARM chips.  The Hackintosh is effectively dead.

My first Hackintosh had the following components:

CPU: i5-3570K (Ivy Bridge 1155 socket)
Memory: DDR3 1600 – 20GB Total
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 2048MB
Motherboard: QUO Z77MX-QUO-AOS (made by Gigabyte)

The motherboard was from QUO Computer’s projectQ Kickstarter from 2013.   There was a lot of bad blood over this Kickstarter.  I backed “THE CONNECTED BY DEMAND” pledge level for $289.  While I got my board, they failed to include the wifi/bluetooth card with it.  No t-shirt either.  From the comments section on the Kickstarter, I saw that I wasn’t the only that didn’t receive the wifi/bluetooth card.  Also some of the boards were never delivered.  The big losers were the people who backed at the complete systems level which were the most under delivered rewards.  A number of people lost a good bit of money (up to $2500USD) backing the project.

I plan on making a ProxMox Box out of my original Hackintosh system components.  I will upgrade the video card to GTX 950 I have available.  The website TonyMacX86 was the place that I visited to research while building my original Hackintosh.  Looking at the Buyer’s Guide Section I was able to choose the components that would increase my chances of success.  The Installation Guide section provided the information that helped me to successfully create my original Hackintosh using Clover as the bootloader.

Once again I consulted with TonyMacX86 and looked at their Buyer’s Guide Section to pick out the components that I would be using.  The following components are going into my second build:

Motherboard: Gigabyte Z390 M Gaming – MicroATX LGA 1151
CPU: Intel Core i9-9900K (Coffee Lake)
Fan Cooler: Noctua NH-D15                                                                                          Graphics: Sapphire Radeon Pulse RX 580 8GB GDDR5
Memory: DDR4 3200MHz CL16 SDRAM (1 stick of 32GB)                                    Case Fans: Noctua NF-P14
SSD: WD_Black SN750 500GB NVMe
Case: AZZA – CSAZ-310DH
Wifi/Bluetooth Card: Fenvi FV-T919 (Suitable for Hackintosh)

For the boot-loader on this second build I went with OpenCore instead of using Clover.  This time I did not use the TonyMacX86 website for build instructions.  They do have info on using OpenCore, but I turned to YouTube for my build instructions this time.  There were quite a few videos available.  The video that I went with is from the Chris Titus Tech channel.  The particular video is called “Install macOS on any PC | OpenCore Guide”.  He uses a Linux Mint Live (LML) system to create the boot USB.  I happened to have a portable drive with Ventoy and a LML system was one of the systems available on it.  I mentioned Ventoy before in my post on WinPE.  For the most part the video is pretty good.  He had to install Python on his LML system, but I already had Python3 on mine.  The SSDDTTime.py script he used was older that the version that I downloaded.  There were only 4 options on the menu while the newer version had 8 options.  It was easy enough to figure out.  The ProperTree.command (python) script worked well.

I was finally able to successfully boot up into the OS X install.  It took me a while to figure out my problems.  Probably the biggest issue I had was that I needed to adjust some Bios settings.  Here is a list that I followed.  I couldn’t find all of these settings in my Bios, but I did set the majority of them.

Disable
Fast Boot
VT-d (can be enabled if you set DisableIoMapper to Yes/TRUE)
CSM
Intel SGX
Intel Platform Trust
Enable
VT-x
Above 4G decoding
Hyper-Threading
Execute Disable Bit
EHCI/XHCI Hand-off
OS type. (Windows 10 Features Other)

When I finished, the files in my OpenCore USB boot looked like this:

After I booted up into the installer, I had to format my NVMe drive.  Since I was installing OS X 11.15 on it, I was forced to use  APFS (I choose Case Sensitive).  Following the steps in the video, I moved the EFI folder on my USB boot to my NVMe drive.history.

There are two ways you can move the EFI folder on your USB boot drive to your new drive.
1. get and use the MountEFI script that is mentioned in the video:
$ chmod +x MountEFI.command
$ ./MountEFI.command
Follow the steps in the video for using the MountEFI script.
2. Or you can use these commands in the terminal:
$ diskutil list
$ sudo mkdir /Volumes/EFI
$ sudo mount – t msdos /dev/disk0s1 /Volumes/EFI
$ cp ./OPENCORE/EFI /Volumes/EFI

While I wanted to use Migration Assistance to move my files from my original Hackintosh to my new Hackintosh, I couldn’t use it.  The reason is that my original drive is not APFS while the new drive is.  So I am not allowed to migrate the files.  Trying out EaseUS ToDo Back for the Mac.  I made a backup of a number of folders on my original Hackintosh.  I restored those backed up folders to my new Hackintosh one folder at a time, starting with the Applications folder.  Then I did the rest that I had backed up.  My Thunderbird application started up and all of my mail was there.  Firefox had all of my settings and so did the majority of the other applications.  There were a number of applications that I had to update in order for them to run under OS X 10.15.

The last thing I needed to do was to check on the Fenvi FV-T919 wifi/bluetooth card to see if it was working properly.  I already knew that the wifi was working, but I hadn’t check on its bluetooth capability.  Well bluetooth wasn’t working.  I was sure that I  plugged in the cable from the Fenvi to the onboard usb so the BT should work.  Well I looked in the computer through its glass side panel and it seemed that I did not plug in the cable.  🙁  After shutting down the computer, I removed the side cover so I could plug in the cable.  I reinstalled the side cover and started the computer up.  The Bluetooth was working finally.  The FV-T919 works in my hackintosh without needing any drivers as promised.

Next thing on my list is to overclock the CPU.  I will save that for another post.