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The cMac Pro (Classic Mac Pro) remains as the high water mark of Apple professional computers, easily besting even the G3/G4 era computers which made for very upgradable CPUs, GPUs, and RAM (thanks to the famed folding door design and CPU daughter cards). Regardless of what the new Mac Pro looks like, we're nearly at the end of the road for the classic Mac Pro. Apple officially dropped the 1,1 - 3,1 Mac Pro support, although (some) of the Mac Pros can be hacked to run current OSes. Thunderbolt PCIe chassis finally (sorta) officially support external GPUs making the Mac Pro a little less necessary. The iMac Pro single-core performance is double that of a Mac Pro 5,1 even with a Xeon X5690. This level of performance is bound to trickle down in the next few years to more modest Mac configurations. If the Mac Mini ever received an update to an LGA-1151 let alone an LGA 2066 and ThunderBolt 3, it'd challenge the Mac Pro 5.1. Edit: there's now an updated Mac Mini and despite the fixed CPU, its an improvement.

SIP - System integrity protection, a feature of later Mac OS introduced in OS X El Capitan, that walls off portions of low-level features of Mac OS to protect it from malware. Prior, any application with root-level access could read/edit/modify system files. However, sometimes, when performing certain hacks, it requires disabling during installation and then re-enabled. There are legitimate reasons why users may want to leave it disabled. See Disable System integrity protection for instructions. See About System Integrity Protection on your Mac on Apple.com for more details.

The Mac Pro line has had a history of Firmware updates. Depending on the model, there's quite a wide gamut of potential upgrades or hacks for your Mac Pro. The Mac Pro Firmware upgrades are now distributed as part of Mac OS and can only be performed when upgrading the operating system.

The Mac Pro 1,1 flash allows for later CPU models to be used. Currently, there is a firmware hack to allow for Mac Pro flashing script (github.com) to boot alt OSes. Also, there's research being done on firmware hack to enable Harpertown CPU support.

Clever hardware hackers discovered how to enable bootable NVMe on Mac Pro. It requires making a custom firmware using ROMtool and EXEinject on the 3.1. Today, this path is no longer necessary for NVMe support as OpenCore can inject the proper drivers for NVMe support.. Note: this hack was initially performed on Mac Pro 5,1s but is unnecessary as Apple has released NVMe compatible bootROMs for them. Below is a collection of links related to the bootROM procedure. Below is a collection of links related to the bootROM procedure. However, this hack falls into adventure territory. See the Mac Pro 3,1 NVMe Drive Natively Booting post below. It's highly recommended to stay with AHCI SSDs with the Mac Pro 3,1s.

The Mac Pros can run much later OSes than officially supported, although there are caveats. Installing unsupported OSes can be done easily using scripts or using OpenCore. These scripts have been named after the authors who created them. Pike's Script is exclusively for the 1,1/2,1. DosDude1's scripts cover a brevity of Macs, including the Mac Pro 3,1/4,1/5,1. All but the 1,1/2,1s can run modern iterations of macOS using Dosdude1's hacks, which can be found at his website dosdude1.com. Below is a list of the official vs. unofficial supported OSes.

To understand OpenCore, it's important have a grasp of the history of hacking macOS to run on unsupported hardware. Prior to boot loaders, the vector to run the latest macOS were scripts that generally modified the OS itself so it'd pass hardware checks to install and boot and often included fixes. The most popular and prominent were the DOSDUDE1 installers.

To give context to the battles OpenCore has had, Big Sur 11.3+ presented problems as boots would often fail. Eventually, a failed boot would result in a corrupted boot volume documented by users on MacRumors, which resulted in the experimental LateBloom OpenCore hack and eventually SurPlus.

Upgrading to Catalina may not be in everyone's interest, as 32-bit applications are no longer supported. No Mac Pro (sans the 2019 xMP) can run sidecar, although I wouldn't be surprised if enterprising hackers find a workaround.

Any OS beyond Big Sur 11.2.3 is susceptible to a serious bug, a PCIe race condition. This particular glitch caused the Mac Pro to fail to boot frequently and often, eventually, after repeated crashes resulting in a boot drive corrupting crash. As a stopgap, a very experimental workaround known as LateBloom, a hack to inject delays into the boot process to allow for the callbacks (that cause the crash) to respond. Now, the exact issue was identified, and SurPlus is included in h9826790 (aka Martin)'s OpenCore bundle. For users who've already installed OpenCore, Mac Sound Solutions has a great YouTube video demonstrating the process to upgrade to Big Sur 11.6, Jessie's Flying - macOS on unsupported Macs also some interesting OpenCore content as well.

We're not done yet. Finally, GPUs can require more power than the factory Mac Pro PCIe power taps. The Mac Pro's forward-thinking design tries to eliminate cable mess by taking the uncommon design of having passthrough PCIe power taps on the motherboard. On a standard PC, these cables would be linked directly to the PSU. The Mac Pro's 980 watt PSU is up to the task of very large GPUs, but it requires bypassing the motherboard power taps. Clever hackers have created solutions like Mac Pro Pixlas Mod (also covered in the Other mods section of this guide) or using external PSUs. Users have successfully powered two GeForce 1080 TIs using the Pixlas mod and (possibly upgraded) internal PSU. GPUs that require additional power, for example, are the GeForce 1080 Ti, AMD Vega 64, AMD Vega FE, Radeon VII, and Radeon 5700 XT.

Radeon R7 260 and R9 390 can be used in macOS but require Hackintosh libraries to work. I recommend looking at one of the many other options unless one is comfortable researching hackintosh forums and installing custom kexts and the possibility of the hardware not working.

** Dumped MacVidCards ROMs for these cards are floating around on the internet, making these particular cards flashable by users, but the modified ROMs only exist due to MVC putting in the effort to hack together Mac EFI compatible ROMs. MVC has yet to give out its modified ROMs for free.

Custom Flashed Cards: Depending on how much time you've spent researching upgrades, you may have read about the website/business, MacVidCards. MacVidCards sells custom flashed EFI NVidia and AMD cards. Initially, when I wrote this section, I hesitated to link directly to their site as several FaceBook (requires membership to MacProUpgrade) / MacRumors posts have been lukewarm. I worried readers might think I was endorsing a service they may not like. The cards do work, but the turn-around times are long, communication infrequent (although since writing that, MacVidcards now boasts improved communication and turn arounds). Is that true? I don't know, FaceBook (requires membership to MacProUpgrade) really runs the gamut. The prices are high, but they are legitimate, with many testimonials floating around message boards from longtime members that they do indeed work as promised. Just be prepared to wait and any issues to be sorted out in a time frame that may not be acceptable. MacVidCards claims to have written custom EFI ROMs for both NVidia and now AMD cards. Rather than explain how said hack was done (Unlike previous releases TonyMacX86 / MacRumors / Netkas), MacVidCards chooses to be a monopoly. (Note: Dave of MacVidCards notes he did contribute to previous AMD card hacks and did not get paid for his work on this). I'd rather not weigh too much on the ethics of it, but software developers do deserve compensation, and depending on the actual work performed on the EFI ROM, it may very well be truly custom. As of writing this, they are the only game in town when it comes to making the custom GPU cards Mac EFI compatible.

There isn't a "best card" for any computer, instead of how much money you're willing to spend and if the money could be better spent elsewhere. This is an arbitrary metric as even a 3,1 Mac Pro will see significant gains in GPU tasks, with AMD Radeon VII over lesser cards (for example, an AMD Radeon 580). Consider this: A Radeon VII sells for many times more than a Mac Pro 3,1 itself. Commonly, forums and groups will mention "pairs well" or "bottleneck" (see PCIe And You (PCIe overview) PCIe 2.0 vs. 3.0), but any high-end GPU will "pair well," the question is more about where a user can see more performance gains. I'd argue buying a 4,1 Mac Pro and mid-range GPU would be better money spent over investing deeper into a Mac Pro 3,1. It'd feel faster for many day-to-day experiences and is very upgradable, and requires fewer hacks to run later OSes, but that's just my personal opinion.

This seems to be a burning question that comes a lot in Mac Pro communities, and it can be answered very easily answered with the recently flashable the 6900 XT. Previously before the hacked ROM to enable Navi 21 GPUs, by the benchmarks, the Radeon VII was hands down the most powerful consumer GPU available for macOS. The best place to check GPU performance for macOS is the Geekbench Metal Benchmarks, which is far from perfect.

Shortly after, MacRumors Forum members started testing the Gigabyte GC-TITAN RIDGE and getting promising results. Afterward, a member of Mac Pro Upgrade and MacRumors posted a screenshot of ThunderBolt working on a cMac Pro using a digital audio interface and posted two YouTube videos Part 1 and Part 2, demoing his setup using Windows 10. Months passed, as users toyed with boot methods and firmware versions until unexpectedly, on hackintosh-forum.de (German Hackintosh forum), a user claimed success on a modified firmware with some info on the vector. Later, the moderator, DMS2, posted custom firmware on MacRumors despite some members being somewhat less-that-polite. Since then, the community has moved to using OpenCore to unlock more functionality like hot-swapping and Thunderbolt displays, this guide (posted by a GitHub user) is an excellent resource. 2b1af7f3a8

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