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Feb 07, 2018
The Mac Pro Upgrade for the Most Utility and the Best Price
0 of 1 found this helpful The purpose of this purchase was to upgrade from a mac pro 1,1 audio workstation to a mac pro system that could be upgraded to the latest OS. Dropbox, Chrome, and several browser extensions had dropped support for OS 10.7 necessitating the hardware upgrade. Upgrading to a 2010 mac pro 5,1 was the cheapest, quickest and most effective step I could take to remain the mac ecosystem.
Consider I spent $476 on this upgrade. Compare that to the price of upgrading to a better mac pro (2010 higher processor count/speed, 2012 version, etc..) or the time it would take to purchase, assemble and configure a comparable hackintosh. I'm not sure I could do better quicker for the same or less money.
To prepare for the upgrade, all i had to do was purchase a couple DVI to mini display adapters and a firewire 400 to 800 cable. I deauthorized some software from my old system, and that was it. Once that was done, I simply transferred my OS 10.7 hard drives from the 1,1 drive sleds into the 5,1 drive sleds and slapped them in, and performed the long OS upgrade. I reauthorized the software now in its "new" tower, and it worked perfectly. There is no discernable improvement in performance, but that wasn't the point.
I would recommend this procedure for anyone who wants to upgrade an older than 5,1 mac tower quickly and cheaply. 2010 Mac PRo 5,1s are currently the sweet spot for balancing price and future utility. Just make sure your peripherals can still interface as you want them to and you manage your software authorizations.