today i will be upgrading this 2009 mac pro i've made videos for the past few years
and this machine has helped me create all of those videos from creating thumbnails
in photoshop to editing video in final cut pro this machine has done a wonderful job
i originally received this from a university that was getting rid of it and when i initially
received it it was in its base configuration that is mostly the same today now while this machine
has served me very admirably it's in need of some upgrades and while i could go out and replace
this with something newer i don't really have the budget to do that so we're just going to upgrade
this computer and see how far we can take it when i originally received this computer it was in its
base configuration now this is the lower tier model that would have been released in 2009
it has a single processor that is a quad core intel xeon running at 2.66 gigahertz
it originally came with three gigabytes of ram it originally came with a nvidia gt 120 graphics
card and it also had a 640 gigabyte standard hard drive now since i originally received it
i've done a couple of uh very simple upgrades i've upgraded the ram to 18 gigabytes just
because it's things that i had laying around the only other thing that i did was i replaced the
hard drive with a 250 gigabyte samsung ssd which has really improved the performance of the machine
so today we're going to upgrade the processor the ram and the graphics card now the processors in
these machines are really limited to quad core in the 2009 models however if you hack the firmware
like i did the machine will identify as a 2010 mac pro and you can run a slew of other processors
but the processor that i went with is this six core intel xeon that runs at 3.33 gigahertz
they go for about 40 on ebay and they perform pretty well now 18 gigabytes of ram is already
plenty for a computer but we're going to be upgrading it to 20 gigabytes just because i
have these two two gigabyte modules laying around uh which will equate to 20 gigabytes
total for this computer while i'd much rather put a much faster video card in this computer
i had this little gtx 680 laying around from another computer that i had so i just decided
uh because it is compatible with mac os high sierra that i would just go ahead and use it in
this computer it's a two gigabyte card it's pretty old but it'll be a huge improvement over the gt
120s that are in there right now and of course replacing the processor means you're going to
need some thermal compound paste to put on the processor this goes in between the heatsink
and the processor now upgrading these computers is incredibly easy you just flip a switch like
you saw there and the cover comes off now we're going to start with upgrading the processor which
is in that bottom compartment there with the ram to get at the processor there is um these little
levers that you have to bring out and then once you bring those out you'll be able to
pull this whole tray forward now the processors sit on a separate tray and that whole tray needs
to be removed from the computer as you're going to see here it still amazes me just how well crafted
these computers are and just how strong they are so as you can see the processor tray just
kind of comes right out from the rest of the computer all right so once you have the tray
pulled out you're going to want to set the rest of the computer aside and begin to loosen the allen
screws which are spring-loaded that hold the heat sink to the processor that's this big gray tower
now there are five of these like i said they're spring loaded so you don't have to worry about
them coming out or anything but it does take a little bit of time to get them all loosened and to
remove the heat sink just a little side note here you are going to need an extra long allen wrench
to get these screws out because of the heat sinks depth so you're going to need to purchase
a longer allen wrench and once all of the screws are removed you can carefully lift the heat sink
now it might give a little bit of resistance because there is a connector
that connects the fan in the heat sink up to the logic board so you can just remove the heat sink
this would be a good time to go ahead and clean any built up dust that is in the computer
um as you can see we're going to take the camera in here you can see all the dust that's kind of
built up on the board you're just going to want to remove that now and something i've found is that a
paint brush is very effective at removing all of the dust so now we're going to want to remove the
old processor you just push down on this little retention arm this little trapdoor comes up and
you can actually remove the old processor from the socket and just as the old processor was
removed the new one can just be set in place now you're going to want to make sure that the top of
the processor is very clean so just taking some rubbing alcohol and a q-tip you're going to make
sure that's clean likewise you're going to want to take the heat sink and clean the copper pad on the
bottom you can use the same method that you use to clean the top of the processor you're just going
to remove all the old thermal paste that's kind of built up there so that we can apply some new
thermal paste using the new thermal paste just put like a p size dot of it on top of the processor
and then you can go ahead and take the heatsink place it on top and begin to tighten the screws
this will kind of spread the thermal paste over top of the processor and you should be good to go
with the thermal paste once you have all of the screws tightened you're good to go with the
processor and we're going to move on to the ram this is by far the easiest thing to upgrade now
as you can see i have two eight gigabyte modules in the first two channels there so we're just
gonna remove these other two one gigabyte modules and replace them with these two gigabyte modules
they just kind of clip in place you push them down and you're good to go it's like installing
you know a game cartridge it's very easy once you have your ram installed it's very easy to
put the processor tray just back the way that it came you just kind of slide it in
into where the processor tray goes and then you push the two little levers and it'll just snap
right back in place the next thing we're going to do is upgrade the video card now something
you have to keep in mind is if you're not using an official amd apple supported video card you're
going to need to use some drivers to get the graphics card to work these things are called
the nvidia web drivers you're going to need to install these before you upgrade the video card
and once you have these installed they will allow you to run nvidia graphics cards from
the 900 series and older in this case i'm going to be putting a gtx 680 in here so these are going
to work with the web drivers once you have that taken care of it's time to remove your old cards
the fan has a little button on it that you're going to push and you're going to
want to slide it out as you saw right there once you have the fan slid out which unlocks
the cards you're going to want to undo these little thumb screws that hold in this plate
this little plate comes off and then you can then kind of grab onto the card and pull it out
and you can remove your old cards once you get your old cards removed you're just going
to snap in the mini 6 pin cords to the mini 6 pin connectors on the board before you install
your card you might need to remove a little back plate that allows it to rest in place
you can also reposition this back plate if you need to fill an empty hole left over from say an
old card and then in order to install the card you just line it up on the board and
slide it in it's pretty easy once you have the graphics card slid in you're going to want to hook
up these power cords to the header on the card and then obviously slide the fan lock back in and
screw back in that thumb plate and with that our upgrades are complete time to see how we did
yes now that it's working um i figured i'd run some tests before and after the
upgrades to see how my performance increase was in geekbench before the upgrades the score for
the processor was 492 for the single core score and the multi-core score was 1837.
after the upgrades my single core score went up significantly to 660 and my multi-score pretty
much doubled to 3 which is a pretty significant increase for a graphics test i decided to run
unigine heaven at the medium preset and this is it exactly how it was on the old graphics
card as you can see it was running at about seven to eight frames per second so pretty choppy and
overall pretty bad quality after the upgrades you can see a pretty significant uh increase in
the frame rate this is at the same preset with the gtx 680 and you can see it's much smoother
uh we were getting frame rates about 50 to 60 which is a just a massive increase so the graphics
performance has really gone up even more than the processing performance overall these upgrades were
well worth the money and to be honest i had a lot of these parts lying around really i only needed
the processor those graphics card cables and the thermal paste the upgrades all together cost you
about sixty dollars and i expect that i will get several more years out of this machine it's crazy
that it's 12 years old and it's still able to edit video edit photo and it still works perfectly fine
now while exporting times are a little longer that's okay and performance in final cut pro is
pretty incredible i'm actually editing this video right now in final cut pro
um i love this computer it didn't owe me anything i got it for free
and yet it's been a wonderful device so thank you for watching and long live the mac pro