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Best For 2009 Book Pro Update The 2009
Best For 2009 Book Pro Mac Pro Showed

Best For 2009 Book Pro Mac Pro Showed

Check that everything works and then boot info safe mode and enable SIP: csrutil enable After doing these steps my Mac Pro showed as a MacPro 5,1 model, which meant it could now support better CPUs such as the 6-core Westmere CPUs.

Ive owned this Mac longer than any other prior Mac which might explain why Apple does not make Macs that are easily upgradable any longer; they get fewer sales of new hardware.

As cool as the (not-so-new) 2013 Mac Pro is, it is still too expensive and not upgradable enough for my purposes.

As a software developer, I prefer to have lots of storage and do not need dual video cards.

So Im sticking with my classic Mac Pro (or Mac Pro tower) for the time being.

About My 2009 Mac Pro My Mac Pro is a single-CPU, quad-core 2.93Ghz model (Intel Xeon W3540) with the ATI Radeon HD 4870 video card.

Over the years Ive upgraded it with several SSDs and to 16GB RAM.

Plus I have other large spinning hard drives for archival purposes in the standard drive bays.

Overall, there is space for four 3.5 (or 2.5 drives with adapters) in the drive bays.

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Add the 2nd optical drive slot, plus 3 empty PCI card slots and this Mac Pro can hold a total of 8 drives, all of which are inside the case As awesome as the storage management is, this thing is not nearly as fast as the latest Mac Pro or even the latest iMacs.

USB 3 can easily be solved with a 60 PCI card to add four superspeed ports.

I dont have a big need for USB3 just yet since I can keep so many drives inside the Mac Pro, but its nice to know this low-cost option is available.

There is nothing that can be done about Thunderbolt, however.

CPU Upgrade Research I had recalled reading in the past that the Mac Pro CPU might also be upgradeable, but I had never looked into it before.

It didnt take much searching to find out that even a CPU upgrade is pretty easy to do It is also possible to upgrade my single-CPU system to a dual-CPU configuration, but that requires an all-new daughter board, which greatly increased the cost enough to make it impractical.

But updating the single CPU definitely seemed like an option.

After some initial CPU research I had considered getting an Intel Xeon W3580 3.33 Ghz quad-core (Nehalem), which would be about a 14 speed improvement.

These CPUs seemed to be going for about 120 or so, making it a worthwhile upgrade cost.

I was about to purchase the W3580 when I discovered with a little more digging that the 2009 Mac Pro (MacPro 4,1) is essentially the same as the 2010 and 2012 model Mac Pros (MacPro 5,1).

The only difference is those newer models have a newer firmware that supports even better processors and allows for sound over DisplayPort to HDMI (not relevant to me).

Best For 2009 Book Pro Update The 2009

Updating the Firmware More research uncovered that it is actually possible to update the 2009 Mac Pro firmware to the one used by the 20102012 Mac Pros.

Download the firmware update from Apple and open the DMG to mount it in the Finder.

Run the Updater Tool, which recognized the mounted DMG, rebooted and applied the firmware update.

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