MP 7,1 CPU upgrade in 2019 Mac Pro

[strangerthanlight]

can you post the link to your seller, i would be interested in purchasing it!

I got from

Intel Xeon W-3275M 2.5GHz 28Core LGA3647 CPU For Mac Pro 2019/HP Z6 G4 NOT ES/QS | eBay

Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for Intel Xeon W-3275M 2.5GHz 28Core LGA3647 CPU For Mac Pro 2019/HP Z6 G4 NOT ES/QS at the best online prices at eBay! Free shipping for many products!

www.ebay.com

 

[flowrider]

Well, thanks to strangerthanlight I just upgraded my NcMP from 8 core to 16 core. I figured that was the sweet spot between raw speed and core count.

Anyway, for me it was a real bear? The four T10 screws (two for the cover and two for the CPU cooler top were installed much too light. The tool I had was in a plastic handle with a hex top. I couldn't loosen them by hand so I tried a socket and the shaft spun inside the handle. I then went to Lowe's and got another T10 in a socket. Wouldn't budge, even when I used an adapter with a ½" breaker bar?

So, I drilled all four of those darn screws out. When I finished I replaced those screws with self tapping phillips screws. So all ended on a positive note. It took me three hours! Temps are all good?

Lou

 

[strangerthanlight]

Well, thanks to strangerthanlight I just upgraded my NcMP from 8 core to 16 core. I figured that was the sweet spot between raw speed and core count.

Anyway, for me it was a real bear? The four T10 screws (two for the cover and two for the CPU cooler top were installed much too light. The tool I had was in a plastic handle with a hex top. I couldn't loosen them by hand so I tried a socket and the shaft spun inside the handle. I then went to Lowe's and got another T10 in a socket. Wouldn't budge, even when I used an adapter with a ½" breaker bar?

So, I drilled all four of those darn screws out. When I finished I replaced those screws with self tapping phillips screws. So all anded on a positive note. It took me three hours! Temps are all good?

Lou

these screws are damn tight! feel like it’s intentionally made more difficult by apple

 

[KeesMacPro]

these screws are damn tight! feel like it’s intentionally made more difficult by apple

I suspect these screws are locked with a threadlocker (e.g. Loctite 243) by Apple.
I would remove them with a new/ unworn high quality screwbit and ratchet handle.

 

[flowrider]

Hmm, Yep Probably? But, the thing is, in the tutorials I watched no one mentioned this. All mentioned those screws as nothing special

Lou

 

[KeesMacPro]

Hmm, Yep Probably? But, the thing is, in the tutorials I watched no one mentioned this. All mentioned those screws as nothing special

TBH I (still) dont own a MP7,1 but I've seen that Apple secures the screws that way in many cases.
The trick is to use a screwbit with absolutely no play at all when inserted and maintain a little pressure to avoid wear to the screw and/or the bit while loosening it.
With a ratchet one can use both hands : one for pressure , the other for turning the screw.
Once there's some wear to the screwhead , things get complicated...

 

[cobra521]

Lou,

Sorry to hear about the stuck screws. Mine were tight but not enough to cause me any distress. It does sound as if yours were unusually hard to remove.

It must have been hard to find others to replace the originals!

Are the CPU temps OK?

Tom

 

[rondocap]

Well, thanks to strangerthanlight I just upgraded my NcMP from 8 core to 16 core. I figured that was the sweet spot between raw speed and core count.

Anyway, for me it was a real bear? The four T10 screws (two for the cover and two for the CPU cooler top were installed much too light. The tool I had was in a plastic handle with a hex top. I couldn't loosen them by hand so I tried a socket and the shaft spun inside the handle. I then went to Lowe's and got another T10 in a socket. Wouldn't budge, even when I used an adapter with a ½" breaker bar?

So, I drilled all four of those darn screws out. When I finished I replaced those screws with self tapping phillips screws. So all ended on a positive note. It took me three hours! Temps are all good?

Lou

Wow, that sounds rough. I upgraded on two separate Mac pros, and they both took me under 30 minutes to do. Maybe it was the tool that I used? Screws were tight but fairly easy to loosen, did not have any issues. Thermals also work great afterwards on 28 core

 

[flowrider]

Lou,

It must have been hard to find others to replace the originals!

Are the CPU temps OK?

Tom

I actually used some screws I had been saving - old HD mounting screws. They worked fine for this application.

CPU temps are actually a bit lower than with my 8 core. I applied the Arctic Silver with a CC to spread it evenly throughout the contact surface. The old CPU showed the Typical uneven oval paste pattern.

Lou

 

[rkruk]

Hmm, Yep Probably? But, the thing is, in the tutorials I watched no one mentioned this. All mentioned those screws as nothing special View attachment 1829648

Lou

Right well how about the first time with the "thumb" screws, tuts online said they were easy to use your thumb on them, I had to use a screwdriver as they were super tight as well.

 

[mayuka]

I upgraded the CPU from 12 to 24-core and so far it seems to run fine.

I wondered about cpu updates and the microcode. I could not find any meaningful on the net, so I am asking here. How do I properly check for the microcode version of the cpu? The only thing I could find was looking in the sysctl where an extremely large value is reported (for comparison, my MBP has version 234).

$ sysctl -a | grep microcode
machdep.cpu.microcode_version: 83898626

Any ideas?

 

[cobra521]

Mayuka,

I upgraded from 8 -> 28 cores some time ago using an eBay/China vendor CPU. I ran the microcode query you used (above) and got exactly the same result you have. No idea what that means!

Tom

 

[tsialex]

Mayuka,

I upgraded from 8 -> 28 cores some time ago using an eBay/China vendor CPU. I ran the microcode query you used (above) and got exactly the same result you have. No idea what that means!

Tom

It's the correct microcode, from June 2021. 83898626 is the decimal representation of 0x5003102, Apple is using decimal while most Intel doc uses hexa.


You can read more here:

Intel June 2021 Microcode Update - Red Hat Customer Portal

Description of some vulnerabilities, affected systems and microcode_ctl releases that include microcode blobs that address them, related to Intel IPU 2021.1 update.

access.redhat.com

 

[flowrider]

^^^^Thanks - Just ran it on my 16 core W3245 and got the same results.

Lou

 

[mayuka]

Ah... thanks for clearing this up. Will Apple update it in one of their later updates or do I need to update the microcode myself in the future? (I guess that could be done with one of the RedHat Linux update startup disks intel provides...)

 

[Auggie]

For someone who uses the MP mostly for graphics design and now dabbling with home videos using Resolve and FCP, it doesn't seem to make sense upgrading my 3.5GHz/8-core to a 2.5GHz/24-core with that big 1GHz drop in overall CPU speed. A 3.2GHz/16-core seems to offer me better performance for what I do, but I keep reading other's experience that jumping to that 24-core was leaps and bounds "faster" than their 8- or even 16-core CPU's. I certainly understand that current market prices for used 16- and 24-core CPU's on eBay suggest a 24-core is within a couple hundred dollars over a 16-core so it would seem logical to spend the extra for the 24-core, but that GHz delta seems to suggest the 16-core would be the faster all-arounder.

Am I missing something here, or does that 24-core really makes everything faster, including pedestrian OS X duties?

 

[tsialex]

Ah... thanks for clearing this up. Will Apple update it in one of their later updates or do I need to update the microcode myself in the future? (I guess that could be done with one of the RedHat Linux update startup disks intel provides...)

Microcodes are loaded at POST time from the BootROM. Apple upgrades the microcodes automatically via BootROM upgrades and upgrades are frequent for MP7,1.

This is a non-issue nowadays, most times Apple releases a BootROM upgrade with the microcode updates just days after Intel make it available for end users.

 

[rondocap]

For someone who uses the MP mostly for graphics design and now dabbling with home videos using Resolve and FCP, it doesn't seem to make sense upgrading my 3.5GHz/8-core to a 2.5GHz/24-core with that big 1GHz drop in overall CPU speed. A 3.2GHz/16-core seems to offer me better performance for what I do, but I keep reading other's experience that jumping to that 24-core was leaps and bounds "faster" than their 8- or even 16-core CPU's. I certainly understand that current market prices for used 16- and 24-core CPU's on eBay suggest a 24-core is within a couple hundred dollars over a 16-core so it would seem logical to spend the extra for the 24-core, but that GHz delta seems to suggest the 16-core would be the faster all-arounder.

Am I missing something here, or does that 24-core really makes everything faster, including pedestrian OS X duties?

I had the 8 core, then went to the 24 core, and then the 28 core.

For me definitely worth it, I work with FCP and Resolve, and 8k Red Raw, Pro res too, etc. The 28 cores are heavily used depending on what I am doing - even with powerful GPUs. For the cheaper 2nd hand eBay prices, I thought it was a no brainer. I would be limited by a 16 core, even if it has higher clocks - I benefit more from the 28 cores as they are well utilized in my workflow.

 

[mayuka]

Just my 2 cents...

I upgraded from 12-core to 24-core. The 28-cores cost around 3000 € here while the 24-core go for around 2000 €... The extra charge is simply not worth it for my use cases.

I mostly do image analyses and computational segmentation thingies at the moment which are heavily demanding on CPU and/or GPU. I noticed an increase of speed nearly 2-times when upgraded - BUT only when the RAM is not limiting. I have 192 GB of RAM and what I also noticed is that the amount of RAM needed roughly doubles. Make sure, that you have enough RAM when upgrading, or just upgrade the RAM with your CPU on one go. Next thing for me would be to upgrade RAM. But the prices are over the roof at the moment...

I also noticed that for Photoshop and other image editors. They take a lot of more RAM than before. Calculations in Photoshop are maybe 1,5 times faster than before. With some demanding operations like panorama and subject selection all CPU cores and threads are still utilized but only to about 30%. Same thing as before but the RAM usage goes significantly up.

I am not involved in video tasks so much, so I would rather not comment on that.

To sum up. The Xeons scale extremely well for image editing. Single-core performance is similar as to the 12-core, but I mostly use multi-core. Make sure that you also increase your RAM to be not limited.

Although I find the latest M1 Pro / Max CPUs very interesting. Only 64 GB of RAM are rather limiting for many computationally heavy tasks nowadays. I am looking forward to see how Apple will solve this in the future to go well beyond 128 GB...

 

[Auggie]

Thanks for the CPU upgrade insights. I'm definitly going with at least 16-cores because I have to say, my speed impressions of the 3.5/8-core is not very favorable compared to my 2012 2x3.46 12-core. Many times, whether it's booting or other Finder tasks, it sometimes seems to lag for no discernable reason. And I haven't even begun to start using this machine for its intended tasks (still in the process of migrating my old system along with other some pretty severe setbacks that have occurred).

I definitely appreciate the feedback with Photoshop that showed marked peformance increase between 12- and 24-cores.

I immediately added an additional 64GB to 96 the moment I pulled the machine out of the box, but it sounds like I would probably need to jump way past that for Photoshop. To maximize RAM channel utilization, I will probably add 2x 8GB sticks to bring those total to 6, and another 4x 32GB sticks to bring that total also to 6, for a total of 240GB.

My first step after realizing that the puny stock 256GB "flash" drive wasn't really good for anything for my needs, I've ordered a 4TB kit from Apple (should have just optioned that from the beginning) because adding up the cost of getting aftermarket bootable PCIe cards and 4TB+ NVMe stick(s) would be close to the Apple 4TB kit. And I save a PCIe slot for something else...

Anywho, that M1 Pro and Max demo'd by Apple seems amazing, and I'm anxious to see what the spec's would be for the future M1-incarnation of the Mac Pro, which I will eventually jump to.

 

[LeonPro]

When I purchased the 2019 Mac Pro for video editing in both Adobe and DaVinci applications, I did the research and came to the facts that 16-core is the optimal for this kind of work.

Per Puget Systems research, they determined:

"In addition, Resolve is in many ways a collection of different software packages combined together and some (like Fusion) much prefer a CPU with higher per-core performance than one with a lot of cores."

While Adobe's own technical staff has advised:

"Some of these threads may use a core more than other cores, and right now, an "optimal" number of cores is somewhere around the 8-12 mark."

Once you go past 16-cores, your clock speed is greatly diminishing and right now clock speed and 16-cores is the sweet spot - for this line of work.

If you're doing other work that ACTUALLY supports multi-core processing then good on your apps.

Other people's budget may vary. My intention with the 7,1 purchase is to upgrade to the 8,1 AS Mac Pro when that comes out so I'm not one to change the CPU after making the purchase.

I would concentrate more on GPU upgrade with an MPX module. But then again I'm waiting and seeing if the 8,1 is closer to introduction before I shelve the 7,1.

Also with the 2021 MBP 16 M1 Max having been introduced, I'm replacing the current 2019 MBP 16. So not in a hurry to make upgrades on the now archaic 2019 Mac Pro.

 

[blackquartz]

I use my Mac Pro mostly for 3d modeling and animation, Ive been trying to make my mind about going for a QS 28 cores, since its around $1k and while I know it might be a gamble, has anyone here has any experience with QS xeons processors?

 

[Auggie]

I use my Mac Pro mostly for 3d modeling and animation, Ive been trying to make my mind about going for a QS 28 cores, since its around $1k and while I know it might be a gamble, has anyone here has any experience with QS xeons processors?

Perfect timing as I'm also contemplating a CPU upgrade and those QS prices on eBay sure look tempting...

 

[arche3]

For someone who uses the MP mostly for graphics design and now dabbling with home videos using Resolve and FCP, it doesn't seem to make sense upgrading my 3.5GHz/8-core to a 2.5GHz/24-core with that big 1GHz drop in overall CPU speed. A 3.2GHz/16-core seems to offer me better performance for what I do, but I keep reading other's experience that jumping to that 24-core was leaps and bounds "faster" than their 8- or even 16-core CPU's. I certainly understand that current market prices for used 16- and 24-core CPU's on eBay suggest a 24-core is within a couple hundred dollars over a 16-core so it would seem logical to spend the extra for the 24-core, but that GHz delta seems to suggest the 16-core would be the faster all-arounder.

Am I missing something here, or does that 24-core really makes everything faster, including pedestrian OS X duties?

Most of the video editing software and plugins for roto and vfx work are writing in multicore rendering as the default. It makes everything faster. Even the preview window is faster.

 

[Auggie]

Most of the video editing software and plugins for roto and vfx work are writing in multicore rendering as the default. It makes everything faster. Even the preview window is faster.

One thing I missed before is that all the other CPU's above the stock 3.5/8c have Turbo Boost up to 4.4GHz, which is faster than the 3.5/8c Turbo boost of 4.0Ghz.

So it's possible the higher core-count CPU's truly do feel faster overall, even for mundane Finder ops; and perhaps the difference between a 3.2/16c and 2.7/24c may in fact favor the lower base clock-speed of the 2.7/24c since they both have Turbo Boost up to 4.4GHz, but the higher core-count of the 2.7 may edge out the 3.2...