If your 2006 Mac Pro has just 1 GB of system memory, upgrade immediately. If you have Office v.X, Office 2004, AppleWorks, etc., it may make good economic sense to stick with Snow Leopard rather and have to replace Office or whatever. If you are running any PowerPC-only software, think long and hard before going beyond OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, the last version of OS X to include Rosetta support for PowerPC apps.

If you want to go beyond OS X 10.7 Lion, the first thing you should do is apply the EFI update mentioned directly above. Be sure you only use a UPS with sine wave output to avoid reducing the life of your Mac Pro. The AC power coming into your home or office is a sine wave, but some UPSes generate a square wave when you are operating from battery power. See Install 64 GB of RAM in Your Mac Pro 1,1 or 2,1. Earlier versions will only boot with 32 GB of less. However, the 2006 Mac Pro will only boot with Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion or newer. It is possible to install 64 GB of memory after installing the firmware update. Oh, and did we mention that the Mac Pro was the first 64-bit Intel Mac? Unfortunately, it also has a 32-bit EFI – but Modernizing the 20 Mac Pro to Go Beyond OS X Lion by Robert Bryant explains how to change the boot.efi file so it can run OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion and later.

The two things unexpectedly not included by default are Bluetooth 2.0 and AirPort Extreme, which are standard on all other Intel Macs.Ī headphone jack, two USB 2.0 ports, a FireWire 400 port, and a FireWire 800 port are located on the front of the Mac Pro for easy access.

And you can upgrade from Apple’s regular wired keyboard and Mighty Mouse to the wireless (Bluetooth) version. If one SuperDrive isn’t enough, put in a second one for US$100 more. Or choose an ATI Radeon X1900 XT or Nvidia’s top-end Quadro FX 4500. According to Greg Hrutkay of Hrutkay Mods ( see warning video), it breaks boot.efi on the 20 Mac Pros that have been thus updated.įor graphics, Nvidia GeForce 7300 GT is the default, and you can add one, two, or three more.

WARNING: If you have updated boot.efi on a MacPro1,1 or MacPro2,1 so you can run Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan, DO NOT INSTALL SECURITY UPDATE 2018-001 or later. 160, 250, or 500 GB in drive bay one, and optionally 500 GB in bays 2-4. The buyer could choose as little as 1 GB of RAM or as much as 16 GB.

Apple introduced the Mac Pro as a fully customizable quad-core computer in 2006 and updated it to eight cores in April 2007.

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