The Mac Pro 2006 - 2012 represents a high water mark Apple, an era unburdened by the preoccupation of iOS and the trappings of planned obsolescence or it's self-indulgence of $1000 monitor stands or $10,000 smart watches. This guide's intro has changed multiple times over years as the landscape has radically altered for the Mac and after four years my perspective has changed. It has been continuously updated for over four years and will continue to be updated as long as there is a community to make new discoveries. This is less a how-to guide/manual than it is a roadmap to primary sources by other brilliant people, written to be accessible to both new and advanced users. The information is out there but knowing what is possible, what questions to ask, and where to find it isn't nearly as easy. The largest/most-complete guide to all possible classic Mac Pro upgrades covering OS, Firmware, GPU, CPU, Storage, USB and Network upgrades.

Collected Articles on classic Mac Pro and the 2019 Mac Pro.

Upgrading from a single CPU to dual CPU on a 2009 - 2012.

Enabling Apple Watch Auto Unlock with the Mac Pro.

Update Recovery Partition on Unsupported Macs.

Fan / Heat Sink / other case part Replacement, Liquid Cooling.

3D Printed Replacement Hard Drive Trays / 2.5-inch Adapters.

Recommended Places to go for Monitor Recommendations.

Apple Thunderbolt 27-Inch Cinema Display (and the LED 27-inch Display).

Control Brightness on a 3rd Party Display.

Why you can go HDMI to DisplayPort but not the inverse.

Dual-Link DVI Displays & Modern GPUs (and the 30-inch Cinema Display).

Summary: Getting the most out of your SSD.

Making PCIe drives appear as internal Drives.

Can I use a card that isn't listed that hosts multiple NVMe drives?.

Installing a 2.5x height GPU (such as a Radeon 590x).

I want a GPU that has a boot screen and is Metal (Mojave 10.14+) compatible.

Radeon Navi 21 GPUs (Radeon 6800 - 6900 XT).

OEM EFI Bootable Cards / Aftermarket EFI Bootable.

Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) vulnerabilities.

Instruction Sets, SSE 4.2, VT-x/EPT, AVX/AVX2.

Running Apps from unidentified developers.

OpenCore: Codec acceleration, boot selection, and unpatched OS updates.

Upgrading to Catalina: OpenCore vs DosDude1.

Updating Firmware Strategies for Mac Pro 5,1s.

Fast Resource Loading API / DirectStorage API.

3.0 vs 4.0 and its impact on GPU performance

The Cheese Grater's last stand & Big Sur.

This guide is a living document, it was last updated: 10/11/22

Broadcom bcm43xx driver mac os x