Hack Pro Mod

[spanky]

I managed to find an old 90mm fan in an old PSU after taking it apart and with a bit of fiddling about I got it to go. I've got the megahalems in now. The fan shroud needed some more modifications to get them to fit and I will only be able to have one 120mm fan on the Megahalems. Two would require losing one of the shroud's screw holes, which I don't really want to do. It's a bit noisy at the moment since I'm running the 90mm at full pelt but everything should be ready for the fans and new hard drive tomorrow now. I probably won't have time to do the hard drive until after new year now though since I've got to get the house ready for a party tomorrow night.

OSX is now running on 10.6.2 now with everything I've needed to work working so far.

[aquamac]

Good to hear spanky, keep us posted! I think I am playing TAXI service for my son Josh tomorrow night, so no drinking for me. Have a great party!

[blackknight]

Hey Spanky, here's a link to how I got the Apple fans working and even a way to adjust their speed.

aquamac.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=hack1&action=display&thread=784&page=2#5426

[spanky]

Hey guys, hope you had a great New Year!

I managed to get my new HDD and the fans set up yesterday morning and have just spent the last few hours tonight playing around with a bit of overclocking.

I'm pretty much there now with my mod for the time being now. As I mentioned before, I'm going to have to leave the rear panel work for a while. I just don't have the time to do anything as fancy as I had originally hoped.

The machine is pretty much fully working. The only issues I have at the moment are:

1. Because of the crampedness in the optical bay, I can't use my optical drive without pulling the chassis out of the case a bit because otherwise the SATA cable for the drive gets mangled (cheap 1m SATA cables). This should be easily fixed early next week though once the 1m long SATA cables with right angled ends get here.
2. The second 4870 is still causing me trouble in OS X. ATI_Init can sometimes get it to shut up after a reboot but then rebooting again makes it loud again. Even when it is quiet, it is nowhere near as quiet as Windows. I'll do some more looking into that soon.
3. My cinema display goes all weird during OS X bootup just after the drivers are initialised but unplugging the DVI connector and reconnecting it fixes it right up. Hopefully I'll be able to find a way to fix this but if not a DVI switcher may do the job.

Performance wise... wow.

Original machine specifications (2006 Mac Pro)
2.66Ghz Dual Dual Core Intel Xeon (Woodcrest 5150)
6GB 667Mhz DDR2 ECC RAM (Dual Channel)
2 x ATI Radeon 4870 1GB XFX cards (flashed - also limited to 8xPCIe1.1)
16x Superdrive
750GB System and User data drive
500GB Backup data drive
3x1.5TB Data drives
Bluetooth + Airport Extreme

New Hack Pro machine specifications
2.66GHz Quad Core Intel Core i7 (920 D0) (Currently at 4GHz)
12GB 1600MHz DDR3 RAM (Tripple Channel) (Currently only at 1528MHz)
2 x ATI Radeon 4870 1GB XFX cards (now using 16xPCIe2.0)
8x LG Bluray Reader/DVD Writer (meant to order the BD-writer, whoops)
256GB Crucial M225 SSD System drive
500GB User data drive
750GB Backup data drive
3x1.5TB Data drives
Belkin Bluetooth

So I've lost ECC RAM and Airport Extreme. I can cope with losing ECC and I have no need for wireless anymore since the computer is now connected to a gigabit ethernet.

Performance Comparison

XBench:
Mac Pro - 156.06 link
Hack Pro - 389.16 (~2.5x) link

Pretty good I reckon!! Then there's the real reason for upgrading... well the reason I justified doing this. I have to program and run n-body simulations for work. The code I'm using at the moment isn't multithreaded, however, this doesn't matter since I tend to run multiple instances of it with different initial conditions at once. Before building the Hack Pro, I created a test simulation and ran three test scenarios. One with just one instance running, one with four instances running and one with eight instances running. Each test has two times, the first is the actual n-body run and the second iss the data sorting program that turns the binary data into something useful. For the 4 and 8 instance runs these timings are averages.

Test 1 (One instance)
Mac Pro: 37.0s / 21.7s
Hack Pro: 17.2s / 12.9s (2.2x / 1.7x)

Test 2 (Four instances)
Mac Pro: 38.8s / 26.1s
Hack Pro: 18.2s / 18.0s (2.1x / 1.5x)

Test 3 (Eight instances)
Mac Pro: 78.5s / 53.8s
Hack Pro: 25.4s / 23.9s (3.1x / 2.3x)

Wow. So I've got a speedup of between 2.2 and 3.1 for the actual work I do and I can actually do double the work using eight instances in 2/3rds the time it took me with four instances before.

Total upgrade costs came to around £1500 although I should be able to recoup at least about £600 by selling off the old internal components, maybe more. Comparatively, the closest Mac Pro that Apple sells to this performance wise is the 3.33Ghz Quad Core which comes in at £2920.99 so I reckon I've got a pretty decent deal!!

I don't have time to sort through all of my photos now but here's a before and after shot:

Before | After

Cheers guys for all your help so far, it's really appreciated!!!

[aquamac]

Hi Spanky,

Your mod is looking awesome! Those results show just how much power is available from a hackie. I am sure in time that you can sort out some of the niggles you currently have. There is also still huge potential in the future to improve performance with SSD hard drive or raid. With your 2 ATI cards how are they actually showing up in system profiler. When they are quieter, are they both showing up with QE & CI or if you were to connect a second monitor would they both work?

[blackknight]

Way to go Spanky!!

Just a suggestion: you should check netkas's PC_EFIv10.5 as it has a built-in GraphicsEnabler that works great and is usually updated whereas ATY_Init isn't anymore. If you're already using Chameleon v2 RC2 or higher, it's just a simple replacement of the boot file on the root of your boot drive. Then just use the following in your Boot.plist:

<key>GraphicsEnabler</key>
<string>y</string>

It should work great with multiple cards.

Looking good man!

[spanky]

Cheers guys!

I've managed to fix the need to unplug the display every time on boot by adding:

<key>Graphics Mode</key>
<string>2560x1600x32</string>

to the the com.apple.boot.plist file.

I'm still having issues with the fan speeds though. When the second 4870 is quieter, it still doesn't show up in system profiler. I've got Chameleon v2 RC4 running, PC_EFIv10.5 and I've tried Netkas's universal injector which replaced ATI_init. No joy yet.

On the overclocking side, I had it up at 4.2GHz with 3.25 Vcore in the BIOS running Prime95 for about fourty five minutes earlier before it crashed so hopefully a slight boost in Vcore will get it stable. I really don't know what kind of Vcores are temperatures are ok or not though. I've seen everything from 1.2V at 4.2GHz to 1.5V online. Aqua, what settings are you using?

[aquamac]

Hi Spanky,

At 4.2 I have not increased anything, but I have Intel Core i7 950 3.07 set with a FSB of 175 and a 24x Multiplyer. It works all day at this but if I change the FSB to 180 I get a crash as OSX hits the blue screen. Having said that the computer posts fine so I am sure with a bit of fine tuning I could hit 4.32 or even 4.44 with FSB @ 185. I am thinking you may have Core i7 920?

[spanky]

Yeah, I've got a 920. Figured I'd save the money on the processor and use it to buy the SSD. I'm running at 4.2 now and it seems stable enough. I haven't done a long prime test yet though since I've been trying to get the graphics cards sorted.

[spanky]

Any ideas on how to change the Model Name and Model Identifiers in the System Profiler? My machine's coming up as a Mac Mini and its icon on the network is also a Mac Mini.

[blackknight]

Use SMBIOS.plist with Chameleon. Just modify it and put it in your Extra folder. There are lots of keys in there that you can use. If you don't already have an SMBIOS.plist to start with, let me know and I'll send you one.

Also, about your 4870, I know that lots of people were having trouble with the 10.6.2 drivers and 48x0 series, including my 4870x2. I used netkas's 10.6.1 drivers and they work great. The other option is to download the 10.6.2 combo update and manually install all ATI drivers from it using Pacifist after manually deleting the current drivers. I had this problem with my 4550. The 4550 is actually fully supported in 10.6.2 without any changes other than adding it's deviceID to ATIRadeonX2000.kext, but when I did a clean install of SL and did the 10.6.2 update without first deleting the ATI drivers, I just wouldn't work. It might be worth a try.

[spanky]

Cool, I'll try deleting the ATI drivers and if that doesn't work then I'll try the 10.6.1 drivers (are these the ones you mean: netkas.org/?p=212?). How do I remove the ATI drivers though, do I just remove all ATI* and natit* or something? Thanks to your suggestion of SMBIOS.plist, I've found a guide by prasys (http://prasys.co.cc/2009/09/guidecreating-your-own-smbios-plist/) that I'll have a read through when I'm in OS X again. I'm just doing a Prime95 test in Windows. Fifteen minutes more and I'll at least be prime stable at 4.2GHz for an hour.

[blackknight]

Those are the 10.6.1 drivers I was referring to. As for deleting the ATI drivers, open terminal and type what's in quotes:
"rm -rf /System/Library/Extensions/ATI*"
Then use Pacifist to add the new ones. You'll need Pacifist 2.6.3 as it works with Snow Leopard.

[aquamac]

Good advice Blackknight,

Here is my SMBios plist:
rapidshare.com/files/329674790/smbios.plist.zip

Just put in your extra folder, it is set for 4.2GHz already.

[spanky]

Cheers Blacknight. I've now tried all those things and still nothing works. No matter what I do, I can't get the second card to show up in the PCI devices list. I think I'm just going to have to live with it for now. If the fans are spinning when I boot up then a reboot will quieten them. Still not to Windows levels but liveable with. I just really hope 10.6.3 will bring 5xxx series support or new Mac Pros are announced shortly with 5xxx series cards. I'd really like to upgrade to a 5970.

Cheers for the smbios aqua, I'll give it a try when rapidshare lets me download it.

Prime95 was stable for 8 hours last night before the system eventually crashed so I'm definitely getting there with 4.2GHz. Maybe one little extra voltage nudge will seal the deal.