#MAC PRO 2012 GRAPHICS CARD INSTALL#
#MAC PRO 2012 GRAPHICS CARD FULL#

Upgrading to Mojave also upgrades the firmware on your machine to its final version, which adds the ability to boot from an NVMe SSD via a PCIe NVMe adapter or card.

#MAC PRO 2012 GRAPHICS CARD INSTALL#

If you install a Metal supported GPU, you will be able to natively upgrade to macOS Mojave. The third upgrade in terms of difficulty of installation is probably the GPU, but this is also arguably the most important part to upgrade. You should still feel a substantial speed boost though.

#MAC PRO 2012 GRAPHICS CARD FULL#

You won't be able to reach the full rated speed of the SSD though because your Mac Pro has SATA 3Gbps ports while the rest of the world has moved onto SATA 6Gbps and NVMe. Any new SATA SSD will work, and will make the system feel much faster.

If you are using the stock hard drive disk from Apple you need to switch to at least a SATA SSD. The second easiest upgrade has to be the hard drive. I suggest getting three 16GB DDR3 ECC UDIMMs. For maximum performance you will want to stick with three sticks of RAM because the CPUs for this generation all have triple channel memory controllers. Since you have a quad core, that means your CPU tray only has a single CPU socket and you only have four memory slots. TLDR get a 3x 16GB DDR3-1333 ECC UDIMM ram kit like this one, any SATA SSD, any two slot thick RX 580, and the Intel Xeon W3690.

using the machine as a VM host for gaming workloads as the Intel 5520 chipset has a hardware defect and can't do interrupt remapping which is necessary for PCI passthrough.

Thunderbolt cards (these are a hassle to set up on the OS side and half the chip flashers on ebay/amazon will fry your chip).

a new DVD drive - at that age, many of these have simply outright failed.

Don't go for top-of-the-line GPU models either, you're stuck with PCI Express 3.0 on the old rigs and the power supply is limited (300W if you use this cable). You absolutely want an AMD GPU as you can count the number of NVIDIA cards with macOS support on one hand. Shitcoin miners and covid disruptions have completely messed up everything.

likely a better GPU but I'd hold out on that until supply chains normalize a bit.

a SSD (preferably using an adapter card for a M.2 for better performance).

more RAM (IIRC up to 32GB are supported).

Mac pro 2012 graphics card