Mama Mia 3, the encore....
that was one hairy upgrade. LOL just coming down on the adrenaline. I spent way too many hours on this, and at one point thought about completely giving up/giving in and buying a replacement board on ebay. I was also looking for similar model on kijiji/craigslist and thought deeply about giving up another grand to get a replacement.
Sigh - I was so close to the edge there.
So the saga was that the initial install of the 12 core Xeon cpu did not boot. I thought it was a DOA chip, but I disassembled it all down and found I had bent 3 or 4 pins on the motherboard socket. That was all fine and good, used tweezers to bend them back. Reassembled. Nope nothing.
Started panicking. I disassembled the whole thing (this will repeat many many times ...) and tried to put in the original 6 core. Nope not booting. more panic! I just destroyed a mac pro! At least I now knew the 12 core cpu probably wasn't DOA. It was everything else that was broken.
From here on hence I did the re-assembly probably 6-7 times, each time trying a different approach ie different order of screws (believe it or not, this matters when it comes to this design), trying with 1 stick of ram, or no stick of ram, or no graphics cards plugged in, or just plain trying to turn on the psu without any load on it.
NO GO!!!
I had to work today so left it alone, but kept poking at it at lunch break. Near the end of the day, I started realizing that there is ABSOLUTELY NO WAY I had shorted some shit out. I was using my super GEEKY antistatic wrist strap, and my FedEx(TM) branded working mat is totally inert. Where could I have shorted???? I ripped my hair out. That was my lowest point.
Then I ripped the whole thing apart again, this time, wondering if I can just sell the thing for spare parts. But then I slowed the heck down and stopped trying to rebuild the thing. Looked really close at the board, and noticed that one of the surface mount components (I think a resistor) wasn't flush to the board................
I must have knocked it loose? It was on the CPU board right next to the socket.
So of course I did the first thing I could think of. I tried to scratch it like a scab (ok that was stupid), and instead of just loose, it came off entirely!!!! Shitting bricks.
Broke out my crappy soldering iron and my crappy solder. And proceeded to do the sketchiest solder job I've ever done. (re-soldering an XLR connector on a church pulpit on Sunday morning came close, but this was sketchier). I'd disown my own daughter if she showed me this soldering job. I didn't take any pictures cause I wanted to forget what I did. the solders were globous and messy, I burned some of the pcb, and it wasn't pleasant. But at least the resistor didn't come off the board anymore.
So giving this a 20% chance of working, I plugged everything back in, knowing that if that didn't work this last time, I was going to just leave it alone and treat it as an inert art piece.
And when I plugged it in, the lights started turning on (the mac pro has motion activated lights that come on without turning on the computer itself) - so that was like my halleluia moment!!!!!!!
So. I am reminded of a saying by Quark: The bigger the risk, the bigger the thrill!! The bigger the thrill, the bigger the payoff!!
I now have a 12-Core Xeon Mac Pro 2013 with 64G ram. Total financial outlay was 2000CDN for the intial computer (used) + 230 for the cpu = 2230 CAD ~ 1700 USD.
I know I could have gotten a M1 mac for that price, but hey this Mac Pro is a beauty and a piece of art. And now it has my sweat and tears in it too.
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Originally I wanted to try using the Innovation Cooling IC thermal graphite pad on this build, BUT the design of this thing is such that thermal paste is used as a STRUCTURAL element holding up the board.
When I applied the thermal pad, it kept slipping and sliding, and the structural pieces didn't fit (I think the design anticipated a few mm of thermal paste, and they used that in calculating the size of screw standoffs, etc) - with just the thin-non-sticky pad, the pieces don't fit together anymore WTF what a crazy design.
Also, I was totally worried about the conductivity of the pad, because the triangle heat sink is also in direct contact with 2 other gpu cores, and those have associated surface mounted chiplets in close proximaty to the heat sink contact area, so if the graphite pad conducted some stray electrons, it wouldn't just fry the cpu board, it would fry the 2 gpu's as well together WHAT A WTF DESIGN.
So... I used up all my thermal grizzly in my various rebuilds, and 3/4 tube of arctic silver 5. And in the end, it's artic silver at the heart of the 12 core mac pro. I basically just gave up at the end and didn't care about any details of thermal paste, etc - as long as it's on there I didn't give a shit cause I was about to call it a total loss.
So it turns out this runs at around 50c idle, and then at 100% load, stays around 70-72c which isn't bad when it comes to mac's!! before with the 6 core max load was around 90-100c core temps. So I dropped a full 30 c at full load, and it's glorious.
ps. The only weird thing is that I now have some red-LED's glowing at the bottom of my mac. Quick search online says something like diagnostic lights indicating some error, maybe ECC ram error, etc. I don't give a fuck anymore and it looks pretty cool actually. Mac finally got some RGB... but it's only R lol
https://chattypics.com/files/DSC_4975JPG_80zjd0fdm5.jpg
pps I was using this ifixit guide. Great guide, awesome walkthough. I only had one big question, and that was whether a certain metal component was supposed to be touching another one when it was kind of hanging on by a flex cable - what a WTFBBQ design - looks amazing on the outside, the inside guts are ... something else.
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Mac+Pro+Late+2013+CPU+Replacement/21947
