Follow the steps below and you too can enjoy the affordability and upgradeability that a Mac Pro 1,1 or 2,1 can provide.

After all, this was a genuine Mac Pro and not a hackintosh build.Īfter a great deal of persistence, I was thrilled to eventually find a native upgrade path (again, many thanks to Tiamo at MacRumors) that is not that hard to accomplish. Many who I chatted with and messaged during my search for answers claimed it just wasn’t possible to use the nVidia 210 in a Mac Pro 1,1 without running Chameleon or other hackintosh tools to get OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion or later installed (a necessity for using the nVidia 210 but not technically possible due to the 32-bit EFI issue), which I found disappointing to say the least. The whole idea of upgrading a Mac Pro 1,1 for me started out of a curiosity: I began researching how to use the nVidia 210 Silent video card (with no native Mac drivers) in my Mac Pro 1,1 and was disappointed after many dead-ends, finding no readily available answers, but I refused to give up. Recently, I have been helping friends upgrade their Mac Pro 1,1 and 2,1 models with OS X 10.9.3 Mavericks (and more recently 10.9.4 and have also begun experimenting with 10.10 Yosemite with some success). Tiamo is the original modifier of the “boot.efi” file (more on that later) that allows you to run modern versions of OS X on the Mac Pro 1,1 and 2,1 which would otherwise be limited to OS X Lion 10.7.5. Just like anyone else who frequents Low End Mac, I wanted to get more value out of my Apple hardware.īefore going further into detail, I would like to give special thanks to MacRumors forum user “Tiamo”. As a daily Mac Pro user, I wanted to provide the Low End Mac community with the necessary steps to take a base model 2006 Mac Pro 1,1 or 2007 2,1 (that can now be easily obtained for under $500) and show you how to make it as modern as any current Mac, while retaining all of the expansion that the older tower style Mac Pros provide.

My name is Robert Bryant, and I am a computer tech in Central California just south of San Jose.

Installing windows on mac pro tower