I have three apples that do not support PCIe gpus this one this one and this one
but guess what I also have an apple that does the Apple
xer 3 comma one is the very last server
that Apple ever released for their commercial and education customers and
compared to Modern Max it has many
abilities that some consider to be
unnatural like upgradable memory upgradable CPUs and even yes the ability
to run a graphics card
wait are we about to game on an Apple
server yes and we're about to tell you about our
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and I won't ask check it out at the link below I know we've talked about this
machine in the past but there are just so many things about it that are utterly
unlike anything Apple does today check this out onboard power and reset
switches not only does it not have a chassis intrusion that prevents you from
powering it on when the case is open they outright enable it and this is
great Apple actually delighted the Nehalem architecture xeons that were at
the heart of this thing and then used a shim to prevent the dye from cracking
just like you can buy from der Bauer today because these are regular socketed
CPUs we could actually upgrade them however most of the higher performance
xeons from this generation have much higher tdps ironically this use of
Enthusiast class cooling solutions does make Apple's x-serve machines a little
bit tougher to upgrade because you'd have to de-lid any off-the-shelf Xeon
that you wanted to put into it but fortunately the e5520 that we have in
here is only about 20 percent slower than the fastest chips that shipped in
this machine and while there are faster ones that you could install aftermarket
they run at significantly higher tdps and this cooling solution has a hard
time keeping them under control so we're just going to uh leave those for now
replacing my one gig sticks I have oh
wow these 16 gig sticks from Kingston
that's good I'm gonna give us a total of 96 gigs of
RAM in this that is over a 15x upgrade
in memory capacity oh yeah
every stick I put in has more RAM oh
yeah then the whole system had when we
oh yeah started it's the double-edged sword of upgradability you can change
out your Hardware but will it work I don't know
now it's time for the big moment where we pull out our network card and install
any GPU we want in that PCIe 16x slot
that's right before Apple had their big falling out with NVIDIA you could put
GeForce Cards into a Mac this one specifically okay so we're
gonna pause for a second and you guys are gonna click on the card that you
want me to install go ahead
I'm kidding there's no way for me to do a poll like this you guys just pause the
video what do you think you're doing also we have a problem
there is oh
okay I just ripped that off which may be helps it doesn't
that's okay I have an idea oh that wasn't the idea
this is my idea by putting a PCIe riser
in this slot right here we should be able to quickly and easily hook up any
card we want find a good spot for it
no why would I be worried about that the Fan's right here no no I mean on for the
rest of the system oh
hmm yeah so the GPU needs to be outside of
the chassis Ah that's why I thought of having my writer bring a much longer
PCIe expansion oh I think I get it
haha oh boy this is not good there we go
yeah you can hear the ghost of Tim Cook just screaming in agony okay
now we're good to go is what I would say if we had any way to
power this thing which we do by using one of these
jumpered 24-pin female connectors all it does is Bridge the green and any ground
wire but we can turn on a power supply without a
computer connected to it so
um here what an elegant solution
then we just need to power everything up
all right I'm forgetting something
HDMI cable also I need somewhere safe to put this
GPU you were just going to let me put this back down on here weren't you he
was look at him no back plate that would have shorted
out that would have actually been very bad got the 12 volt the ground right
there yeah that seems much better
now we just plug in our HDMI cable
thank you Colin I am not seeing a lot of
action here uh probably help if you actually turn the computer on
oh that's right I forgot this is not on
yet it just makes that noise when it's thinking about turning on
good boy now the question you're probably asking yourself is
what environment is he going to boot into
are they gonna game on Steam in macOS are we yeah yes yes we are
remember what we're gonna try uh how long is the boot up cycle
uh we should be seeing something by now I think we're getting dangerously close
to time to start trying stuff
oh yeah that's my favorite oh oh we got
something it's gray you got something we got a gray screen there I
am going to try something I'm going to start by turning off the computer then I
am going to remove this PCIe card I think it's possible this cable may have
gotten damaged when we were jamming it through that PCI slot for the second
time so we do test things ahead of time but
sometimes that's not biting Us in the butt go figure right
how dare you test things wow there's so
much cool stuff on here I didn't even see this last time look at this it's got
a whole Bank of LED code lights here for memory PLL voltage core voltage
amazing another possibility is that when
I reseeded that CPU one of the pins got a little misaligned so
let me pop that off and put it back in
maybe ripping things off it damaged in some
hmm do I ever make things better rather than worse
I'm pretty sure it
come on baby you can do it
well that was something I'm gonna reseat the RAM
come on baby I believe in you
thought maybe we're at a platform memory
limitation I'm gonna pop two sticks and see what
happens whoa hey
we're up okay interesting cool that doesn't make any
sense uh from what we were able to find the
platform supports well over 100 gigs of rent
but not necessarily at this density
but what was the maximum RAM supported by
this platform again so for the processor itself it says it's 144.
but if I'm looking at every Mac which
lists all of the different versions of this it says official Max is 24 and 48.
obviously that's not right because we currently have 64 in here but one thing
that I did find out when I was just trying to look up this blinking light
here is that at least on the older versions
of the excerpt for the G4 G5 a blinking light like this could mean an ECC or I
see do we settle for dual Channel or do
we try the other set of three slots and see if maybe we've just got a bad memory
slot but we had a bad memory slot it wouldn't be booting with the other set
of RAM sure would if I took the stick out of the slot
I put these back in the slots you had them in so if one of those third ones is
bad then it could be bad
valid let's shut it down yep now we find
out how much of a problem it is to populate the secondary memory slots
first in this particular
particularly want 96 gigs of RAM not because I need it but how many
people have a Mac gaming rig with 96 gigs of RAM
come on
no okay
ah do you notice what's happening right
over here yes yeah so those lights are flashing
angrily at us now though that doesn't usually happen
oh that's that's probably still a some sort of issue with the RAM
so we're running dual Channel then well that's an interesting thing for us to
find out totally by accident in that case let's go straight for maximum
points put our PCIe Riser back in
see if this thing fires up
yeah are no longer on this bodes well I'm so
confident I'm moving around to this side
hey there we go there you go yes Mac
gaming this is Titan x black this is
Maxwell This is GeForce 900 series that's right we might actually get
somewhat decent gaming performance out of this thing
what just happened is this Steam yes it is Buddy whoa hey it's back uh
wait is this farther than you it doesn't happen normally it stays black oh okay
well this is wait oh uh
well what did I click on no I had it working oh I could just click on things
if I click the right spots can I launch a game yes game will also be pitch black
oh really every game as far as I'm able to tell I can't
really click through to most of them now you mentioned that someone
some foolhardy Beautiful Soul was still
updating NVIDIA drivers on macOS
this looks fairly old though
they're taking older drivers that aren't
normally supported for this and and making them work they're not taking the
absolute newest drivers however I don't think this is a graphical issue or
necessarily I don't think this is a GPU driver issue oh I do have a solution for
it but I'd like to just take one second to talk about why it might be happening
I think it's because Chrome no longer supports this version of macOS and
steam uses a lot of chromium underneath it
just basically a web browser
makes sense okay
work around are we heading for the terminal we are and the command that
you're going to use is up in that file at the top right corner
and here is where we see that steam no
longer cares about this version Mac OSS of September stop running in 76 days
this is the second time this has happened in like two weeks where we got
one of these notifications that it was about to be unsupported on our platform
we're like thank goodness we made this video today
ah I am so excited right now there's
gonna be a great gaming computer for just over two months we could play
Shadow the Tomb Raider portal 2.
Batman Arkham Asylum Game of the Year Edition I mean it is a good game
how about we install portal 2. 64 gigs
1066 RAM that's another thing that we
would be able to upgrade if we had better CPUs is our RAM speed we'd be
able to do 13 33. wow that is a slow SSD wait is that a
hard drive in the front the hard drive in the front but you
might be downloading directly to the SSD inside of it I doubt it
not at the speed this is going what happened to my desktop
half of my desktop is gone oh my God
this is so slow I think we need to find
a way to get the library working properly
steam Library folders yeah see this that's what this is okay so how do we
edit this wait a second I have an idea what if we
just try to launch whatever the Mac version of an executable is from that
other Drive hmm that could that could work
uh where is our other Drive
I mean it's here Untitled right there should be one that just at the root has
a steam games folder so our other drive
is not even in here anyway no that's
that's just the two partitions on the internal drive
well let's hot swap it unplug it and plug it back in again number one Tech
tip it is not spinning I think it may have died on the way over
here why does this happen every time we come to set things work perfectly until
cameras roll I think that drives dead dude
no how much does that matter
oh really but there's only so many of those that still exist oh okay but it
doesn't matter for the video no I'm totally over it
I never recover from this Tanner apparently had all of our Mac
compatible games installed on this drive
I guess we're gonna play some Portal 2 then to make ourselves feel better
why did Apple have to give up on gaming my friend had all the cool games on his
Mac when we were kids my mouse is not working
look up I mean boy am I ever trying uh Hey Tanner hey
what what's happening are you expecting the mouse to not work in this game nope
were you able to play Portal 2 I did not attempt to but I did play Counter-Strike
successfully okay boy is that over a lot of tearing
is that expected yes ah okay I think I
found a fix you need to go to windowed mode then
back to full screen and it should fix it and this bug has existed for six years
I've got oh well hey yes we're looking around
we oh wow that frame pacing though
but restarting the game totally fixed it I am gaming
this does not feel like 300 frames per
second I am going to turn on vsync
words I never thought I would say the
leg though Andrew can look at this can you see it
oh yeah we don't even need a high-speed camera
to show how bad that input lag is that's like
60 80 millisec it's awful no I'll take
the tearing oh and I think we crashed didn't even
make it out of the tutorial while I was waiting for our second game to finish
installing I was poking around and struck by the fact that for a machine
from almost 15 years ago these specs at
least on the surface look shockingly modern they have eight processing cores
in here 64 gigs of RAM okay 12 gigs of
GPU vram I mean
many modern cards only have eight Batman Arkham Asylum Game of the it's a really
good game I played it through this is very much
running
but that's a solid easy 60 plus FPS I
think it's more it's really hard to tell with the motion blur
like oh man early motion blur particularly looks like garbage look at
the little artifacts around his ears can you see that tenor
yeah oh whoa that was weird if I move
the mouse too fast it activates the pointer finder feature and puts a
gigantic mouse cursor in the middle of my screen and aside from these odd bugs you can
see that out of our pretty large library of games here very few of them are
natively supported on the Mac so what are our options then because
this is an Intel based Mac actually
nothing would theoretically prevent us from installing Windows
except the absence of support in boot
camp for this particular model folks have tried to emulate a UEFI pre-boot
environment on this machine but they haven't found any success which means
this is about as good as it gets and
once steam stops running on macOS 10.11 in 76 days
the X serves time is a weird Niche very
limited gaming platform are pretty much over and that's not even just the
software NVIDIA cards haven't had support in almost 10 years but even AMD
cards are looking like they are not going to be supported by Apple moving
forward on their M series Apple silicon
but there is good news the game porting
toolkit that was just announced at WWDC 2023 looks like it could address a lot
of the difficulties that developers have had porting their games to the Mac All
That Remains to be seen given that it was clearly possible to Port your games
in the past is whether developers will support it and it remains to be seen
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off grammarly premium if you guys enjoyed this video you might enjoy part
one where we did a bit of a deeper dive into what this thing was actually for
because um janky gaming wasn't it