Though if you look through the specs of the Mac Pro 5,1 (Mid 2012) there some quite impressive bare metal there. First there is the dual Xeon 6 core processors. When hyper-threaded results in 24 cores. Thats right 24 cores! Find me a MacBook Pro sporting 12 cores. Memory can be expanded to 128 GB without a visit to the Apple Store and seeing a 20 something “Genius”.

The outdated:

USB 2.0 ports.

This is where this 2012 power house shows its age.

• USB 2.0: 480 megabits per second
• USB 3.0: 5 gigabits per second, or over 10 times faster than USB 2.0
• USB 3.1: 10Gbps, or over 5 times faster than USB 3.0

USB has come a long way from when the Mac Pro 5,1 was manufactured. What to do?

Graphics Card

Quite simply you need to upgrade this old beauty to something like the Sapphire RX580 Pulse. This card is Metal compatible, so Final Cut Pro, Photoshop, ect will scream with speed. Though your going to loose the ability to see the boot screen. That means booting back and forth between Windows is possible, but not at all easy. If your looking for boot screen support, and even higher end Mac Pro video cards, check out MacVidCards.

Hard Drives

The interface for how data is read and write (SATA) has also come a long way to say the least since the Mac Pro 5,1 was last manufactured. Namely SATA III, and PCIe 3.0 and M.2 solid state drives. Typically the 4 drive slots using SATA I interface in the Mac Pro should be used for archiving. Grab a few cheap 2 or 8 TB drives, and put them in a RAID I for redundancy. For your main bootable drive, and scratch disks, move on to SATA III, and PCIe M.2 drives. If you have two or more SATA III or PCIe M.2 drives, put them in RAID 0 for performance. Keeping in mind if any one drive in a RAID 0 configuration goes down, all the data is lost.

SATA III 2.5″ Adapter

This adapter will allow booting with High Sierra.

Dual PCIe 3.0 M.2 Adapter

This adapter will allow booting with Mohave.

Quad PCIe 3.0 M.2 Adapter

This adapter will allow booting with Mohave.