Overview
I've always enjoyed building and modifying computers, so when my dad offered me the opportunity to take his old 2012 Mac Pro, I didn't hesitate. It was slow and outdated for his needs, but I saw potential. After cleaning and upgrading I turned it into a triple-boot machine that is great for tinkering in different operating systems. I currently use the machine for school work and programming.
This project is finished
Physical modifications
Once I got my hands on this machine I began wiping down the outside of the chassis before opening it. Once clean I opened the machine and was surprised to see it was running dual CPUs, had 8 ram slots and a GPU. After cleaning I reapplied thermal paste and booted up the machine. It immediately booted into High Sierra and after checking the systems specs I noticed the only thing that should be upgraded was the RAM. I got 8 16GB 1333MHz GDDR3 RAM sticks online maxing out the RAM on my system.
Software modifications
After doing the physical modifications I added 2 256GB SSDs to sideload Windows 11 and Linux. I already had 2 512GB Apple SSDs inside the machine (one as boot one as backup) so adding the other 2 was necessary to locally run the operating systems. I wiped all 4 drives and loaded Sequoia from a USB using OpenCore-Patcher on the Apple SSD bypassing the software block apple set. The other Apple SSD was configured as a backup drive like it was before. After I did this I used bootcamp assistant to install windows 11 directly from Sequoia without the need for a USB. I did the same process with Linux but instead of bootcamp assistant I used Balena etcher.
