Can you help me upgrade?

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Hello,

So, I recently bought a used mac pro. Originally, a Mac Pro 4,1 2009 with 4 cores. It's most recent owner upgraded it to a Mac Pro 5,1 with 6 cores.

I bought it with intentions to upgrade - and, so it begins. Can you help me upgrade?

I moved the original hard drive back to a separate drive and installed an SSD. Unto which, I installed OS Sierra.

I am upgrading ram from three 4gb sticks to four 8gb sticks.

I'm a bit confused about upgrading the usb to 3.0 .. I watched a few youtubes from 2012 but i'm not quite getting it. I even took my machine to a local Mac reseller/fix it upper - and the guy had my machine for 2 weeks and told me it can't be done. Which is a bit disheartening.

What else can/should be upgraded? Video cards? GPU? Fans? DVD drive?

Anyways - have yourselves a splendid day and if you can help me great! If not, thanks for reading!

*BTW - I tried to upgrade my membership here and I was unable.

Thanks again!
Artie
 
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Your Mac's Specs
Silver M1 iMac 512/16/8/8 macOS 11.6
G'day and welcome to the forums.

In my Mac Pro days Artie the best PCI-e cards for anything at all were Sonnet, and there is a PCI-e card for USB3. Read it through before hitting buy to see the price! Depending how the recent owner completed the upgrade, you may have to upgrade the Graphics card to something later, such as an ATI Radeon5770 or 5870 for best results. Mac Rumours handle this upgrade more than this forum, so you might like to check out the second link. Hold off buying more memory, as you might find it necessary to go to faster modules. If Sierra is running, all is well with the upgrade to a 5.1.


http://www.sonnettech.com/product/allegrousb3pcie4port.html


https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/another-mac-pro-4-1-to-5-1-efi-update-problem.1879564/
 
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