There are already plenty of posts like this, but I figured I'd make another one :,)

Choosing the trash can and upgrading it

First of all, I live in France, so I don't get the same kinds of deals you can find in the US or UK. Despite that, buying one from the UK still made more sense financially than buying one locally in the land of croissants.

Buying the absolute base model didn't seem worthwhile once I factored in the cost of upgrading it, so I went for a compromise: a base machine with 64 GB of RAM already installed. Out of all the upgrades, RAM was probably the most expensive and annoying one to figure out, mainly because there are so many different DDR3 options.

The machine itself cost me £130, plus around €70 for shipping from the UK.

I looked at all the CPU options and eventually decided that the 12-core isn't particularly useful for my purposes. Its single-core performance is too low for general everyday use, and I don't need this machine to act as a server. I went with the middle ground and bought a Xeon E5-2667 v2 from AliExpress for €35.

The storage is still the original 256 GB SSD for now, but I plan to replace it with a 1 TB NVMe drive using an adapter later.

I specifically avoided chasing the D500/D700 models. The D300s are slower, obviously, but I preferred reliability over theoretical performance.

Why did I even want a trash can?

My original idea was to move more demanding tasks (which I don't actually have that many of) from my Apple Silicon MacBook to a separate Intel-based Mac with easy x86 support and lots of RAM. This also means my MacBook can basically become a typewriter. I'm a writer, so most of what I actually need from it is writing and web browsing. The biggest advantage is that the laptop doesn't have to heat up and waste battery doing random background stuff, which should hopefully also help with battery longevity.

I didn't need another MacBook, so that was immediately out.

An iMac wasn't really appealing either. I don't want to deal with removing the display, and considering how unreliable shipping can be here, I also didn't want to depend on finding a seller willing to ship an iMac safely.

A 2017 Mac mini would have been a decent option, but the soldered SSD was a downside for me. I also simply like having external components around a computer, so this particular choice was partly aesthetic.

The Mac Pro 7,1 would be a fantastic experiment, and I'd love to own one eventually, but I'm not ready to spend the money on that experiment yet.

So I ended up with the trash can.

I won't talk about the design; you all know perfectly well that it's a beautiful device. Without the lid, it reminds me personally of the R2-Q5 droid from Star Wars.

What OSes did I install?

macOS Sonoma + OCLP

I installed macOS Sonoma using OpenCore Legacy Patcher.

Why not Sequoia? A lot of the newer features aren't supported anyway, so I don't really see a practical reason to upgrade. Choosing Sonoma is mostly just a personal preference.

The system itself is stable, but there are a few annoying issues caused by running a modern OS on unsupported hardware.

First, I had to give up on Safari because it feels rather slow, especially on YouTube.

I switched to the latest version of Firefox with a Safari-like theme because I prefer that look. Unfortunately, YouTube still has some problems. For example, the video can occasionally get stuck visually while continuing to play in small blocks, and similar glitches randomly appear for a few seconds. I've tried different extensions and various Firefox flags to reduce or disable AV1/VP9-related video support, but I never managed to completely solve it. At this point I'm just too lazy to spend even more time debugging YouTube.

The second issue is the infamous red screen in Chromium-based apps, such as Discord.

The patch available on GitHub didn't work for me, so I launch affected applications through a shell script using Automator. That works perfectly fine. The important thing is to disable the app's automatic launch at login, otherwise you can run into the problem again.

If I eventually get tired of dealing with these little issues, I can always go back to Monterey or install Fedora Linux. I'm already comfortable using the terminal, so we'll see.

Windows 10

Windows 10 installed without any major problems.

I didn't use Boot Camp because I already had my own lightweight Windows build that I preferred.

I don't know whether Windows 11 can be installed, but honestly I wouldn't use it anyway. I personally like it even less than Windows 10.

Everything works surprisingly well (For Windows). The custom drivers installed without any problems.

I don't really need it on this machine, except for the occasional homebrew application that is simply easier to run there without having to perform some ridiculous ritual in macOS.

What pleasantly surprised me?

64 GB of RAM

This was probably the biggest reason I like this machine.

With current Apple Silicon pricing, buying a Mac with 64 GB of unified memory is still way too expensive for me personally. Getting that much RAM in an old Intel Mac for relatively little money was a very nice compromise.

It's not nearly as slow as I expected

Honestly, I expected this thing to be a potato compared to Apple Silicon. It isn't.

Obviously, it is nowhere near an M-series Mac in terms of efficiency or raw modern performance, but for everyday tasks the E5-2667 v2 is surprisingly snappy.

Web browsing, writing, file management and general desktop use don't feel like I'm sitting in front of a 2013 computer.

Universal Control

Surprisingly, Universal Control works between my two Macs with OCLP.

That's a pretty nice quality-of-life feature that I didn't expect to work.

Legacy iOS devices

If you have older iOS devices, especially jailbroken ones, having an Intel Mac around can be extremely convenient.

Some tools and workflows either don't work properly on Apple Silicon or aren't supported at all, so having an Intel machine available can save a lot of trouble.

Native OS X Mavericks

The fact that I can natively install OS X Mavericks on this thing is honestly pretty damn cool.

More than anything, it shows how much support this machine has received from the community over the years. A computer from 2013 still being this flexible in 2026 is kind of ridiculous.

The speaker

I expected the built-in speaker to be absolutely terrible.

It's obviously nothing special, but it has a surprisingly usable volume range. I assumed it was basically only good for the startup sound, but if you just have some music or a video playing quietly in the background, it's perfectly usable.

Given everything I'd heard about it, I expected much worse.

Light gaming

I also have a decent collection of consoles, so I don't really use the Mac Pro for serious gaming.

But occasionally I like playing things such as Terraria, Don't Starve Together or Minecraft.

I actually tried running several of them with mods just as an experiment, and everything worked surprisingly well. Even multiplayer was stable and I didn't have any weird ping issues.

What I don't like

Using both GPUs

Honestly, just forget about trying to make both GPUs useful.

Almost nothing properly supports them, and when something does, getting it to work is usually more trouble than it's worth.

The dual-GPU setup is probably one of the most disappointing parts of this machine from a modern perspective. It's more of a curiosity than something useful

Local LLMs / KoboldCpp

You can run local LLMs through KoboldCpp, but the experience isn't particularly great.

The DDR3 memory isn't exactly fast, and getting proper GPU acceleration working isn't really an option in my current setup, so the CPU ends up doing most of the work.

If anyone has recommendations for getting better performance out of local LLMs on this machine, I'd be happy to hear them.

I might also try doing it properly under Windows, since I basically forgot it existed and ended up doing everything through terminal hacks on macOS as usual.

Final thoughts

Overall, I'm honestly pretty happy with the machine.

I bought it because I wanted a cheap Intel Mac with lots of RAM, x86 compatibility, decent everyday performance and a completely different role from my Silicon MacBook.

And for that purpose, the trash can actually works surprisingly well in 2026.

It's definitely an old computer, and you have to be willing to deal with OCLP, old drivers, weird software issues and the occasional hacky workaround. (4.1, 5.1 owners will throw a slipper at me)

But there's something genuinely impressive about a 2013 workstation still being this usable thirteen years later.

Thanks for reading.

I'm still fairly new to this whole Mac Pro/OCLP stuff, so I'd be happy to hear any advice, corrections or recommendations.

For some time now, we’ve been gathering data from Wii U owners who have experimented with GPU Overclocking to see how the silicon lottery treats different console revisions.

While the sample size is still growing, the initial trends are very clear. Here is the breakdown of what users are actually achieving in terms of stable frequencies, specifically comparing A5X and B1X motherboards.

GPU Overclocking Distribution (Stable Results)

A5X Revisions:

1. 750 MHz: ~33% of users
2. 680 MHz: ~29% of users
3. 650 MHz: ~17% of users

(The base frequency is 545MHz)

It appears that the group 1 of users encountered issues at 760, appearing as screen freezing for approximately 2 seconds every 10 seconds. The group 2 experienced a similar issue at 700. Only a few experienced graphical artifacts on the screen, manifested as purple lines or dots, but this didn't seem to affect the GPU's performance.

B1X Revisions:

1. 750 MHz: ~66% of users
2. 700 MHz: ~33% of users

The best results were achieved with the b1x, where we can see a consistent 750MHz overclock from the initial 550MHz. However, some preferred a lower frequency because the console was not serviced.

General questions for A5X & B1X

Console revision:

1. WUP-01 (a5x): ~47% of users
2. WUP-30 (a5x): ~17% of users
3. WUP-50 (b1x): ~16% of users
4. WUP-10 (b1x): ~4% of users

Date of manufacture:

1. 2012: ~30% of users
2. 2015: ~29% of users
3. 2013: ~11% of users
4. 2014: ~10% of users

Console maintenance:

1. Not serviced: ~47% of users
2. Dust cleaning: ~41% of users
3. Replacing the thermal pad: ~23% of users
4. Replacing the fan: ~11% of users
5. Washing machine: ~1% of users

Testing time:

1. 3-5 hours: ~31% of users
2. 1-2 hours: ~24% of users
3. 5+ hours: ~23% of users
4. <30 minutes: ~22% of users

Game benchmark:

1. Zelda BOTW: ~82% of users
2. Watch Dogs: ~17% of users
3. Monster Hunter 3U: ~11% of users
4. Other games: ~64% of users (AC3, MK8, NFSMWU, HW etc)

Conclusions

When asked whether overclocking is worth the effort, about 70% of users said yes. 17% also said yes, but with maintenance, and I'm among them: in my opinion, the low performance is directly related to the fact that most people find it difficult to replace the thermal pad or simply clean the console of dust to maximize performance.

However, the survey results show that even without maintenance, the console runs perfectly at higher frequencies. This makes one wonder why Nintendo so dramatically underestimated the performance of an already weak console. In any case, those who were still afraid to overclock their Wii U can now do so, as no significant downsides from overclocking have yet been reported.

Most users recommend 650Mhz for those who don't want to bother.

___

Thanks to everyone who responded to the survey, and below I'll leave a couple of interesting comments on the test results:

Zelda BOTW | 650Mhz | A5X

"Korok Forest ran at 30 fps, and Hyrule itself, while riding most of the time, remained at 30 fps without drops, except in certain places like Hylia and Faron where the fps did drop. But mostly in the places where I used to have FPS drops with 550MHz, they are no longer present for the most part, which is already a victory for me. Clearly, the frame rate improved in the ranches unless you go inside, but outside it mostly maintains a stable frame rate, while in Kakariko Village and the castle itself it ran at 20fps as you already mentioned in your guides. However, I noticed a difference in more stable (though not perfect) frame rates in the following locations: • Zora's Domain (stable 30fps until near the king's throne) • Goron City (30fps with some minor drops) • Ornin Village (same as Goron City) • Gerudo Town (30-25fps, not bad, but clearly there's room for improvement). Where I also noticed a difference is when activating bullet time and using the tablet modules. Before, magnification and paralysis would drop the FPS to 20, but now it maintains 30 FPS. Similarly, exploding bombs or barrels didn't cause such aggressive drops and also maintained 30 FPS (although I should do some pyrotechnic tests, haha). I played for almost 1 hour and 22 minutes, and honestly, my Wii U didn't get hot at all (I bought it a year ago). It felt the same as when I have long gaming sessions. I have an A5X SoC, and my Wii is one of the first models, so I want to think I got lucky and my Wii U dissipates heat well, or something like that

Zelda BOTW (+Patch) | 750Mhz | A5X

Stable 30 fps everywhere except CPU-dependent locations like Hateno Village and the Castle: 23-25 fps.

Zelda BOTW | 680Mhz | A5X

I recommend 680 because is when the overclock is more noticeable. In BOTW in the korok forest in some places the FPS were dropping to 20-22, but with that frequency it gets 30 stable, also in some cases you get some drops to 25, but only in certain situations and is way less noticeable than the step from stock to 680. With 737 i don't get almost any fps drop, or the only way to notice is with the hud always on, which i don't like playing with hud. In addition to why i recommend 680 is because if your console is dirty or have the original thermal pad you may not have any overheating problems.

Need for Speed: Most Wanted U | 750Mhz | A5X

There were never any drops below 30 fps, the console is capable of much more, but there is vertical sync.

Hyrule Warriors | 730Mhz |

In areas with a huge number of enemies, the frame rate was around 28 FPS, with the lowest spikes reaching 24 fps. Boss fights and less crowded scenes were a stable 30. 22fps in coop.

Other comments:

Cafe OS is probably the most improved element here, menu loads way faster.

___

I hope these results were useful to everyone, thanks again.