How refresh rate affects your perception of performance

I’ve had my Mac Pro 2013 (aka ‘Trashcan’ Mac) for a few months now, and while I didn’t buy it for any specific purpose, there was an odd sluggishness that I couldn’t put my finger on, compared to the performance of my much older 2008 Mac Pro 3,1.

I didn’t have any Thunderbolt display cables so was initially using an HDMI cable into my 4k monitor, which rather surprising I thought for a 2013 machine only supported 30khz refresh rates. I didn’t think too much of it, but eventually got a Thunderbolt to DisplayPort cable, and now the screen is at 60khz everything my usage is noticeably smoother. It’s odd that it would make this make difference, but the jankiness of the slightly laggy screen updates when dragging around or resizing windows really made a massive difference in how I perceived the performance of the machine.

Mac Pro 3,1 with OpenCore Legacy Patcher – not much success

I previously shared that I was attempting to upgrade my 2008 Mac Pro to a later version of MacOS using OpenCore Legacy Patcher. Unfortunately I had zero success. I tried initially with Big Sur, but I couldn’t get it to boot OpenCore from the USB stick, so at the point from Recovery when I tried to install it said it wasn’t supported on this Mac. Tried following multiple guides but no luck.

I tried stepping backwards through previous versions – Catalina installed but core dumped on booting. Mojave core dumped when booting the installer.

I don’t have a tremendous urgency to upgrade this Mac, it’s getting a bit slow with Chrome on current websites, so I went to eBay and this happened instead:

I picked up a rather well spec’d Mac Pro 2013 for £270, and other than it took a week for it to arrive, it seems to be running pretty well so far.

So now the question is do I try and use OpenCore again to install something beyond Monterey? I think I’ll enjoy Monterey for a while and maybe play around with some different versions in VMs instead 🙂