Sonnet McFiver PCIe Card

I was so excited to get this card because I have a couple extra M2 SSD cards I would like to use, plus the 10Gb Ethernet port is a great upgrade to my built-in 1Gb port. After some frustration and aggrivation with the card not working I gave a bad review, which I have now corrected. I finally figured out that I needed to install a special driver from their website at SonnetTech.com before installing the card. After I did that, the card works perfectly!!

Old and mighty Mac Pro 5,1, running Opencore Monterey. Using NVME Gen 3 4TB (3500 mb/s read/write) on PCIE, which is only PCIE 2 speed due to the age of the computer. On generic NVME PCIE adaptor, had read/writing around 1300-1500. With McFiver, now getting about 2300 - 2500 mb/s!Huge improvement on how the computer feels. Apps launch quicker and snappier. Internet browsing is definitely quicker too. My 14 year old computer ALMOST feels like Apple silicon computer for general use. Final Cut Pro feels snappier too. Rendering is better, but export time is still bad due to graphic card on PCIE 2.For those who wants to bring new life to Mac Pro 5,1, this is a must upgrade....if you are planning to use it daily, as it is not a cheap upgrade. I actually enjoy using the old cheese grater. Prior to the change, it was being used more as a home server for data storage, as it has 4 SATA + 4 PCIE. Now I'm using it as daily computer.Beside the NVME adapter, it comes with 2 x usb-C and 10G ethernet.USB-C port is a nice addition and functioned properly.10G ethernet does not work on Mac Pro 5,1. I believe Sonnet has mentioned that this was not built with Mac Pro 5,1 in mind and currently it will not work.Bottom line - It's worth the bump in NVME speed and 2 x usb-c port with using only 1 PCIE slot for Mac Pro 5,1. It's not cheap, so unless you will be using your Mac Pro 5,1 daily, consider whether it's worth for you and get few more years out of the old cheese grater.

I immediately observed that the card was mostly working at cold boot. But mostly not at reboot. In 50% of the reboots it came back on. I did some research on the net and found that the 10Gb chipset they used the aquantia aqc113cs has some stability issues like this that sometimes could be solved with a bios update of the motherboard or using a shielded CAT-7 cable. I already observed running Iperf3 that the communication speed was far from 10Gb/sec. So tried everything to improve this and did hundreds of reboots since I only had 50% chance of the card being recognized. After doing a passthrough in ProxMox I installed Truenas scale who recognized the aquantia aqc113cs. But what happened next was the final nail in the coffin of my card. I tried to copy many files and I saw the already slow speed going down after 5 minutes until 0. And I observed my whole server was hang up for the first time ever. After that I could do even a cold start any more unless I removed the McFiver. I decided to try one more time and plugged in the card. Result: I could start my server again, but beside the undocumented LED's on the McFiver, all functionality of the McFiver was gone, my SSD's, and my 10Gb, and probably also the 2 USB-C ports which I thought they where advertised as thunderbolt.I happily filed a case with Amazon within the time limits for return. Pity, I really looked forward to get this card to work.

My mac pro needed a boost for 4k video work. I am using Silcon Power brand NVMes - twi 4TB sticks - and though they are rated for faster speeds, I'm only getting around 1400 mb/s. I tested them separate and in raid 0, I got the same speeds. This is triple the speed I get with my spinning 8TB raid so I'm happy. Just an FYI to othes: I also have an RX580 GPU and a USB 3 card installed. You have to put the McFiver at the bottom PCIe 16x slot and the GPU above in the next 16x PCie slot. Otherwise, the GPU will block the 2nd 16x slot. Also, you should install a fan control app as my NVMes got hot and the speed throttled to unusable sow speeds. I'm trying to keep the temperature around 40c

Excellent product with functionality as described, though the card, once installed, whether you use SSDs or not will disable the system boot volume selection tool (boot picker/menu accessible by holding down Option key prior to startup chime) on 2010-2012 Mac Pro 4,1 and 5,1. Hope this gets fixed with an update as the card is really useful, but at least for me, this shortcoming is a deal breaker.

This is one of the best expansion cards you can have for a G5 Mac Pro.I'm using it in my studio ona G5 Mac Pro running Monterey and it works perfect!

Results in a Mac Pro 5,1 with two WD SN580 1tb in a Raid 1 booting Fedora were fantastic. Consistent peak above 2600 MB/s read (and even much higher on the first test after boot [pic]). Surprisingly more than twice as fast as using two separate cards. Probably taking advantage of the extra PCI lanes to get more performance out of the old PCIe 2.0 compared to typical 4 lane cards in this old machine. Im not sure if the ethernet and USB are going to be fighting for throughput but with these speeds and the versatility it gives me I don't care.

Works great on a 2009 Mac Pro tower running Monterey running open core !