Mac Pro upgrade, what to expect?

[Ignatius Gorin]

PS : I’m mostly using 1080/50 (Z1/5/7) footage + more recently tackling AVCHD.

[Ben Holmes]

I wouldn’t expect to see any significant speed improvements, for the following reasons:

– The slower clockspeed Nehalem is equivalent to the 2.66 Xeon in most test as far as I remember.
– You still have 8 cores for Compressor work.
– FCS is still a 32-bit application that cannot harness the power of multiple cores and more RAM effectively.

I am holding off any MacPro upgrades until a 64-bit rewrite of FCS which is properly aware of these 8-core machines is available.

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[Ignatius Gorin]

This means that I wouldn’t notice significant speed/comfort improvement upgrading from my Mac Pro dating back to 2006/2007 to a current Mac Pro ?

Quite depressing…

Maybe I could just upgrade the NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT to a newer video card?

Thanks for your input.

[Bryan Dicerb]

Mac Pro is WAY overdue for a refresh anyway. Purchasing one now would be a mistake. I have an OLD quad core as well and while I’m sure I’d see a speed increase in render times, until FCP makes the jump to 64 bit, I just don’t think I’d get the return on investment I’m looking for.

[Michael Craven]

[Ignatius Gorin] ”
Maybe I could just upgrade the NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT to a newer video card?”

Motion and Color would definitely benefit from that.

[Gary Askham]

I don’t think you’d notice any kind of speed increase by upgrading your mac. There are however a few other things you could do.

Upgrading your graphics card is one. There aren’t that many graphics cards that are supported though so do your research first. I think the ATI Radeon HD 4870 might work with your system (but check first).

Add some more RAM. RAM should be installed evenly over the risers (which yours doesn’t seem to be at the moment – you have eight slots but 3GB of RAM. That doesn’t add up). 8GB is a nice amount for your system (either 8x 1GB sticks, 4x 2GB sticks or 2x 4GB sticks). Try to match brands and don’t buy from Apple – it’s expensive. FCP only uses 4GB so that leaves 4GB for the operating system and any other apps you might run in the background.

What do you currently use for storage? You might find the most noticeable speed increase would come from buying an external RAID drive. There are many good ones advertised either side of this forum. Go for eSATA, SAS or Fibre.

If you’re fed up with rendering effects and want better realtime performance consider converting your footage to ProRes prior to editing. The file sizes will be larger but ProRes is much more suited to editing than camera codecs such as XDCAM and AVCHD.

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[Ignatius Gorin]

Many thanks for your very informative inputs.

I currently use daisy chained external Firewire 800 hard drives.

I’ll check out a RAID external drive. I don’t see eSATA or SAS connectors so I think that would have to go with an adapter. Or maybe I’ll use internal slots, for current projects, then will copy to external Firewire for archives.
I didn’t know that would make a noticeable speed improvement.

My RAM seems to be evenly installed : 2x512MB + 2x1GB, yet the total is still an odd number.

Any recommendation for RAM brand and video card model?

Thank you again.

[Jason Porthouse]

I’ve often wondered about this, and come to the conclusion that for the type of work I do, the hit I take on occasional looonnnng renders isn’t worth the cost of upgrading – I’ve a similar quad Xeon machine and it’s still plenty quick enough. A Tangent Wave would be more of a productivity upgrade for me, for instance. I think it’s all too easy to chase the numbers on computer speeds – I have a client who cuts on a dual G5 still, and it doesn’t hold us up at all.

Jason

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[Bj Ahlen]

[Ignatius Gorin] “Any recommendation for RAM brand and video card model?”

I’ve been using OWC for RAM and other Mac bits for many years (& they also ship internationally). Their RAM meets Apple specs at a fraction of the price, and they’ve been a good company to deal with.

For a video card, do get the ATI HD4870 if you can (about UKP250 in the isles).

[Ignatius Gorin]

Thanks again.

I’ll go for the ATI HD4870 + RAM upgrade (prolly Kingston, I’ve seen people reporting they worked ok here).

Then regarding RAID HD’s, if I don’t mind the noise and heat + hd lasting 4 years vs. more (I’ve seen threads where it said external systems last longer I believe), is internal ok?

Or do I gain much by going hardware/card based RAID (vs. internal software based using Disk Utility)?

I’m planning on getting 2x2TB 7200, either WD Caviar or Hitachi.

Again, thank you all, very informative thread.