Upgrading CPU on my Mac Pro tower 2010

[David Roth weiss]

Buy a used 12-core Mac Pro, upgrading procs on an older Mac Pro is not a good investment.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[Blake Porter]

David, Sorry if I’m not following, but I currently have a 12 core(?)
Current Mac Pro system: Mid 2010, 2 x 2.66 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon, 16GB Mem, ATI Radeon HD 5870.

[Al Levine]

There will be a SIGNIFICANT difference if you upgrade your RAM to 32 or 64GB, and upgrade your video card (GPU). Maybe even an SSD boot drive or faster media drives connected with Fibre or eSATA.

Your bottleneck with Premiere is not your CPU, it’s the RAM and GPU.

[Blake Porter]

Thanks Al,
I’m not only looking for more CPU, but also:
GPU: K5000 (10bit)
Adding 4, 8GB mem. sticks, for total of 40GB Ram
SSD: 960GB Mercury Accelsior
3.0 USB

I want to drive a z27x Dream Color, plus two other 27” monitors

Current Mac Pro system: Mid 2010, 2 x 2.66 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon, 16GB Mem, ATI Radeon HD 5870.

[Andrew Kimery]

David’s suggestion was to buy a refurbished new MP (the black tube) instead of upgrading your current machine. For what you’ve listed (CPUs, GPU, SSD, RAM, and USB 3) that’s about $3500 (not counting tax and shipping) which is a lot to spend on a 5yr old machine. I agree with David that that amount of money would be better spent going towards a newer machine.

Also, for what’s it’s worth, in my experience USB 3 can be spotty on the older Mac Pros because they were never designed with it in mind and Apple hasn’t exactly gone out of it’s way to write good USB 3 drivers for the older machines. So machines are fine, while others have issues.

[Blake Porter]

Regarding a new Mac Pro, is there any feel as to a sweet spot? I see a refurbished: 3.0GHz 8-Core, 32GB, 1TB Flash, Dual FirePro D700 6GB – $6,199.00
I use PP, After Effects, Photoshop, encoding, uploading…. (DSLR, XDcam, Gopro… soon 4K) I need to drive a z27 Dreamcolor and 2 other 27 monitors.

[Andrew Kimery]

[Blake Porter] “Regarding a new Mac Pro, is there any feel as to a sweet spot? “

I haven’t looked hard at the new MPs, but I’ve heard people say that the D500s offer the best bang for the buck in terms of GPU. For the CPU I probably wouldn’t go any lower than the 6-core. One thing to keep in mind is that many apps are still more CPU dependent than GPU dependent (especially multi GPU) so the nMPs single CPU is a bit of a weak link. With that being said, more and more apps are levering GPU power so over time the single CPU will become less of an issue.