[Matt Klein]

Heh, just this hour I decided to upgrade my Mac Pro 2009 4,1 instead of a new mac pro. There’s a lot of issues here, not sure which ones are important to you, but i will just dump all of them here.

Geekbench for the Mac Pro 4,1 is somewhat weak. The new 5K iMac gets double the results for both single and multicore activity. The 2013 mac pro is better than that only with multicore depending on which model. So if you’re waiting long times for renders and its killing you, well that’s one issue.

Then there’s the NVMe issue. Check out the Intel 750 PCIe SSD that’s due out soon. 2200MB per second, with insane random IOPS numbers, 400GB for $400. This probably won’t work in the Mac Pro 4,1 but that is the technology that should be in the next Mac Pro as the flash storage. They just put it in the 13″ macbook pro and it gets 1400MB per sec. Not sure if this is important, but I thought I will wait for the next mac pro with SkyLake Intel chip and this NVMe technology.

Next, graphics card. Not sure about the details, it seems that yours is fine. The 2013 mac pro simply screams with 12gb graphics memory, but that would only help with playback stuttering issues and some faster rendering/exports. So again, if the current setup is lagging or having too many issues than you would benefit from an upgrade.

Next, drive speed. Some info above, but I ended up getting a PCI card that holds an SSD on Amazon for $50 which gives it SATA III full speed. Capricorn Velocity PCI card. People with Mac Pro 4,1 are reporting 460MB/sec read writes with about 10,000 random IOPS. Any spinning drive gets about 100 IOPS. I got a 1TB Samsung 850 EVO and will boot off of that. (Avoid the 840 EVO!)

Finally, I got a Nvidia GTX 750ti graphics card ($130) to power a Dell 4K IPS screen ($600).

So, to summarize the above, I spent about $1K to keep my mac pro 4,1 going until a better mac pro comes along. Not sure if any of the speed bottlenecks are causing you too much delay, but the 2013 mac pro is certainly a screamer. And there’s a few USB 3.0 and thunderbolt breakout boxes to handle the peripherals.