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Author Topic: Upgrading a Mac Pro  (Read 1675 times)

Jim Pascoe

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Upgrading a Mac Pro
« on: April 24, 2015, 11:41:04 am »

Looking for some advice.....

I have a 2010 Mac Pro with a Quad core 2.8 Ghz, 16 GB of RAM, an ATI Radeon HD 5770 1024mb, and a 1TB hard drive.  I am in a position to afford to upgrade some of the components.

Most of my photography is dealing with large volumes of images from school shoots, portraits and weddings and almost all are edited in Lightroom.  However I also shoot quite a bit of video and edit that in Final Cut Pro X.

My thoughts/intentions are to install a 480GB SSD to speed things up, and it has also been suggested that the video card might be a bottleneck and to upgrade to something with 3GB of onboard memory.  I have looked at the OWC Mercury Accelsior PCI SSD.   I see that it is also possible to swap out the Processor and upgrade to a 6-core 3.46 and there is a company her in the UK who would do that for in the region of £500.

Any thought or advice on the route to faster performance without going overboard?  My inclination is to stay with the Mac Pro and I have a new Eizo monitor to go with it.

Many thanks

Jim
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francois

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Re: Upgrading a Mac Pro
« Reply #1 on: April 24, 2015, 12:04:20 pm »

Jim,
I have an identical Mac Pro. I added an Apricorn PCI card and a 1TB SSD. The Mac boots without any specific drivers and is way more responsive. Lately, I've added a new video card but can't yet quantify the improvement in speed. The original video was defective otherwise my Mac would still be equipped with the original card.

Edit: I'm sure the new video card offers a huge speed boost for games but I'm not a gamer.
Edit 2: typo correction
« Last Edit: April 27, 2015, 04:39:01 am by francois »
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Francois

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Re: Upgrading a Mac Pro
« Reply #2 on: April 24, 2015, 03:09:51 pm »

Jim ,

macperformanceguide.com has extensive advice on mac configurations and upgrading.
IMO, though, always best to first max out on RAM irrespective of processor.

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Eric Kellerman

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Re: Upgrading a Mac Pro
« Reply #3 on: April 25, 2015, 06:07:30 pm »

Might I please know the name of the UK company that offers processor upgrades?
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Jim Pascoe

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Re: Upgrading a Mac Pro
« Reply #4 on: April 27, 2015, 04:33:10 am »

Thank you for the responses so far.  We are about to go away for a week but when I get home I will make some decisions.  Yes, I am aware of the MacPerformanceGuide and have looked at it before - will read through again soon.

Eric, the company offering to upgrade the Mac CPU is Create.pro - search for them - they have offices in London and Ipswich.  I spoke to a very helpful guy called Tom on 020 377 09603.

Jim
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Eric Kellerman

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Re: Upgrading a Mac Pro
« Reply #5 on: April 27, 2015, 09:31:21 am »

Thanks, Jim. They've just told me they'll accept orders from Europe too.
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