Upgrading Mac Pro for 4k editing

I highly recommend the New Mac Pro cylinder (quad core flavor). Your money would be better invested on the graphics and memory. Get the highest graphics chip you can afford and at least 16 gigs of RAM, 32 if it fits your budget.
 
I've upgraded a few Mac towers for clients. With the new OSX, you can use ANY gforce GPU card. You won't see the 1st bootup screen, but who cares. So buy a PC GFX760 or 770, and you're in. You'll have a lot of Cudas for AE and Premiere. Add 32gig memory. Change to a SSD drive.

But, frankly I'd build a Hackintosh. The Intel i7 boards are great. You can now build a tower that is faster than the new Mac waste-basket, which in my opinion is over-priced. .... You have to buy another Mac case to hold a video card for broadcast output, Geeez. Or just build, or buy, a PC with a harddrive removable tray. You can run Mac or PC software on one computer. I need a PC cause their is some high-end software that isn't availble on a Mac.
You can find deals on the cloud for the Adobe software. I found a $29 per month for the Adobe cloud. All of the software upgrades are Free for life of your contract.
 
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Just a side note:

I have a 2011 tower and recently have done some OS upgrades. What a mess with OS compatibility. I now have four bootable drives, lion, mt lion, mavericks, and windows 7 to keep everything running. Beware legacy software that doesn't play nice with mavericks.
 
If Boosh wants to run FCPX then he will *HAVE TO* upgrade to OSX 10.9.* as the latest version of FCPX only runs on Maverick. After 10.0.9 which ran on most version of OSX AFAICS the FCP 10.1.* only works on OSX 10.9.*

I would say ADD RAM (cheap option)
then
upgrade to OSX Macerick (a "free" upgrade)
Then
get FCPX (10.1.*) not free but... At some point in the not to distant future I can see the price of FCPX creeping up again.

Then see what else is slow. The choices are an SSD or Graphics card. If *you* think you need them after using FCPX on 4K.

I am running mid 2010 a 2.8 Quad core tower with 16GB of Ram and it seems OK running Maverick with FCPX 10.1.* Though I have 2* 1TB internal drives in a RAID 0 which works well.
 
Among other machines I have two 2009 Mac Pro, 2 years ago i upgraded each one with Nvidia GTX 680 4GB card, 32GB RAM, 480GB SSD boot drive, 8TB Internal RAID(2 4TB WD Caviar Black), and 4TB external USB 3.0 G-Drive, Xeon processors will be the next upgrade. they work with RED 5K media without problem, this machines keeps on all day running 7 days a weeks, Editing, Compositing and 3D. No a single hardware failure since a bought them.
Three IMacs has die on me in the last 4 years, two 24" and one 27" so they are not a option for me anymore, keep running too hot.
The new MacPro has wonderful specs but they need to grow outside the box with expensive thunderbolt drives.
 
xenogears said:
Among other machines I have two 2009 Mac Pro, 2 years ago i upgraded each one with Nvidia GTX 680 4GB card, 32GB RAM, 480GB SSD boot drive, 8TB Internal RAID(2 4TB WD Caviar Black), and 4TB external USB 3.0 G-Drive, Xeon processors will be the next upgrade. they work with RED 5K media without problem, this machines keeps on all day running 7 days a weeks, Editing, Compositing and 3D. No a single hardware failure since a bought them.
Three IMacs has die on me in the last 4 years, two 24" and one 27" so they are not a option for me anymore, keep running too hot.
The new MacPro has wonderful specs but they need to grow outside the box with expensive thunderbolt drives.
Click to expand...

+1

My upgraded 2008 Mac Pro beats up on my 27" i7 iMac
 
xenogears said:
Among other machines I have two 2009 Mac Pro, 2 years ago i upgraded each one with Nvidia GTX 680 4GB card, 32GB RAM, 480GB SSD boot drive, 8TB Internal RAID(2 4TB WD Caviar Black), and 4TB external USB 3.0 G-Drive, Xeon processors will be the next upgrade. they work with RED 5K media without problem, this machines keeps on all day running 7 days a weeks, Editing, Compositing and 3D. No a single hardware failure since a bought them.
Click to expand...

Alright. I am threadjacking a bit, but was wondering if xenogears or anyone can help me. I TOO have a 2009 Mac Pro and would like to squeeze a few more years life out of it. it's been a great machine, but i noticed it's been dogging a bit, especially with Premiere CS6 & After Effects.

2 X 2.26 quad core
20 gig ram
NVIDIA Quadro 4000
Snow Leopard (ha ha)

I was wondering if there were any cost effective upgrades I could do, say under $500 to give the machine a bit more speed/performance? For instance, would it be worth my while to upgrade the boot drive as you mentioned?

No need for 4K yet, just 1080. I also work on a cylinder with CC, so I'm aware of how much better & faster things *could* be operating. I don't have the funds or inclination to pick one up yet.
 
Scott F said:
Alright. I am threadjacking a bit, but was wondering if xenogears or anyone can help me. I TOO have a 2009 Mac Pro and would like to squeeze a few more years life out of it. it's been a great machine, but i noticed it's been dogging a bit, especially with Premiere CS6 & After Effects.

2 X 2.26 quad core
20 gig ram
NVIDIA Quadro 4000
Snow Leopard (ha ha)
Click to expand...

Got a 2009 dual core. Just adding an SSD as a boot drive felt like a new machine - that's the most freaky thing you can do, having a mac pro boot in 30 seconds... and being able to quit the entire adobe suite without several apps hanging up, shutdowns take less than a minute now. Adding a small SSD as a cache/scratch disk (AE, FCP, Photoshop) kicked things up a notch.

So there's two drive slots taken... did an internal striped RAID with the other 2 drive slots, caviar blacks, under $200. BM speed test showed that I almost tripled drive speed from using a single internal drive for footage/projects.

Added an NVIDIA GTX 285; the old video card still drives my monitors. Check Adobe's site for card recommendations for AE and Premiere rendering.

Max out your RAM.

Everything gets backed up nightly via firewire, so not as concerned about RAID failures. Firewire drives for print projects and stuff that doesn't need speed.
 
I'm in a similar boat. I have a 2008 Mac Pro, Dual Processor 2.8Ghz, 8 cores, 12mb l2 cache, 16GB RAM.

If I get the new Mac Pro, which processor should I get? I'm planning to max out the RAM, storage, and video card, but what about the processor? I don't want to regret cutting a corner a few years down the road. I'm planning to edit 4K.
 
Given all of the enhancements over the past 6 years, I would say no. A MacBook Pro can outperform the 2.8 Ghz unit. I have a similar config to blando3. I put in a 5870 card a few years ago because Apple made a big deal about how this card would make FCPX run better. I saw little benefit compared to others with a 5770 card. I would save towards a new Mac Pro, or even consider an iMac. The new iMacs have thunderbolt. You will not get thunderbolt on the 2008 Mac Pro tower. I know some folks love the old 2008. Mine is still going, but it is slow.
 
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