2008 3,1 Mac Pro, & Three 30" Cinema Displays Setup?

[chrismacguy]

In working on my Mac Pro system, with the multiple displays, I've noticed occasional pauses in the processing of software commands recently. These are commands in audio software that aren't particularly display intensive. But in tracking down the bottleneck (if there is one to be found), it occurred to me that the CPU may be bogged down with the weight of managing my three displays.

I've upgraded the display cards, such that I now have two nVidia GeForce 8800 GT 512MB cards, with the thought that the added display-processing horsepower would help. But I still have these occasional lags in the system's performance.

Can anyone speak to the issue of multiple displays and any potential hit on system performance?

Thanks very much!

The multiple displays shouldnt hit CPU performance very hard at all (and in my experience never have - my MP with 2/3 displays is just as fast as if it has 1)

 

[tonosity]

Multiple Display Performance Hit?

Thanks for sharing your experiences with me. I guess I can rule out the displays as the bottleneck, then.

At the advise of a friend--who's senior engineer at Apple, but recovering from an illness, so I didn't want to bother him with this particular problem--I upgraded the memory of the MP to 14Gb, some time ago.

I use a dedicated 500Gb, 7200 rpm SATA II drive for the audio application (Logic Pro 9) data. The main drive for the system is of the same type and speed, but 320Gb. I only have a handful of applications loaded on it, with 202Gb free.

And, when I run Logic, I quit out of everything--except Finder, of course.

Any other ideas or comments would be appreciated. If no other system issues are suspect, I suppose I'll focus on the Logic Pro software as the source of the problem.

Thanks again!