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Best Upgrade Options For Video Editing On Old Mac Pro

M

McGizzle

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 19, 2007
13
0
Va
My Mac Pro is a few years old and has the specs listed below. I am starting to get into more video editing using Premiere Pro CS4 and After Effects CS4 and the Mac Pro is running a little slower than I would like.

What are the best things to upgrade?

Current Specs:

OS Version: 10.4.11

2 x 2.66 GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon
4 GB 667 MHz DDR2 FB-DIMM
NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT 256 MB
Seagate Barracuda: ST3500630AS


I was probably going to upgrade to Snow Leopard and put a few more sticks of ram in it, but I am not sure if this would be the best upgrade choices.

Can someone please suggest the best options to get the most out of this mac pro with a $300 budget?

Thanks!
 
Another 4 gigs of memory would be good, unfortunately that's 200 bucks of your budget gone. Depending on the configuration of the 4 gigs you have, ie hopefully not 8x512, you might be able to sell it and replace it with 4x2GB, which would be optimal, and have the total come in at a bit less than 200 bucks. The last 100 would be best spent on hard drives, I like the 64mb 1TB Caviar Black at around 90 bucks to use as you new boot drive. Getting your workflow off of a single disk would be huge, probably make a bigger difference than the RAM. Hopefully you can grab another 500 gb HD at a hair over your $300 budget with careful shopping since you'll want a Time Machine drive as well. Good luck!
 
I am not expert on this since I only edit family videos once a while on my Mac pro 1,1 using iMovie. Based on what your have, here are my suggestions:

1. a 128gb SSD (Samsung 470)
2. double the RAM.
3. RAID 0 with two 2T HDD. You MP looks like only supports SATA II.
4. Offsite backup. Crashplan.com

Item 1 and 3 are on my to do list right below the new MBA.


RAM $114.99
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other World Computing/53FB2MPK04GB/

HDD $99.99 x 2
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136783&cm_re=2t_HDD-_-22-136-783-_-Product

SSD $239.99
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...7063&cm_re=Samsung_ssd-_-20-147-063-_-Product
 
Last edited:
Oops, for some reason I did the math with adding 8 gigs instead of 4. Yeah, that makes things cheaper. I would probably look at a 2TB Caviar black for boot and data, and decent big drive for Time Machine, any quality drive will do there. An SSD would be nice, but their reliability is questionable on my book, though the performancemath is impressive. A 2TB Black is really fast, and would hold plenty of video. I suppose we should ask what sort of footage you are using, and if you intend to store converted material. That makes a huge difference in how much storage you need. If you intend to use Final Cut at some point a 5770 is next on your list. X looks like it'll be a nice tool, I can't wait to scrounge up enough to pick it up.
 
Thanks guys.

I forgot to mention that I have a dedicated storage server networked to the machine where my videos / project files get saved on... So I am working off the server and not putting a strain on the Mac Pro's internal hard drive.

Does this change the need for a new hard drive?
 
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