Hello
hi, I already did 1 major upgrade
from octo 2.26 to octo 3.33
Gtx120 to Gtx285 to Gtx 670
The final increase that I would get by going 12 core 3.46 is it worth it ?
To me the X5690 (3.46 GHz) isn't worth the price differential over the X5680 (3.33 GHz), but that depends on the particular applications that one uses and their importance to the user's livelihood.
From your description of what you started out with, it looks, to me, like that machine began its life as a MacPro4,1, not a 2010 MacPro5,1. Have you done the EFI hack to emulate a MacPro5,1? You'd have to do that before using Nehalem 5600 CPUs. Thus, are your CPUs Nehalem 5500s or Westmere 5600s?
For about $1K and for CPU powered apps, you can get a new pair of Intel X5680s (3.33 GHz) or for about $1.9K, you can get a new pair of Intel X5690s (3.46 GHz), but for that price differential (almost 2x) vs. the speed differential (almost 1.04x), you have to have some unique situation, of which I'm unaware, for me to recommend the X5690s over the X5680s. 12 cores at 3.33 GHz vs. 8 cores at 3.33 GHz would be about 50% faster in highly threaded, solely CPU powered apps.
Do you also use CUDA powered apps? If you don't, for about $800 and for OpenCL GPU powered apps, you can get a new pair of R2 280Xs [
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1722681/ ] or a refurbished pair of ATI 7970s (both 6 GB) from Newegg. If you use CUDA powered apps and they're just as important to you as is FCPX, then you can get a pair of GTX 780 6GB for about $1.2K from Newegg, but the ATI R2 280Xs/HD 7970s would still be the better performers for Apple/certain Adobe GPU accelerated apps such as FCPX rendering and Photoshop's OpenCL accelerated Iris Blur filter. One 7970 is more powerful for OpenCL apps than a single GTX 670. However, the ATI's don't support CUDA and on the MacPro its not advisable to try to mix Nvidia CUDA cards with ATI cards. To power two GPUs (whether CUDA or ATI), you'd need an additional PSU like (the difficult to find) FSP BoosterX5. But, of course, you could get a couple of ATI 7950 Mac Edition (see, e.g., [
http://www.ebay.com/itm/ATI-Radeon-...753?pt=PCC_Video_TV_Cards&hash=item3ce6d016c1 ]) and that would be faster for FCPX than the single card that you already own. If those interest you, just contact MacVidCards.