Juice up a MacPro with video card(s) for Photoshop CS6?

[QuakeProd]

Hello to all.

I see some RAM and Vid card talk is going on, and I was wondering about a couple things myself, if you wouldn't mind. Plus I'm trying to build up my knowledge.

I recently got my hands on a 09 A1289 mac pro (2.66 quad core). Came with 640GB HD, standard graphics card (GT 120 512MB), and 6GB of RAM. Pretty standard machine, but pretty fast.

Is there any tweaks to get apps running better? like photoshop? Or will i just have to really upgrade? Photoshops likes to randomly crash often, but i can open it back up within 3 seconds.. just wish it would stay open.



I plan on getting a couple sticks of 8GB to total 16GB (plus what i already have), and looking into the GTX 570 1.25GB (don't care much for boot screen, starts up fairly quick). Will these both boost up performance with Photoshop/Adobe? If i didn't get the RAM, do you think the GTX 570 would be enough of a significance by itself?


Thanks for any help.

 

[npaisnel]

I have similar situation
08 Mac Pro
Twin quad core 3.ghz
Twin ATI 2600 cards
18gb ram
Boot disk & Apps is on 120 gb SSD
Data / scratch on separate HDD
User folders on another HDD

Even with over 200 layers the other day, I barely saw RAM usage rise over 12gb.

I upgraded to a 4870 1gb graphics card, and have not noticed much or any improvement.

Best advice I have seen is to get a PCIe card that allows fitment of high speed SATA3 6gb/s SSD to the PCIe slots so you get faster read write. You use that disk as the photoshop scratch disk.

Get something like iStatPro widget and while Photoshop is running a heavy task, check RAM usage and processor load. On heavy tasks my machine is showing all 8 cores up at. 95-99%


If the machine is new to you. First job do a complete clean re install of the OS. You can download the new Mavericks 10.9 for free from App Store.

If I were you I would.
Get SSD For OSX Boot drive
Bit more RAM
Move current HDD to slot 2.
Boot from that HDD
Clean install on to new SSD
Don't use any of the import or migration wizards. That only risks copying problems over from old machine.
Once installed, manually copy any data or apps you need to new drive. ..
Reformat old HDD
Search for instructions on how to move the User Folder to another HDD. Move your user folder to the now clean old drive
Fit PCIe SATA 3 SSD in spare slot
Set photoshop preferences to use the PCIe HDD as scratch disk