Your plan is sound, welcome to the cMP world! You're already aboard the SSD train, good. All I have to say about that is how fast is fast enough? Putting an .M2 PCIe card is twice as fast, but for me anyway, I'm totally happy with my Samsung 850 Pro. If I had it to do over again, I'd actually buy the 256GB EVO because the difference that 10 MB/s provides = time to get a cup of coffee IF it's a multi-GB file I'm working with. I allowed myself to get caught up in them, but at the end of the day benchmarks are just numbers. Very few of them mean any appreciable difference to anyone but those very few who are truly using every bit of their computer's capabilities. If you're a professional working with HUGE files and time=money, I suppose that justifies the additional cost of a Pro on an .M2, but it doesn't seem that you are.
My strongest recommendation - I'm surprised no one else has made it - is a
USB 3.0 PCIe card. Absolutely awesome bang for your buck. There's a huge thread on the topic
here. The first post is up-to-date and really all you need to read, but you can read thru hundreds of posts if you like to be super informed. I recommend a card with independent controllers for each port because it future-proofs you to a certain extent. Sooner or later, you'll want/need to connect multiple devices. I happen to have several bare drives, so an external, hot swappable, USB 3.0 docking station, specifically,
this one, made perfect sense for me, but for example, NewEgg had a 5TB Seagate USB 3.0 drive for $139 just a few days ago. I have no affiliation with them but I also recommend signing up for their email deals...
Now, on to GPUs: The benefit of almost any of the AMD cards is that they are very, very easy to flash for full compatibility and functionality with Mac OS and Windows - i.e. boot screens. I really wanted a better box for gaming. First I bought and flashed a 7950. I got caught up in benchmarks and "upgraded" to a 7970 GHz edition, and finally, I sold both of those and got an EVGA GTX 980 Classified for the best Windows gaming performance without going totally over the top for a Ti or Titan. I'm not spending $200 for a few more fps.
The 79xx cards gave me boot screens, the GTX 980 gives me awesome performance under Windows and OS X, but I have no boot screens and that is a fairly significant problem. Also of note: I chose the Gigabyte flavor of both the 79xx because they were the highest factory overclocked cards and for their Windforce triple fan cooling. They were still fairly noisy. Audible at idle and very noticeable under load. The EVGA GTX 980 is absolutely silent at idle and barely noticeable under load.
Lastly: After a TON of research, I strongly recommend that you don't let Boot Camp handle your Windows installation. The hybrid MBR that it creates is not stable in the long run for either Windows or OS X. I'm sure that plenty of people will say that they've had no problems dual booting for years with Boot Camp, but you are now in a world where no company will provide any support for you. I've read many reports of Windows becoming suddenly unbootable and very difficult to recover because Windows is not designed to recognize the hybrid MBR Apple hacked together to accommodate dual booting when Windows booted from BIOS and OS X booted from Apple's non-standard implementation of EFI on GPT formatted disks. Microsoft has moved on from BIOS and now fully supports the UEFI standard. There's no reason to use BIOS emulation. After Boot Camp broke my Windows installation twice, I decided to figure out how to install Windows without Boot Camp's hacked MBR and see if it was more stable. It is. And Microsoft has adopted UEFI fully. There's no reason to emulate BIOS.
You will need to use Boot Camp to download the files for your Mac Pro. You'll need to install drivers in Windows after you've got it running, but don't select to install Windows, just download the drivers.
To install and use Windows 8.1 or Windows 10 in (U)EFI mode, these are the steps I had to take:
1. Under Windows, download the ISO file for Windows 8 or 10, whichever you prefer. Note that for the time being, your Windows 8 key will allow you to install Windows 10. So if you're going to use 10 anyway, you can skip installing 8 and upgrading to 10.
2. Prepare the USB Flash Drive
In Windows, insert a >4GB USB flash drive that you can format.
Open Windows command prompt in Admin mode and type:
then
Identify the flash drive. Be very careful. There is no "are you sure?" dialog. You are the Super User and you're about to format a drive. Anything on it will be gone. Make it easy and remove the drives that are not part of this process.
where n is the number diskpart has assigned to the flash drive. Diskpart will confirm that disk n has been selected.
Diskpart doesn't warn you, I am. Don't f up!
Diskpart confirms the clean...
Diskpart confirms
Code:
format quick fs=fat32 label=EFIWinInst
label can be whatever you want to call it, enclose in quotes in you want spaces, i.e. "Windows 10 Install"
Active = bootable
3. Mount the ISO file by any number of means, I right-clicked the ISO file and selected "mount"
4. Copy everything EXCEPT the file "bootmgr" to the root of the USB drive. You DO need bootmgr.efi so turn on "view file extensions" and hidden files if it isn't.
5. Restart the Mac holding the alt/option key.
6. Select EFI boot - Again, it makes it very easy if the only drives are the flash drive and the target drive...
7. Have a copy of your Windows 8 or 10 license key handy and follow the instructions. You'll need to format the target drive to install.
When it's done, you'll have a bona-fide UEFI install of Windows. Assuming that the GPU you choose has boot screens, DO NOT use the Startup Disk control panel in OS X. When you want to switch between OS X and Windows, shut down/restart with alt/option and select the desired OS. If you use Startup Disk, OS X will hack the MBR and hybridize it. That may or may not break Windows, ymmv.
If you decide to get a GTX 980 or other difficult to flash card, lmk and I'll tell you the ugly workaround I'm using until I can afford to pay MacVidCards $180 for the GTX 980 rom.
Again, I'm sure people will chime in and tell you to let Apple handle all of this and that they have no problems with Boot Camp, but for every one of them they is at least one other who's lost everything on the Windows disk, the Mac disk or both because Windows or OS X tried to fix something in the boot process and rendered the disk not only unbootable, but also unrecoverable. GPT creates a protected MBR for a reason. Contemporary and future versions of both Windows and Mac OS are and will be (U)EFI based. You're in an unsupported configuration as it is. In a couple of years, booting from BIOS will be a memory like booting from floppy disks - if you're even old enough to remember that.
Cheers
