Radeon 5770 or Quadro 4000 or wait?

[nanofrog]

Maybe 24GB would be closer to a "perfect match," but I'd rather have more RAM than find out 24 is just slightly not enough.

This is the best approach if at all possible, and given the lower cost of DDR3 vs. previous memory types (cost/unit capacity), this is more feasible than it has been in the past.

 

[Litework22]

Nvidia Quadro 4000 and/or significant RAM increase?

Are you noticing your RAM is usually maxed out? For me the bottleneck seems to be squarely the processor on rendering/resizing output... but I have the quad-core and 16GB of 1066mhz RAM. I'm wondering if I upgrade to the Hex-core which I see supports 1333mhz RAM, and swap out all my memory for faster, perhaps that would make a significant difference?

I haven't put the Beast to work yet but for Premiere tutoring (we're both nearing readiness). The final two costly items are the RAM upgrade -- I'm still w/the original 6GB -- and the addition of the Quadro 4000. I was planning to do both before January 1, but as mentioned, now I'm going to wait for positive feedback on the Nvidia card. I wonder how far I can get with RAM alone; Wonderspark really improved Premiere's performance via significantly increased RAM and Nanofrog gives that tactic his blessing... seems a path is appearing.

Can you share a link on that RAM? I can't find 16GB modules. All I found for hex-core 5,1 is:
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other World Computing/1333D3X8M32K/

Be happy to Xenophyte. I got it out of a Mac Pro Forum thread that was started by Philipma1957 last spring and was rekindled in July. I bookmarked the thread last march and have watched the price drop by over 50% (there is a link in the thread - I repeated it below). You may find the thread interesting and pertinent to the conversation:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1111184/
And here are links to the 8GB and 16GB modules I'm considering ATM:
http://www.superbiiz.com/detail.php...-1066-16GB-ECC-REG-Samsung-Chip-Server-Memory
http://www.superbiiz.com/detail.php...-DDR3-1333-8GB-ECC-REG-Original-Server-Memory
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other World Computing/8566D3Q16M48/
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other World Computing/1333D3X8M32K/

I wonder if Nanofrog would give his blessing on the 4x8GB configuration or, for a few dollars more, encourage 3x16GB???

 

[TheFuzz]

you won't see any major improvement in C4D or AE with the Quadro. Premiere will see some benefit from CUDA but C4D and AE don't utilize it. C4D actually doesn't see a whole lot of change from 5770>5870>Q4000.

 

[Xenophyte]

I have a program called Fan Control... so the fans are usually at their minimum speed.

Thanks, I forgot about Fan Control, I had used it briefly when my old Macbook fan was freaking out. I like what you're doing with it, I'll try that. Honestly though, my Mac Pro fans are much quieter than my OWC Qx2 RAID box, that thing is a noisy little beastie.

I noticed that the 16GBx3 RAM modules will downclock to 1066 as well. My 8GBx4 runs at 1333MHz.

8GBx4 runs @ 1333MHz = This seems like the next best upgrade for me with the Mac Pro 5,1 tower as I just got the Hex core 3.33 Xeon in the mail tonight and am about to install.

Thanks for all the advice, wonderspark!

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you won't see any major improvement in C4D or AE with the Quadro. Premiere will see some benefit from CUDA but C4D and AE don't utilize it. C4D actually doesn't see a whole lot of change from 5770>5870>Q4000.

That makes sense that After Effects doesn't use it since it does have a Render Queue but that's not Adobe Media Encoder, it is an AE-specific Render app from the looks of it.

After much digging I found an article on setting up AE render farms on Macs and PCs, sounds like you can even set up mixed-platform farms?
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/9.0/WS3878526689cb91655866c1103a4f2dff7-79a2a.html