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Received 2012 Mac Pro 12-core, Best upgrades for $400 budget?

L

looking4anotebo

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jul 9, 2007
300
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I am new to the Mac Pro scene, not Mac computers, and my cousin just gave me a mid 2012 Pro with 12 cores, 3.06ghz, dual 5770 Radeon, 16gb Ram, (2) Western Digital 1TB Black Hard Drives.

I have a crucial m500 240gb ssd that I want to put in it right away so I ordered a sled adapter. I'm looking to spend $130 for 32GB of Hynix ddr3 to upgrade that.

What would you recommend I do with a small budget to max out the potential of this computer? I'm going to be using it for Final Cut Pro X, Lightroom, and some occasional gaming.

Would it be worth upgrading the graphics card and selling the two 5770's?

Any input would be appreciated.
 
Two ATI 5770 seem to be a good choice for Final Cut Pro X (OpenCL). But not for gaming.

Adobe Lightroom uses CUDA, therefore a Nvidia GTX card would be suitable. Also for gaming.

I recommend a SATA 6G PCI Express card for the Crucial M500 SSD.
 
Synchro3 said:
If you are editing Video a 6G SATA card is suitable.

I use a FASTA-6GU3 Pro because each SATA/eSATA port is bootable: http://www.caldigit.com/Fasta-6GU3pro/

But you have to organize power for the internal SSD's: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/motherboard-to-pcie-sata-power.1712884/#post-18855446
Click to expand...


I'm a video editing newb so I don't know how much stuff I need. If I only used 1 ssd, would this be a good choice?

http://www.amazon.com/SEDNA-Express...0560&sr=8-1&keywords=SATA+6G+PCI+Express+card
 
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looking4anotebo said:
I am new to the Mac Pro scene, not Mac computers, and my cousin just gave me a mid 2012 Pro with 12 cores, 3.06ghz, dual 5770 Radeon, 16gb Ram, (2) Western Digital 1TB Black Hard Drives.

I have a crucial m500 240gb ssd that I want to put in it right away so I ordered a sled adapter. I'm looking to spend $130 for 32GB of Hynix ddr3 to upgrade that.

What would you recommend I do with a small budget to max out the potential of this computer? I'm going to be using it for Final Cut Pro X, Lightroom, and some occasional gaming.

Would it be worth upgrading the graphics card and selling the two 5770's?

Any input would be appreciated.
Click to expand...

Damn, Why can't any of my cousins do that for me?
 
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PC3-10600R ram will work in a 4,1 or 5,1 Mac Pro, with the exception (as stated in the Apple guide) that all the ram must be registered, a mix of Registered and normal ECC will never work. But you can use any size, not just the 8 GB chips the manual ways will work, I have tested and 2gb, 4gb and 8gb and 16gb 10600R sticks of ram all work in a mac.

The advantage of this is that Registered is significantly cheaper than the other types.
 
Bubalight said:
PC3-10600R ram will work in a 4,1 or 5,1 Mac Pro, with the exception (as stated in the Apple guide) that all the ram must be registered, a mix of Registered and normal ECC will never work. But you can use any size, not just the 8 GB chips the manual ways will work, I have tested and 2gb, 4gb and 8gb and 16gb 10600R sticks of ram all work in a mac.

The advantage of this is that Registered is significantly cheaper than the other types.
Click to expand...


Yeah, i've read that so I won't mix with the ram in there now. I've also read about only using 3 of the ram slots for max speed. Do you think it would be worth it to go with three 16gb sticks for a total of 48GB over eight 4gb sticks for a total of 32gb when the cost difference is $350 or so?
 
If Lightroom uses OpenCl then better off OP will be with AMD GPU.
 
looking4anotebo said:
Yeah, i've read that so I won't mix with the ram in there now. I've also read about only using 3 of the ram slots for max speed. Do you think it would be worth it to go with three 16gb sticks for a total of 48GB over eight 4gb sticks for a total of 32gb when the cost difference is $350 or so?
Click to expand...

I'd go with the 16gb sticks. What they are talking about is that the 3rd & 4th (and 7th & 8th) stick share the same memory channel. That affects some programs more than others. It's kinda the underwear answer - It depends.
 
looking4anotebo said:
for Final Cut Pro X, Lightroom, and some occasional gaming.
Click to expand...

For these kind of usage, 3x16 or 4x8 should not make any noticeable difference regarding optimising the triple channel architecture. However, if money is not an issue. I will go for 3x16, because more RAM is always better, especially in the current OS, basically it can use all your extra RAM as cache to speed up the system.
 
looking4anotebo said:
Did not know that, now I'm going to try and find 8gb sticks for around $40 a piece.

Thanks everyone for all the good suggestions.
Click to expand...
When finding stick..check to see if they contain the efrom chip that mac uses to optimize OS X performance. Not all manufacturers produce ram for mac. macsales.com and even amazon is place to look for mac memory.
 
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koyoot said:
If Lightroom uses OpenCl then better off OP will be with AMD GPU.
Click to expand...

There's more OpenCL than CUDA in Adobe's apps but then again so few of their function use any GPGPU. They have invested their resources in the Mercury Engine and have said the Metal performance demos at the developer's conference were just concepts.
 
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