MP 1,1-5,1 Upgrade Report & Benchmarks (5,1)

[ybakos2]

I thought I'd share the results of a recent round of upgrades made to my mid-2010 Mac Pro 5,1. Running High Sierra 10.13.6.

Old

• Xeon W3565 @ 3.2GHz (Single quad-core Nehalem)
• 32 GB 1066 DRAM (4 x 8GB)
• Sapphire Radeon 7950 Mac Edition (slot 2, x16)
• 4x Crucial 1TB SSDs in the bays. (4 1TB backup drives)
• 4x Samsung 970 1TB on a Syba SI-PEX40129 (slot 1, x16)
• Sonnet Allegro Pro USB 3.2 (slot 4, x4)

New

• Xeon 5690 @ 3.46Ghz (Single six-core Westmere)
• 64GB 1333 DRAM (4 x 16GB)
• Sapphire RX 580 Nitro+ Special Ed (slot 2, x16)

Benchmarks

	Old	New
Cinebench	1060	1692
Geekbench CPU	592 / 2223	678 / 3683
Geekbench GPU	25793	46517
Heaven	810, 32fps @ 2560x1600	1292, 51fps @ 2560x1600

In a "real work" test, a Screenflow export encoding that took 4:49 before, takes 3:00 now.

I also tested with ram only in slots 1 - 3 (48GB) and while that run was a _little_ faster, I chalk that up to nominal variance in the benchmarking. In other words, this Mac Pro 5,1 is using the latest Xeon and 64GB of RAM at 1333MHz.

 

[h9826790]

If you often need screen recording, go Mojave, and use the RX580's hardware encoding is easier and faster (real time 60FPS, no need to wait for encoding, just record and save).

 

[Macsonic]

I thought I'd share the results of a recent round of upgrades made to my mid-2010 Mac Pro 5,1. Running High Sierra 10.13.6.

Old

• Xeon W3565 @ 3.2GHz (Single quad-core Nehalem)
• 32 GB 1066 DRAM (4 x 8GB)
• Sapphire Radeon 7950 Mac Edition (slot 2, x16)
• 4x Crucial 1TB SSDs in the bays. (4 1TB backup drives)
• 4x Samsung 970 1TB on a Syba SI-PEX40129 (slot 1, x16)
• Sonnet Allegro Pro USB 3.2 (slot 4, x4)

New

• Xeon 5690 @ 3.46Ghz (Single six-core Westmere)
• 64GB 1333 DRAM (4 x 16GB)
• Sapphire RX 580 Nitro+ Special Ed (slot 2, x16)

Benchmarks

	Old	New
Cinebench	1060	1692
Geekbench CPU	592 / 2223	678 / 3683
Geekbench GPU	25793	46517
Heaven	810, 32fps @ 2560x1600	1292, 51fps @ 2560x1600

In a "real work" test, a Screenflow export encoding that took 4:49 before, takes 3:00 now.

I also tested with ram only in slots 1 - 3 (48GB) and while that run was a _little_ faster, I chalk that up to nominal variance in the benchmarking. In other words, this Mac Pro 5,1 is using the latest Xeon and 64GB of RAM at 1333MHz.

Congrats on your upgrades. About the Sapphire RX 580 Nitro+ Special Edition blue, did you encounter any random shutdowns using the RX580 NITRO? Many months ago I was considering the Nitro but was worried on its power requirements. Thanks