Upgrade worth the money?

[Pjotr28]

I own a 2009 2.66ghz Mac Pro running Mountain Lion. Stuffed with ATI 4870, 12gb ram, 4 hard drives and a ssd card as start up drive. I use it most of the times for FCP 7, X and a little motion and AE.

The systems feels a sluggish recently. I've read a lot on the net and on MacRumors on CPU and GPU upgrades. For example a GT670 and a W3680 should give me a huge system boost. But do you guys think it's worth the money? The both will cost around 800 - 1000 euro's. Trading in my Mac Pro and buying a top of the bill iMac will cost the same. Why did you guys, who made the upgrade, choose for upgrading in stead of buying an iMac?

 

[derbothaus]

A W3680 and GTX670 will be quite a bit faster than even the top of the line most upgraded iMac. Otherwise if you really are asking the question you'll be just fine with an iMac. And you get a screen as a bonus

 

[Omnius]

It's always worth asking, does your ssd boot drive have trim enabled? How much free space is there? I ask because you indicate it's getting slow. Slowing down may indicate an easy fix as opposed to being inadequate for increased needs.

 

[Tesselator]

Why did you guys, who made the upgrade, choose for upgrading in stead of buying an iMac?

Aren't the reasons for choosing an expandable open system over a closed one self evident?


In your current case I would recommend increasing your RAM to 24 or 32GB. A faster video card will help as well. Another speed booster for the apps you mention is RAID0 with fast drives. SSDs if your projects are small or something like the 3 or 4 of the new Seagate 3TB drives if larger. I'm not sure how you have your 4-drives configured or which ones they are so I added that in. Here's the four seagates in RAID0:

​

Also see if turning off the dynamic pager doesn't help with the sluggishness:

In terminal enter:

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.dynamic_pager.plist​

followed by a reboot to turn it off. You can turn it on again with

sudo launchctl load -wF /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.dynamic_pager.plist​

.

 

[Pjotr28]

Thank you all.

I'm convinced in doing an upgrade of the video card. Perhaps a pc gtx670. I'll have a look at the trim thing of the ssd. What I forgot to mention is that my scratch disk all ready operates in RAID0.

I'll wait with the CPU and see what this brings. I could allways sell the GPU and Mac Pro when that new Mac Pro finally arrives. If it does....