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Upgrades for 2012 3.2GHz quad I picked up super cheap

D

diamondschwin

macrumors member
Original poster
Jan 2, 2002
84
0
I got the deal of the century on a 3.2 quad 2012, including an extended applecare warranty I nabbed it for $500 from a friend who worked at a tv facility closing down!

I am thinking of starting with either a 12gb or 24gb ram upgrade, and a 2tb softraid built from two 1tb wd blacks. then an SSD OS drive and thinking maybe of getting a nvidia 660 down the line, but the 5770 should hold up for now.

I will be doing mostly work in aperture and photoshop/illustrator, some light video editing in premiere and audio work in pro tools.

Does this sound like a good plan? I am trying to stay away from CPU upgrades although I know a hex would make this machine really fly, right now it geekbenches lower than my 2009 2.26 8 core at work.
 
Wow your a lucky guy.

I think a hex would be a very good upgrade and will give your 8 core a run for its money.
 
Sweet deal i got a bare bone 2010 5.1 for 650 recently.
How about a pcie sata card for full sata III speeds for your ssd. The sonnet tempo is good as well as the velocity x2. If u ever do come around to cpu upgrades the 3680 will make your pro a beast. I recently did the upgrade for a friend and that thing is going blow for blow with my 12 core.. Well not really but shows good sportmanship..my 12 core is still the heavyweight champ :D
 
Well, the hex will give you 2 more cores, it's 133 Mhz faster, and you get about 4mb of additional cache. Unless you plan on using the additional cores, I doubt you'll see much improvement on anything other than geek bench. Great find btw!
 
Yeah I don't want to start with a CPU upgrade. Especially since I still have 2 years of warranty left. Also in actual usage I don't know how big the jump would be, I am not rendering tons of things all the time.
 
diamondschwin said:
I got the deal of the century on a 3.2 quad 2012, including an extended applecare warranty I nabbed it for $500 from a friend who worked at a tv facility closing down!

I am thinking of starting with either a 12gb or 24gb ram upgrade, and a 2tb softraid built from two 1tb wd blacks. then an SSD OS drive and thinking maybe of getting a nvidia 660 down the line, but the 5770 should hold up for now.

I will be doing mostly work in aperture and photoshop/illustrator, some light video editing in premiere and audio work in pro tools.

Does this sound like a good plan? I am trying to stay away from CPU upgrades although I know a hex would make this machine really fly, right now it geekbenches lower than my 2009 2.26 8 core at work.
Click to expand...

Wow Great Deal! :) Yep your plan is fine in upgrading ram and adding softraid and SSD. Photoshop and Illustrator works fine with fewer cores as far as I know and with light video editing your machine should be good. And later you can upgrade the CPU. Have fun and enjoy your new toy.
 
diamondschwin said:
I am thinking of starting with either a 12gb or 24gb ram upgrade, and a 2tb softraid built from two 1tb wd blacks. then an SSD OS drive and thinking maybe of getting a nvidia 660 down the line, but the 5770 should hold up for now.
Click to expand...
How much RAM does it have now? Do you know if you actually need more RAM? Don't upgrade just for the sake of upgrading.

The SSD is one of the single best improvements you can make in overall system performance. Get as big as you can afford, but even if it's only for OS X & apps, it will make a HUGE difference.

You might also want to look into getting a USB 3.0 card if you do a lot of backups to external drives.

What a great deal! But don't make it a bad deal by sinking too much money into it. Only buy what you really need. Best of luck with it!
 
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