Upgrading to Mac Pro 5,1 from 3,1

[sethkj]

Hey y'all,

So I'm in the market for a Mac Pro 5,1 as I recently sold my trusty old 3,1. I didn't do much to the old one other than added more memory, upgraded the graphics card with a GTX 680 Ti Boost (non-EFI) and added a SSD as my boot drive. After doing all that I realized it still wasn't fast enough - and with the bent leg I figured it was time to upgrade.

Mainly what I do on the machine is play World of Warcraft, games from App Store, emailing, web surfing, MS Office apps, and a little bit of iMovie. (I would like to learn more about video editing, etc.) I do also run BootCamp on the machine too. While I do realize that an iMac would be a better setup, keep in mind that I have two 27" Asus LCD monitors that I would like to keep, and I love the expandability of the Mac Pro.

My budget would be around $2,500. I could go more if I needed to. I've shopped on eBay, Craigslist, most of the online used Mac sites until I came across this site:

www.ibuildmacs.com

This is what I priced out at what I want:
https://ibuildmacs.com/configurations/18538/

My question is this: Would I need a 6 core or a 12 core Mac Pro? What would be a good computer to start off with and build from there?

I found this Mac Pro on Craigslist, but my gut is telling me its too good to be true.
http://dallas.craigslist.org/dal/sys/5476078911.html

I am also looking at this one too:
http://dallas.craigslist.org/dal/sys/5528033811.html

Any input is greatly appreciated! Thanks guys!

- Seth

 

[austinpike]

What exactly wasn't "fast enough" with your old machine?

I don't see any uses listed that will utilize 6 cores, let alone 12 - they would be sitting idle 98% of the time. Unless you really get into crunching video. I guess I'd look for the cheapest 4,1 or 5,1 single CPU you can find and and max it out to a Xeon 3.46. But I don't think it is going to be noticeably faster than the 3,1 on day-to-day tasks.

 

[sethkj]

So basically a 6 or 12 core would be for something like video editing or photoshopping, etc right? I guess the graphic card wasn't fast enough (I could have upgrade it). The memory alone was expensive and that's why I sold it. So a maxed out 3.46Ghz would benefit me?

Thanks for all your help!

 

[orph]

why not an imac? a good i5/i7 imac will be relay fast, make less nose + relay good speakers and the display is nice.
look at geekbench the top scores are imacs now.
id even look at macmins or laptops, plug in a keyboard and external display ^^
your gtx680 was nice but the imacs have GPU's that are about 4 years newer

if not get a single core and upgrade the cpu to a fast 4c but it will be a lot slower than a new imac
both macmins and imacs can run external displays

just had a look you can get the top 27" imac with the base i5 but the upgraded GPU 4GB vram in your budget, if you need to you can just add some ram later & it has two display outputs if you want to keep your displays