Upgrading a Mac Pro 5.1 12core 2.4Ghz
 

So I am on a 5.1 Mac Pro with 12 cores and 2.44GHZ, stock 5770 video card, and 40GB ram (4 x 2gb sticks and 4 x 8GB sticks)

My 5.1 one sessions on an HDN card are getting larger over the years and with the plethora of CPU hungry plugs over the years, I need way more power. My main OS is on an SSD on 10.12.6 and recently upgraded to 2018.12 from PT11. And with 2019 with 384 tracks... well will need every ounce of power I can get out of the Mac.

The options I am looking at:
1) upgrade CPU to 3.46GHz?
2) upgrade ram to 6 x 8GB sticks (getting faster triple speeds?)?
3) upgrade to a XFX RX 580 GPU?

Any of your opinions or reviews from personal experience would be greatly appreciated on which route to go with and how much it can help.

As I am sure this will help others too.

Re: Upgrading a Mac Pro 5.1 12core 2.4Ghz
 

1) you'll get the 3.33Ghz CPU (X5680) much cheaper and there's no noticeable difference and the X5680 runs cooler
2) make sure to get the correct speed rating (1333 and not 1066) and yes 2x3 Sticks if you want speed
3) that GFX is plenty fast, I got myself a "slower" one on eBay, an AMD Radeon R9 280X which has been flashed for Mac

Re: Upgrading a Mac Pro 5.1 12core 2.4Ghz
 

Thank you for the reply

1) Would it run that much cooler? heat IS a huge issue, but I always thought more GHz is always better? I found a phenomenal price on trading mine in for a 12c 3.46GHz

2) most definitely getting 1333, but on the fence on 2x3 vs all all 8 slots. (will be getting 8GB sticks). so it comes down to more speed at 2x3 with a total of 48GB or 2x4 at 64GB?

3) I've seen the XFX RX 580 all over the place (B&H, Amazon, etc) for $189. I know I loose the boot screen which doesn't make a difference to me (I'll keep my 5770 for backup anyways) but would a much larger 8GB with some HUGE fans, but would having a far more powerful GPU help in any shape or form, lifting any CPU power giving me more juice in PT?

Re: Upgrading a Mac Pro 5.1 12core 2.4Ghz
 

Heat isn't an issue in a desktop. Sure a faster cpu will run a bit hotter but not enough to matter. I have a single 3.46GHz hex core cpu in my 2012 cheesegrater and it's been aces. A dual cpu version at that speed would be killer.

For ram using only 3 slots instead of 4 is definitely the way to go. Being you have a dual cpu unit and if you want to max performance I'd go with 3 ram slots filled in each side. 3 slots at 16 gig ram gives 48 gig and do the same on the other side for a total of 96 gig ram. You can never have too much ram. You really want to have all ram the same size/specs. Skip the 8 gig sticks.

You only lose the boot screen if the card isn't flashed. To be honest swapping out the video card should be the last thing you do. Get your cpu setup finalized and working along with the ram and THEN see if you really need a different video card. Having a faster/more hefty card won't really help cpu power any. It might make PT run a bit better but that gain is not coming from the cpu doing any less work - it's all on the gpu.

Your system ssd - is that on a pcie card or in a drive bay? If the latter pop that baby on a pcie card- better performance.

Re: Upgrading a Mac Pro 5.1 12core 2.4Ghz
 

Thank you for the reply. So yes I have a SSD (Samsung 1TH evo 850) in a drive bay. I was thing of getting a OWC Accelsior S: PCIe to 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD Host Adapter. How much would that help in real world usage on working in a large 5.1 mix session?

it's only $50 for the adapter to double my read/write speeds from 250's to 500

The other option is to get a Samsung 970 EVO Plus Series - 1TB PCIe NVMe - M.2 Internal SSD which the speeds are around 3,000

Any opinions on this route?

Thanks again

Re: Upgrading a Mac Pro 5.1 12core 2.4Ghz
 

System response will be a lot snappier as will boot times with that 850 on the Acelsior card. And even faster with the nvme card. Either option won't give you more processing power though. The person to get in touch with here about the nvme business is Darryl Ramm as he's the expert on that.

Re: Upgrading a Mac Pro 5.1 12core 2.4Ghz
 

I upgraded my MacPro 5,1 to 12 core 3.46GHZ and glad I did. Much smother performance with Pro Tools 12 and above (12 is when things stated to get slow).

Re: Upgrading a Mac Pro 5.1 12core 2.4Ghz
 

DO NOT GET THE 970 EVO PLUS!!!!!

It is incompatible with macOS! you will have all sorts of system instability problems. I do no think this is intentional on Samsung. I should say its a "bug" with the SSD and macOS. Perhaps with future firmware updates for that model it could be more stable for macOS but right now every real mac and hackintosh has reported issues with this. just do some research

The 970 EVO and PRO models are compatible with macOS

You may notice a little more snappiness from your system using a PCIe drive but it will not make a noticeable real world difference other than transfer speeds. PCIe SSDs actually take longer to boot than SATA SSDs

I would recommend getting the fastest clock CPU you can. If you gotta stick to the budget than X5680's are usually about half the cost of X5690's so cost to performance wise the better VALUE is X5680's. But if you want max performance then get the fastest CPU you can install

Also unless you do video work or game the HD5770 works fine for me, cannot imagine why it wouldn't for anyone else. I even used a GT120 on this setup. I also have an RX580 but that is in my 2nd cMP that I use to game on Windows 10

Re: Upgrading a Mac Pro 5.1 12core 2.4Ghz
 

off the wall, I also did the same upgrade for my 2010, runs really smooth. 3.46 Xeons, 96ram, (3) sticks on each tray. But what puzzles me that on my 2008 dual tray I could record with effects inserts and record @ 32buffer, but with this I can't, tells me to increase the buffer, and pro Tools defaults at 10cores ?


Is there something I need to adjust with the cores ? THANKS:confused:

Re: Upgrading a Mac Pro 5.1 12core 2.4Ghz
 

NVMe SSD can work as boot drives on older Mac Pros, IIRC you need to go for Mojave and boot ROM 14 or later (included in recent Mojave versions)--lots of info online about what to do. Otherwise if you want PCIe SSD you are stuck on AHCI SSD drives that are hard to find and slower (mostly becase now they are older designs more than AHCI being slower...which it is). If it's an option I'd sure go NVMe/PCIe over SATA. So maybe one thing here where I was suggesting getting another SSD for testing but in thinking about it as a part of a move to Mojave then I'd personally grab that a 970 Evo SSD and use that for testing and hopefully final use with Mojave. M.2 SSD drive pricing is just getting in the ballpark of SATA 2.5" drives it's hard to look at a SATA drive. (I will never go back, I just purchased a 2TB Samsung X5 and am swapping my 2016 MacBook Pro with 1TB SSD for a 2019 with 2 TB internal SSD... just wonderful drives, even with the stupid Apple tax, or is that Apple tax of stupid purchasers?).

Bearing in mind you only get PCIe 2 performance on the cheesegrater (guess we need to call them cheese greater classics now, or fine cheesegrater?) but that mostly limits sequential IO, you still get fantastic random IO performance and that's an area where NVMe vs older ACHI helps as well.

Again back to the big picture here, and other folks saying just upgrade the hardware because it worked great for them... here you likely have a specific plugin/CPU issue. Seemingly related to graphics rendering. My suggestion is explore that a little before trying a hardware upgrade. Do one thing at a time. If a Mojave test helps you may be fine as is, or if it helps some and then maybe upgrade.

AFAIK firmware updates to the 970 Evo Plus fix issues with macOS, but may reduce performance back to 970 Evo performance... so maybe do more research and see or yep just go with the Evo or Pro to be sure. Not the first time that Samsung has gooched SSD firmware... but OTOH they are probably the only SSD vendor who controls all of or their ecosystem and can likely fix stuff better and quicker than any other vendor. That's one of the reasons I like their stuff.

*always* check for firmware updates with an SSD.

I would be very surprised if a SATA SSD drive boots faster than a PCIe drive. If that seems to be happening something else is going on. Start by making sure there are not extra startup items starting, and try resetting SMC/NVRAM. It's speed of boot, and application startup that I expect many people to notice with a PCIe SSD boot/system drive.