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.
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Originally Posted by skizzo
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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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