MacPro Late 2012-Is it worth upgrading the Video Card?

[Darryl Ramm]

While I'm a big fan of SSD, especially NVMe SSD, I would not assume that will fix your CPU errors... you can do some quick testing by making sure your sessions fully load into disk cache, you have to set disk cache to a size (not "normal") and watching the disk cache meter turn green before doing anything. That will help mitigate many, but not all potential storage issues. If that does not solve CPU errors then I'd suspect adding SSD probably won't help.

But if you do add SATA SSD: motherboard SATA on the Cheesegrater classics is only SATA II, so you get better performance with a SATA III PCIe card, and either using a card with on board SATA drive mounts, or replacing the optical drive with a mount kit or an install kit in the existing SATA bay space. I suspect you may be out of PCIe slots so this is not an option. ... and still all slower than going with M.2 NVMe drives, but yes that needs an upgrade.

If you are getting CPU errors, plugins should be the main suspect and other folk report issues with waves, including in recent threads. It's also not clear through this whole thread what version of Pro Tools or macOS you are running. I hope you are on Pro Tools 2019.5 or later with the plugin processing improvements, not clear that will solve this problem, but I'd want to at least be running with those improvements.