MacPro Upgrade question

I have a friend who's looking to install FCPX on his MacPro 3,1. 2x2.8GHz Quad Core.

The MacAppStore stopped him due to the graphics card that he's got, and older Radion 2600.

I guess I have two questions.

He can upgrade to either the 5770 or 5870. As far as FCPX is concerned, would the 5870 be worth the extra money?

OR would he be better to spend the money on more RAM, as he's currently running only 6GB.

OR should he really spring for both.

Thanks for the advice.

Both will help a great deal. Personally I'd never touch FCP X with less than 8GB RAM, 16 if you can afford it (Other World Computing is great for price and service).

Not sure about graphic card compatibility. I have the HD 4870 in my 2007 Mac Pro and am very happy with it. Considering either replacing everything with a MBP, or, just upgrading my own graphic card. Just need to verify compatibility with the 5870.

I have students recently who found major performance improvements with FCP X and Motion 5 from upgrading just RAM, just GPU, and super major improvements by upgrading both. So yeah, I know first hand both will help.

You really need both. I upgraded my 2009 Mac Pro with a HD4870 and added 24GB RAM along with a SSD boot disc. Programs like Photoshop and Aperture became unbelievably snappy to use but FCPX still gave me disc speed warnings and was a pain to edit with.

As a final solution I added a PCIe card and bought a G-Tech drive to use just for editing (connected via eSata) and it became much better. It's ok with small projects now but if you start using lots of effects it gets bogged down quite quickly.

I have ordered a new MacBook Retina to use now.

I upgraded my old 2006 Mac Pro to the 5770 card mainly because I wanted to purchase the 27" LED Cinema Display. It works like a charm, only I'm limited to running 2 displays on the MacPro 1,1. Upgrade the RAM, it's totally needed.

Why would you want more than 2 displays? Especially on a single GPU?

One thing to remember about multiple displays is that when you hook up a second one, you cut the available GPU and VRAM resources available to your apps in half. They only get to access the resources allocated to the main display. Connect a second one, it allocates half it's resources to the secondary display, and none of that is available to apps any longer.

Beefier cards won't show this too much, but I've seen systems where Motion and AE show very noticeable differences depending on if a second display is connected at boot time or now.

So for dual display systems, yeas, get the most powerful GPU you can afford for that system.

I have three 2-TB internal drives and that's about all the speed I need. If you do very large, complex projects a RAID 1 on an eSATA will work great. Just be sure the drives in that RAID are swappable. Many small RAID enclosures won't let you swap, so if one goes bad even with RAID 1 you've lost everything.

I'd put an SSD in my tower, but, I have a 1TB system drive and it's got plenty on it. SSD's aren't big enough for me yet, nor are they what I'd consider "affordable" for most small studios. But if you can get one, and you don't need that much space, they're nice.

I recently upgraded to the 5870. I had done some research that indicated there was a definite boost vs. the 5770 so I went for it. The research also indicated there wasn't anything to be gained going for the 6870.

I spent an hour or so googling the differences and that was the takeaway. Try "ATI 5770 vs 5870" and follow the threads.

FWIW, you can buy them more cheaply on ebay but I went through Apple to get the warranty and support.

Given the the fact that there are no real new Mac Pros this year, I'm glad I went for top of the line. FWIW, I have 32 gigs of Ram.

But I still get beach balls and freezes on FCPX. I chalk it up to the lack of maturity in the software.

I also cut on my late 2011 MBP, and the performance seems about equal--for heaven's sake.

screendor wrote: I recently upgraded to the 5870. I had done some research that indicated there was a definite boost vs. the 5770 so I went for it. The research also indicated there wasn't anything to be gained going for the 6870....

FWIW, I have 32 gigs of Ram. But I still get beach balls and freezes on FCPX. I chalk it up to the lack of maturity in the software.

I also cut on my late 2011 MBP, and the performance seems about equal--for heaven's sake.

I do most of my editing on my iMac with 16 GB RAM and the 2 GB graphics card and I hardly ever get a spinning beach ball. So I don't think what you're seeing is a "lack of maturity of the software". My iMac is also a dedicated editing machine, meaning I don't have a lot of other software of it and I don't do much else with it but edit. So, maybe that's why I hardly ever have any spinning beach balls, or freeze ups.

As far as the 5870 card for my 2006 Mac Pro, I forget why I went with it versus the 5870, is seems to me the 5870 wasn't compatible with my old Mac Pro 1,1 (Even though Apple won't tell you anywhere that the 5870 is compatible with that year Mac Pro).

Remember that CPU plays the most major factor, still.

I don't see how having other software sitting idle on a computer effects how a specific app will run.

I have a PC XFX 6870 Radeon in a MacPro 1.1. Works oob and much faster than original 7300. Only real issue with using PC version is there is no grey screen with spinning wheel while booting. Log-in screen is first screen to show. Vastly cheaper than Apple branded 5770/5870 cards, both of which work fine in all MP's.
FCPX and App Store require later GPU to download, although I have read X will run on earlier cards, but why would you?
Get the PC cards, spend $ on ram=best bang for buck.

Exactly what I did. Went with the 5770 because it was cheap and I wasn't sure if I'd want to stay with FCP X. My only issue with the card is that sometimes I get flickering noise on one monitor. A restart always fixes the problem.

As to using two monitors, for me it's absolute essential. I just can't work efficiently off one.
I'm sure many would agree and it's why Apple needs to make this software more 2 monitor friendly for the professionals to start adopting it.

Now a question on upgrading the MacPro.

Has anyone here tried adding an SSD drive in one of the optical bays? Seeing as how it's going to be quite a while before we learn of Apple's next pro machine I was thinking of adding one in an attempt to keep the old girl up to speed.

Thoughts?

Seanus, You don't say if SSD is for boot or media. Also not sure which Mac you have and only the last couple support the latest 6Gb/s transfers to take full advantage of speed. Having said all that, IMHO adding SSD will speed things up. Several ways to go for maximum speed, adding PCIe solid state card like the Accelsior by OWC, a PCIe card to mount SSD to or using SSD directly in a internal bay including the optical bay. Going direct bay may give you only 3G speeds even with a 6G drive. I'd still buy the faster drive and use in next computer even operating at slower speed.
Might want to check out these sites/articles:
on Accelsior card. www.barefeats.com/hard150.html
General article on MacPro soup-up: www.barefeats.com/ssd6g02.html
It's only $$$ after all.

I work very efficiently off of one monitor. Well, it is a 30" though.

Even with my 27" iMac, I've got it in the back of my mind to buy a refurb 27" ACD at some point down the line. Regardless of screen size, the single 16x10 screen means I'm always shuffling to get the most space for specific tasks. A second monitor for the event library will be the bees knees.

My only problem is how to fit 2x27" displays AND my 21" JVC Studio monitor on this desk!

I've got the 27" LED display on my desk, using it with my Mac Pro. I have a 24" Dell setting vertically to the left of is that I use as a spill over for other apps. Works great until I go to full screen, then I basically lose that 24" monitor. But, nothing says you have to go full screen. In any case, I don't do much editing on the Mac Pro these days. Editing is mostly done on the iMac.

BenB wrote: Remember that CPU plays the most major factor, still.

I don't see how having other software sitting idle on a computer effects how a specific app will run.

Actually, I completely disagree with you on this one. The graphics card, RAM, and speed of the drives are at a point that overwhelms the CPU. Case in point, most of the time in FCPX the activity monitor hovers CPU usage around 30-40% of available system resources. I rarely see beachballing or crashing (and when I do the culprit is most likely a corrupt video file, which happens far more than you think!)

Only when rendering or exporting do I max out my CPU.

Get a faster graphics card. If you want to cut projects more than a few minutes long with more than a hundred clips or so, get more RAM.

CPU is your systems heart and soul. Simple IT fact of life. But all the components effect each other. CPU usage percentage reflects nothing about how fast it's processing bytes of data.

My point was more that on most systems you'll notice far better performance improvements by upping the graphics card rather than choosing between a 2.3Ghz and 2.7Ghz processor (for example). Because of this, I no longer feel that processor speed is as important as it once was and given limited budget, I'd opt for a better graphics card and more RAM.

This is seen in tests on Barefeats where a Macbook Pro runs hand in hand with a Mac Pro running with double the number of processors at much greater speed (2.3Ghz vs. 3.3Ghz I believe).

www.barefeats.com/fcpx01.html

They only tested one Mac Pro model, not two.

All speeds on the test vary a great deal.

A 6-Core Westmere CPU is actually a slower CPU in processing than an i7. Compare the floating point gigaflop specs of each CPU. Faster CPUs have faster data buses, also.

If you can upgrade from an out dated CPU to a up to date CPU, it's going to give you more power.

If you can't afford it, more RAM, more powerful GPU, and faster drives will do the trick. It's all a balancing act.

That test did not in any way text CPU power alone. To do that we'd need to compare a 6-Core Westmere to a 6-Core i7, same RAM, same drives, same GPU. Guess who's going to out perform who? I spent many years running those types of tests. I don't think anything has changed.

Better GPU will help, more RAM will help, faster drives will help, but don't think a better CPU is not going to help much.

Thanks VidGreg

I was basically trying to find out about adding an SSD to the optical bay of my 2007 Mac Pro (2,1)
I also have a SATA card installed which is what my 5 Disk RAID is attached to.

OWC has some kits to add SSD to the optical drive of a Mac Pro. Only some models can take it, from what I remember seeing on their site.