Creating Optimised Media - MacPro vs MBP

I'm really scratching my head here....

I have a MacPro 3,1 2.8Ghz 8 core, 16GB ram, ATI5770 and RAID 0 HDDs.

I also have a MacBookPro i7 2.5Ghz, 17" 16GB Ram ATI 6770M with single external HDD.

I have an FCPX project in a sparse disk image (around 300GB). I copied the disk image so that each computer has an identical copy, mount the image, open FCPX and tell it to create optimised media (mixture of source codecs, DSLR, AVCHD, Canon MXF 422).

The MBP is totally kicking butt here and I can't figure out why.

The MacPro CPU usage is miserable, varying between 1,1% and 65%.

The MBP CPU usage is a fairly constant 630%.

That's a huge difference, and the speed the MBP is chewing through the files is seriously faster.

Now, I know that the MBP has a better GPU, but everything else should favour the MacPro right? Eight genuine cores, fast RAID HDDs etc.

So, what could possibly be wrong (mis-configured?) on the MacPro to make it soooo slow compared to the MBP for this task?

I should add that editing on the MacPro seems to work well enough, so it's not a sluggish system as such.

What does activity monitor say on the two machines?

That info is from the activity monitor.

I just rebooted and the MacPro is now running faster than before (no idea why, since I'd just done a reboot before), but it's still significantly slower (50%) than the MBP.

performance will also depend on how clean your system is too. I noticed that FCP X performed considerably better after I had to do a complete clean system install on a 2012 MBP.

Rather than a clean system install, you can run Disk Warrior once a month. Under the hood they both achieve the same thing.

Be sure all connected drives have enough free space, 10% of total capacity.

Also, the two machines have different RAM speeds.

How are the RAID arrays connected to each of the MBP and MP?

Thanks guys.

FCPX is running perfectly in all other aspects.

The OS is in a fairly recent SSD install and the RAID 0 is 6TB with 4.2TB free. So I very much doubt that's the problem.

According to speedtest the raid (which is connected internally via the SATA2) is running at 362MB/s read and 358MB/s write. So speed shouldn't be an issue. I can also copy these files over the network to another mac at 111MB/s, so generally everything is running fine.

It's the transcoding that's running slower than expected.

Yes, I also trashed prefs

It still doesn't explain why prior to a reboot (having only rebooted a few mins earlier) I was getting only 1%-65%, then after rebooting it was running faster (about 4-5 times faster. Both times had lots of RAM free too.

As I recall, the GPU doesn't get involved in transcoding, so it's all going to be CPU power.

Maybe the MBP's i7 2.5Ghz with 1333Mhz DDR3 memory is just so much faster at this than the 8 core 2.8Ghz Xeon with 800Mhz DDR2 memory....? Looks like my MacPro is getting a bit in long the tooth for this sort of stuff and I need to offload the transcoding to an i7 machine.

Just had a quick look at the overall CPU speeds of each machine (geek bench), your laptop should be faster than your tower by 5% on CPU intensive tasks.