Mac Pro 5.1 mid 2010 upgrade

Soldato
Joined
13 May 2013
Posts
2,510
Hello,

So At work we have some of this mac around, and no one wanted to use them as they are "slow" I have took one under my wings and replaced the 16Gb of ECC memory for 20Gb of normal non ECCddr3 mem, (tried mixing ECC with non ECC as a test and it obviously didnt work :p )and put an SSD there for test.

After fresh sierra install it seem to work like a glove so I'd like to beef it up a bit more.
The mac has 2x 2.4ghz xeon with 8 threads

I am looking for GPU that would work, the PC will be used for video editing and encoding but I have no knowledge if Premiere pro CC on mac actually uses the cuda acceleration so I am open to suggestions

I am thinking of using non ECC memory, anyone knows is there is any significant difference ? non ECC seems to be cheaper on some second hand websites. Looking to get like 64gb second hand.

Also looking at 1TB Samsung EVO SSD, paired with current 1TB WD black as a storage.

I am open to any suggestions of what to do, I do not have too much experience with Macs and I got this a play machine. By the looks of it if I invest like £500 to this I can have a solid workstation for few more years to come.
 
Soldato
Joined
10 Apr 2004
Posts
13,489
2x X5690 (6-core 3.46ghz)
64GB ram (I prefer ECC but non-ECC will be fine)

Then pretty much any of the current nVidia cards will work (9xx series do with a downloadable driver IIRC).

Only thing to note is the 2x6-pin power limit. I.e cards up to 225W max.
 
Soldato
Joined
11 May 2007
Posts
8,906
Location
Surrey
Yes Premiere will use CUDA. The 10xx Nvidia cards don't work yet, best bet is 9xx as mentioned. However if you only use that card, you won't get a boot screen, you'd need to run it with a GT120 or similar.

You can put in a USB3 card, which for £30 is a good investment. More RAM would definitely help (there's some compatible 1333 ECC RAM in the MM I think). I just upgraded my machine to dual X5690s for £300. Easy to do. As an editing machine though, you should consider having a number of SSDs installed, one for the OS/apps, one for project files and another for disk cache.
 
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