General question, is it possible to upgrade 2010mp to be as powerful as 2013mp ?

Depends on the software you run. A dual X5690 cMP can perform very close or better than a 6 core nMP.

rueyloon said:

As per the title.

I've read some stuff but it seems to be only for certain processing like optimizing the oMP with graphic cards to have good rendering time.

I also read on barefeats that the 6core nMP can out perform the 12 core oMP.

Souping the oMP with every thing possible seems to cost around 3k, or about half the price of getting the 6core, will the performance be anywhere close ?

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Jumping to a Apple PCIe SSD or NGFF/M.2 SSD in the cMP delivers nMP Boot speed and OS and responsiveness. Depending on your work flow, the x58 based cMP can remain competitive with a nMP. Upgrading an existing system is cheaper.

Yes you can uppgrade a 2010 MP to be comparable to a 2013 nMP.

Depending upon your requirements then for somethings the 2010 can be souped up to be faster. In others the 2013 may be faster.

It really depends upon what looking for from the system.

I am sure that there will be others answering at some point about how the 2010 is the way to go. However it really depends upon what looking to achieve. Is your software CPU limited?

Personally I would say that if you already own the 2010 model then is better to upgrade it. As you already done a CPU upgrade / swapped for non-Apple Cards then you have already gone through the pro/con of running on the 2010 with non-Apple hardware in it.

rueyloon said:

...

The final increase that I would get by going 12 core 3.46 is it worth it ?

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What software do you run? Can they use all 12 cores concurrently?

Get the fastest CPUs you can, and get dual, matched GPUS for your cMP...

Check out a comparison done by Macworld below:

http://www.macworld.com/article/210...-for-users-of-multi-core-mac-apps.html?page=2

If looking at FCPX then the current releases will use the second GPU found in the nMP so you would want to fit a second GPU into the 2010 to get the same sort of performance in FCPX as from the 2013 model.

The D700's in the 2013 are roughly comparable to 7970/R280x and there are Apple Flashed versions of these available, or can do the flashing yourself if bothered about the boot screen. You will however want to get an extra PSU to fit in the lower optical bay of the 2010 to power the second card. For FCPX then you really want to be on AMD GPU's.

A 2010 souped up with either Dual X5690 or single W3690 with Dual 7970/R280x, Kitted out with Ram, and an SSD sled with 2 SSD's installed on it on RAID0, should be comparable to the 2013 Hex/12 Core models. You will find some things the 2010 is better at, other the 2013.

If already upgraded to octo 3.33 then I don't believe is worth the extra to go 12 core 3.46Ghz.

You then of course need to factor in support, are you happy running with the support yourself, or do you prefer the AppleCare you can get for the 2013. Will apple updates affect your flashed GPU cards

rueyloon said:

Hello

hi, I already did 1 major upgrade
from octo 2.26 to octo 3.33
Gtx120 to Gtx285 to Gtx 670

The final increase that I would get by going 12 core 3.46 is it worth it ?

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To me the X5690 (3.46 GHz) isn't worth the price differential over the X5680 (3.33 GHz), but that depends on the particular applications that one uses and their importance to the user's livelihood.

From your description of what you started out with, it looks, to me, like that machine began its life as a MacPro4,1, not a 2010 MacPro5,1. Have you done the EFI hack to emulate a MacPro5,1? You'd have to do that before using Nehalem 5600 CPUs. Thus, are your CPUs Nehalem 5500s or Westmere 5600s?

For about $1K and for CPU powered apps, you can get a new pair of Intel X5680s (3.33 GHz) or for about $1.9K, you can get a new pair of Intel X5690s (3.46 GHz), but for that price differential (almost 2x) vs. the speed differential (almost 1.04x), you have to have some unique situation, of which I'm unaware, for me to recommend the X5690s over the X5680s. 12 cores at 3.33 GHz vs. 8 cores at 3.33 GHz would be about 50% faster in highly threaded, solely CPU powered apps.

Do you also use CUDA powered apps? If you don't, for about $800 and for OpenCL GPU powered apps, you can get a new pair of R2 280Xs [ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1722681/ ] or a refurbished pair of ATI 7970s (both 6 GB) from Newegg. If you use CUDA powered apps and they're just as important to you as is FCPX, then you can get a pair of GTX 780 6GB for about $1.2K from Newegg, but the ATI R2 280Xs/HD 7970s would still be the better performers for Apple/certain Adobe GPU accelerated apps such as FCPX rendering and Photoshop's OpenCL accelerated Iris Blur filter. One 7970 is more powerful for OpenCL apps than a single GTX 670. However, the ATI's don't support CUDA and on the MacPro its not advisable to try to mix Nvidia CUDA cards with ATI cards. To power two GPUs (whether CUDA or ATI), you'd need an additional PSU like (the difficult to find) FSP BoosterX5. But, of course, you could get a couple of ATI 7950 Mac Edition (see, e.g., [ http://www.ebay.com/itm/ATI-Radeon-...753?pt=PCC_Video_TV_Cards&hash=item3ce6d016c1 ]) and that would be faster for FCPX than the single card that you already own. If those interest you, just contact MacVidCards.