Just bought a new 12 core and I see no improvement over 08 Model?

So you have the 5870 and the old card in? What is the old card? What is your old HDD? Are you booting from that?

And what are you doing to test if its slow or not?

 

I'd suggest you get an SSD and do a clean install of OS X.

 

Yep, listen to Jake. You need a new install of OS X to make sure it's optimized for your system.

Otherwise, run some multi-core friendly benchmarks... the difference should be huge.

 

You put a 4 year old card in a new computer, as well as an equally old hard drive? Try running it as it came out of the box, see how fast it is then and post back.

 

Shouldn't be slower then your 08, but in day to day tasks that dont push the computer at all there should be no real obvious difference, I only notice the difference in my upgraded processors when I render out 3D or something such as that which pushes the processors to 100% usage.

Does your 2012 Macbook Pro have a SSD? As a previous poster said try clean installing OSX if possible on a SSD. An SSD is a night and day speed difference even without 6.0 GB/s SATA

Or you could partition your existing drive and install a clean copy of OSX in the new partition and see if it solves your issue. I rarely see the spinning wheel of death on my Mac Pro unless its due to ... Microsoft Excel choosing to crash.

 

I'm surprised nobody said this yet but...

you might have picked the worst time possible to buy a new mac pro.

 

I would do a clean install if I were you - backup your current partition, format and re-install, and then selectively copy over any data and reinstall apps that you need. I find even on my 2008 that I get a huge "snappiness" improvement by doing this every couple of years.

 

Picked implies that he had a choice. For lots of people there are circumstances beyond their control about when the purchase is made. Budgets, projects, and deadlines are just some of the reasons.

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If you do a clean install on every major OS release then you wouldn't have to do that every couple of years.

 

Exactly The newest Mac Pros are running on 3 year old technology.

Try encoding a video or something that will use those extra cores and then you'll see how fast it is. Normal day to day single threaded stuff and you won't notice a thing unless you upgrade that old mechanical WD Blue HDD to a SSD. Do a fresh install and migrate all your data to it. You will notice simple day to day activities from an SSD upgrade compared to more cores.

 

I bought the 3.06 12 core, and it renders in Lightwave about 2.5 times faster than my 2008. You probably won't notice much of a difference on normal day to day stuff, but it should blow away your 2008 when you start cranking those 12 cores.

 

+1

Sounds right. Just loading apps and web-browsing the MP3,1 or even the MP1,1 with an SSD will feel zippier than the fastest 2012 without an SSD. Like Tony states the speed increase of the 2012 won't be noticeable (without a stopwatch) until you stress the cores.

If you want a machine that feels faster all around you have to get something in the 4.3 to 4.5GHz range. Adding an SSD to something like then will give you that all-around good feeling of upgrade satisfaction. Well, until you become used to it anyway.

 

Graphics card is more important for frame rates. And higher CPU clock is more important than multiple cores, since most games can't even use more than 2.

 

Tru-dat...

I hope the 2014 MP6,1 offers high clock speeds. Prolly too much to hope for but...

I guess there's just about no difference between your old 3,1 and your new 5,1 when it comes to games.

 

If games are your top priority.... yes

 

Exactly

I've been saying that since the 2008. NO major speed bump so I've been stuck with the 2008. Finally I broke down and a stop gap and bout the fast imac.

I wonder if Apple realizes they lost two or three desktop sales betwen 2008 and now - from me anyway.

 

You also save more than a thousand dollars. Unless you're rendering or encoding or doing other similarly linear tasks, all those cores won't do you much good.

 

And I would be remiss if I didn't mention that the top of the line iMac with the 3.4 GHZ option will beat the quad mac pro 5,1 in every single CPU benchmark while costing almost $500 less. Something to think about if gaming is the goal.

 

It totally depends what you wanna do. The basic idea is that

more_cores = horsepower (think tugboat)
core_speed = snappiness (think jet ski)

When I was rendering 3D a lot and compositing multi-layer 2k and 4k video (also a kind of rendering) I wanted as many nodes as possible. Now that I'm only casually editing photographs (3,000 per month), gaming, web surfing, and watching video (for research) I want the fastest cores. Thus for me I'll probably overclock a 6-core i7 Hackintosh or something. For horsepower you can calculate generally

core_speed x core_number = total horsepower

So in the i7 case it's (4.5GHz x 6 = 27GHz) and single threaded apps and RAM access will be at 4.5GHz (so snappy). With the 12 core you can use the same formula to see what ya got. What's the clock speed on your 12-core anyway?

 

I put 5680s in my 4,1/5,1 for this reason.
Evens the playing field a bit. Wish I had felt silly enough to go with 5690s but they were another bunch of $$$.