Hey guys,
What are my upgrade options?
I have a GTX 770 spare, will it accept this?
What is reasonable with regards to RAM within a budget?
Is it actually worth upgrading the 4,1 and throwing some money at it?
Would value your opinions, what are some worth upgrades I can do to the 4,1 for a reasonable budget.
Many thanks in advance!
Believe it or not you can turn a 2009 4,1 MacPro into the fastest production Mac on the planet for relatively not a whole lot of money (especially considering how cheap you got the machine for).
You'll get a Geekbench 3 64-bit MP score of about 32000 and flash drive read speeds up to 6000MB/s.
Here's my secret recipe:
First, update the 4,1 firmware to 5,1. This will allow your MP to use 5,1 1333MHz RAM and Westmere CPUs.
1) CPUs - Dual X5690s. Xeon Westmere 12-core at 3.46GHz. The price on these has gone up in recent months due to availability but I bought a pair for $450. They are now almost double that. It's still worth it. Or you could opt for the X5680 X3.33GHz for a couple hundred dollars less if you don't need every once of horsepower. Geekbench score is awesome for multi-core (32000), but less impressive for single-core (2800). My workhorse apps are all MP dependent. So I need this kind of speed.
2) PCie-based flash storage - Here's one that not a lot of people know about. Buy an Amfeltec Squid PCIe carrier for M.2 drives. Install it in Slot 2 (16x lane). The Squid holds up to four M.2 drives like the Samsung SM951. I currently have three SM951s in RAID0 and am getting read speeds of 4800MB/s. Write speeds are about half of that. I use this setup to read sample libraries so that I can both load samples into RAM and stream from disk. It's completely eliminated all issues related to sample libraries.
256GB SM951s cost about $180 and the Squid is about $230.
3) 512GB SM951 on a Lycom PCIe board in Slot 3 or 4. I use this as a boot drive and get read speeds of about 1400MB/s. My home folder is on the SM951, but all apps save to an internal HDD.
4) RAM - OWC sells 16GB DIMMS. OWC is a little pricey but they have a lifetime warranty and are the only company building 16GB modules. You can install up to 128GBs of RAM in your MP. I see a speed bump when installed in three pairs (triple channel). So, I recommend 96GBs (16GB DIMMs), or 48GBs (8GB DIMMs) for maximum speed.
4) Graphics card - This is your choice depending on what apps you use. I just needed a slight boost for FCPX so I got an AMD Radeon R9 280X 3072 MB.
5) Sonnet USB3 PCIe card or Sonnet USB3/eSATA card.
Total cost for all of my upgrades? Slightly over $2000. But that's for everything on this list (with 48GBs not 96GBs of RAM).
That may seem like a lot at first. But you may not need all of these upgrades. If you upgrade the CPUs, and install a 2 or 3 SM951s, and less RAM it could be half that with about the same experience in speed. And keep in mind, this SEVEN year old computer is faster in almost every way than any current production Mac.
The only limitations are: no Thunderbolt, PCIe 2.0 bus (this isn't really an issue), and a 3Gb internal SATA bus. The only item on that list that bothers me in the slightest is the lack of Thunderbolt. But I'm still able to work around that. Still, all considered that's significantly less than a new iMac or MacBook Pro.
