Mac Pro 1,1 upgrades, where to start

[ashman70]

I am going to be acquiring a 1,1 soon and want to upgrade it a bit at a time.

It will come with two dual core 2.26GHz CPU's, 9GB of RAM and the stock 7300GT video card, the drives I will be supplying myself.

I do have a Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drive 500GB that I am thinking about using as a boot drive, just not sure if the bracket I have will work with the sleds on the MP. Should I even consider this or just look at a Vertex 2 with Trim support instead?

I do plan on getting a 5770 video card and eventually upgrading the CPU's to quad cores, but that will likely be later on.

Which would make sense to start with in terms of upgrading?

AM

 

[zorinlynx]

The 5770 is the biggest performance boost you can get for your system. It will blow your mind how much faster everything will feel.

The 7300GT is one of the crappiest video cards I've ever used. Hell, even a *video* playing on one monitor can slow down activity on the other. That's how lousy the fill rate is on that piece of ****. To give you an idea, I currently have a Radeon 3870 in my MacPro1,1, and even THAT card completely destroys the 7300GT. And the 5770 is over twice as fast as the 3870!

Start with the 5770. More RAM will help too if you're under 4GB. CPU upgrades will NOT make a very big difference; you are more limited by the slower bus and memory speed of the MacPro1,1. Hard drives are hit or miss, the biggest performance gains will be if you buy a solid state disk to boot from. It doesn't have to be big, 128GB should be more than enough. Use the spinning metal for your bulk data storage, like audio/video.

Good luck!