Well, exactly two months later, i'm back using a Mac Pro! Was a short hiatus but was offered a really good price on my old 5,1 6-core Mac Pro. Got a good deal on this 4,1 8-core, $500 shipped with 2x 2.26Ghz Quad Cores, 32GB DDR3 1333 ECC, 1TB HDD, GT 120.
I upgraded the CPU's straight away, as 2.26 is waayyy to slow. Replaced with X5677 3.46 GHz Quad Cores (Don't mind the dust, was cleaned shortly after) I used 10mm M4 washers (2 for each post) to prevent crushing my socket. These CPU's are only in temporarily as I will be purchasing X5690's in a few months.
Before the upgrade, I tried to upgrade the firmware from 4,1-5,1 on El Capitan but did not work. Read elsewhere that one may have to use an older OS for the upgrade. I used an old DMG of 10.9 on my old archive drive and it worked flawlessly the first try.
The setup on this Mac Pro will be a bit different for the time being, I am using a HP OEM RX 480 4GB that I had laying around instead of the MSI RX 580 8GB, I am waiting on custom cables to be made for the "Pixlas" mod so I can run a Vega FE or 56/64 sometime in the future, also because I do not have an adapter (dual 6 to 8 pin). I also have; Starting from top to bottom:
Wi-Fi card (No wifi in 09 Mac pro)
Ableconn USB 3.1 10Gbps Type C Card
SM951 256gb
RX 480 4GB (temp)
Some Benchmarks:
Overall, this should offer a substantial boost in performance in transcoding, rendering and exporting over the 6-core. I have already edited a small test project and in it's current state, is only a small bit faster (if not the same) in export, but is noticeably faster transcoding. I will also be doing some tests with handbrake and compressor to see how well they favor more cores.