MP 1,1-5,1 Mac pro 5.1 Photo editing build.

[1949386]

Hello guys,


My name is Marco and I am a retoucher,
So for my work I need a reliable and good machine.
A couple of years ago I upgraded my Mac Pro.
And this is what I have now.

Mac pro 5.1
2 x 2,26 quad core intel xeon
Gpu Nvidia Titan X ( Pascal 12GB )
Nvme 256GB samsung evo 970 ( for booting )
4 TB harddrive ( never use them I work one external hard drives )
96 gb 1066mhz DDR3 Ram
And at this moment running 3 monitors 1x 27 inch Asus pro art and 1 32 inch pro art
And a 16 inch Wacom tablet.

My question to you guys to help me figure out what the next best upgrade would be.

I was thinking to upgrade to 2 x 6 core.
upgrade my ram to 128gb
new USB C ports
And 2 video cards

My main problem would be the video cards.
The Nvidia works great! but only can run high Sierra and for now thats still fine but in a couple of years.
It could be a problem zo I would need a AMD card to run aside t.


So the problems I run into are the following:

External power
Can I run AMD and nivdia at the same time ?
and which and card would I need?



Hope you guys could help me!
And if you have some tips I would love to hear them.

Cheers!
Marco

 

[h9826790]

I was thinking to upgrade to 2 x 6 core.

You should upgrade the CPU at the very beginning. 6 cores or not doesn't matter, photo editing can rarely really fully utilise all 12 cores anyway. But it's highly CPU single thread limiting, you should go for the fastest possible CPU.

It seems you have the budget, so, X5690 is the way to go. But IMO, X5677 is also a good option if you want to save a bit.

upgrade my ram to 128gb

You can, but I doubt if you can feel any difference.

new USB C ports

Do you really need this? Or simply you want this upgrade?

And 2 video cards

Bad idea because your plan is to mix Nvidia with AMD.

If you only need the other card "in a couple of years", it will be much better don't do anything now. Until you really need it, then see what's the best card / deal you can get (at that moment).

 

[1949386]

Thank you for your response!
Gone change the cpu first then I have one x5690 lying here around.
The usb C ports i need of the data transfers with my camera 50 megapixels a photo is around 125mb
for every photo. this with 3 monitors my photoshop is lagging.
the 2 videocards was because I only can run high Sierra.
Apple doesn't support Nvidia but of course you would now this.

My goal is simply s faster build and faster transfer speeds.
With Mac OS Catalina.

@h9826790

Cheers

 

[h9826790]

My goal is simply s faster build and faster transfer speeds.
With Mac OS Catalina.

Then forget about Nvidia, or unnecessary dual GPU setup. Simply upgrade your GPU to Radeon VII (if you want the best), and install Catalina.

IMO, Photoshop is lagging because it's poorly optimised. A faster CPU (higher clock speed, not more cores) will help. However, most likely still not to the performance level you are looking for. TBH, Affinity Photo is a much better photo editing software on cMP.

Have large photos doesn't mean that you can benefit from USB-C. Some USB-C card can't run any faster than USB 3.0 (type A) on cMP (due to PCIe 2.0 restriction). It also depends on your external storage speed. e.g. if your external drive can't do anything faster than 500MB/s, then upgrade to USB-C is meaningless.

 

[kohlson]

The usb C ports i need of the data transfers

I installed a very inexpensive Inatek KT4004 USB 3 PCIe card, to improve transfer speeds between SDXC cards and my cMP. I transfer about 50GB about 1-2 times per week. It goes fast enough at least for me. Plug and play.

Transfer speeds are throttled when writing to a hard disk, though not by much. My boot/work drive is a 1TB NVME SSD, so no throttling there. NVMe drives are comparably priced to a SATA SSD, and much faster, though a few seconds slower in boot. A PCIe NVME adapter can be very inexpensive.

 

[Fwi Haxx]

Hi all, just to add my experience...I ve got a. DELL UP3216Q and a DELL UP2716D..... 10.15.6 reel cMP5.1, 96 Goddr, 2x Xeon5690 and a Radeon VII with pixels mod......and I can tell you, when I plug only the 32" it s like normal and smooth, but at the moment I put the second monitor on Windows on finder are laggy on 32 pouces and not on the 27".... same in Photoshop.... it really sucks.....all this amount of power and money to have laggy and can't work normally (sorry for my bad English) ..... If anyone has comments or help..... fyi: Radeonbooost : ON

 

[panjandrum]

Upgrade all the way to the dual 6-core 3.46Ghz chips, which are the fastest you can stick in that machine (I'm fairly sure), a really good video card of your choice (I use Radeon 580x boards mostly, and they are fine for my needs, but you'll know better than I do how much you want to spend vs. the performance you'll get). That much RAM is almost certainly fine (more than you need). If you are working with even moderately large files seriously consider sticking a couple (now very cheap) SSDs in your bays for your data drives and putting them in RAID 0; this it makes a huge difference and is fine to use as long as you maintain a good backup solution (and, since you are obviously a professional I'm guessing you do). You'll get very good performance out of an ancient machine with these upgrades. One thing you might notice is that I think the AMD GPUs are not as good as the NVIDIA GPUs at accelerating the Mac UI, but if you want to upgrade beyond High Sierra I think you are stuck moving to AMD. I'm not absolutely sure about that, you might so some further research on the subject. My 12-core 3.46 4,1s flashed to 5,1s benchmarks in Cinebench at 3362 and your 5,1 should benchmark at more like 3412 according to barefeats.com. This is within approx. 10% of the baseline brand new $5999.00 MacPro. So you do the math on that one. For faster transfer speeds to external devices I don't think you'll gain anything by going to USB-C. I'm relatively confident that a USB 3.x card will saturate the write speeds of anything reasonably-priced that you would attach to it.

Quick suggestion: Install new processors first and then clone using CCC. Test system with current OS and NVIDIA card. Then install new vid cards and update to Catalina. Now test system again with AMD card. Which is actually faster? If you don't absolutely *NEED* Catalina and your NVIDIA card does actually perform better than your new AMD card, having the clone will let you go right back to where you were.