MBP 2009 Hardware upgrades

[hampants]

Hi all,

I'm looking at upgrading the hardware in my 2009 Macbook Pro 13".

The majority of work I do is in Final Cut Pro X and the current setup is proving to be very slow.

My main question is about what exactly to upgrade. Obviously if I had the finances to upgrade the CPU, HDD, RAM and graphics all at the same time I would but this will have to be an upgrade that happens in a few different steps.

Where will I see the biggest improvement in FCP-X? My guess is the CPU but I could be wrong.

Any comments/tips would be appreciated.

 

[Saturn1217]

No Mac laptops (or generally any other laptop) allows for cpu/gpu upgrades after you buy it so forget about that.

As for ram vs. hd.

I upgraded the ram in my computer to 6gb a while ago. It really helps to stop those slow down beach ball moments when you have too many things open but it won't dramatically speed up your computer. Aka when your computer is running fine and not beach-balling or stuttering extra ram won't make it faster. Check activity monitor and see how much free system memory you have. Don't believe other people on here who will include inactive memory in that free total. Your machine will slow down if you don't have free ram available. (I speak from experience)

I have just ordered but not yet installed a solid state drive (samsung 830). I think this upgrade is supposed to really speed up day to day activities. But I won't know for sure until I try it myself.

Also upgrading the ram and hard drive on this computer is really easy.

 

[hampants]

Can the 2009 model MBP take the Samsung SSD? I'm not sure if the MOBO can take Sata 3 (6Gb/s).

If it can I will definitely be purchasing one of them.

My concern is that while the SSD and RAM will improve performance, will it make that much difference while using FCP-X ?

Rendering is done in the CPU and the GPU is still 3 years old.

 

[T5BRICK]

Can the 2009 model MBP take the Samsung SSD? I'm not sure if the MOBO can take Sata 3 (6Gb/s).

If it can I will definitely be purchasing one of them.

My concern is that while the SSD and RAM will improve performance, will it make that much difference while using FCP-X ?

Rendering is done in the CPU and the GPU is still 3 years old.

I have a mid 2009 13" MBP, the 2.53GHz model, and I'm running a 256GB Crucial M4 and 2 x 4GB 1333MHz Corsair RAM. It'll handle it, and it'll speed up disk intensive tasks. The SSD runs at SATA2(3Gb/s), which is part of the reason why I went for the Crucial over the Samsung; the higher write speeds are pretty much wasted on SATA2.

I'm pretty sure FCP-X is probably CPU limited in your computer, upgrading the RAM and HDD may help, but your processor is going to be your limiting factor.

 

[Dark Void]

Your Processor is the bottleneck and unfortunately that is not upgradeable, as stated in the posts above.

 

[snoylekim]

Your machine will take a Samsung 830 ..works fine in my 2009 ..and you should upgrade RAM to 8 G ..Final Cut Pro will use it .. You're stuck with the procssor, as stated in several eariler posts . The SSD and memory will give you noticeably better performance when Booting up, reading and writing data, etc..but the CPU is the CPU .. the best upgrade for you is a new(er) Macbook Pro with at least an I5 processor, plus the memory and SSD mentioned above ..

 

[hackerwayne]

Buy a SSD, max out the RAM (up to 8GB) and probably replace the DVD drive with another 1TB HDD using Optibay