More horsepower

Wanna spend some bucks? If you're using CUDA for rendering/raytracing:

– 2x GTX Titan - $2000 new, $1550 used
– optical bay PSU or external PSU with 2x6 + 2x8 independent lines, 450W minimum
– 2x X5680 for maximum performance in CPU rendering (if needed) - $2800 new, $1500 used

...and you have a monster for ~$5000 (new parts) or ~$3200 (used).

Cheaper version:

– 2x GTX 580 3GB - $1200 new, $750 used
– optical bay PSU or external PSU with 2x6 + 2x8 independent lines, 450W minimum
– 2x X5670 for much better performance in CPU rendering (if needed) - $1700 new, $1100 used

...and you have a more modest monster for ~$3100 (new parts) or ~2050 (used parts)

All calculations based on today's offers from Amazon and eBay. Probably if you'll be patient you could get better deals on these parts.

You could get about $560 back from reselling your current CPUs and ~$200 from graphics card, depending on which one you have.

 

Without trying to remove decimal places from your bank account.

1. Separate your project working storage from your OS/Apps/Basic User Account. I imagine there are other drives involved here (only the fastest one listed) but more than one can lead to speed-ups. ( Especially, if not corked on the same SATA controller as the other one. )


2. Video card. Unless trying to drag behind the times OS X version wise there are much better options now. if primarily just crunching embarrasing parallel floating point workload ( graphics and graphics related output) then this addresses the problem directly. ( if have old software that is completely oblivious to this potential source of computational power... spending money to get rid of that is higher priority than the card. )


3. This probably should be #2 or #1 performance tuning. You need to find out where your bottlenecks are. A single disk is highly suggestive of a bottleneck. Likewise 1GB cap is highly likely to be a bottleneck for higher end 3D work. But after those to relatively bright neon flashing lights the first step is to find out what blocked on . Activity Monitor can give some gross indications. There are more specific ways.

Otherwise this is really just an exercise not in performance but in how quickly can we empty you bank account. There are lots of things that will do that faster than others.

 

Biggest boost to OP's machine would be upgrading the CPUs, switching the 2.4's for 2x 3.33GHz will give you a large noticeable boost in rendering. Do some cost benefit analysis and decide if you want to upgrade to 2x 2.93, 3.06, 3.33 or with proper cooling 3.46 (very expensive not really worth it IMO)