PowerPC G5 upgrades? (Worth it for Final Cut?)

[TheBMill]

Hello,

I have a PowerPC (not intel) G5 dual 2.5ghz. I've use Final Cut Pro a lot and have had the system for a while now and was wondering what I could do to speed up performance.

I currently have 2gb of ram and the default ATI Radeon 9600 XT graphics card. Would it make a difference if I upgraded either of those? Is it worth the extra money?

Thanks,
Bobby

 

[Aea]

I might be wrong, but your video card doesn't play much of a difference when it comes to most aspects of Final Cut Pro to the point where it's probably not worth changing it.

A ram upgrade (maybe double) should deliver a fair nice lift though, I would wait until somebody with more direct experience can respond though

 

[0007776]

RAM would help, I don't think that on final cut the video card would make a difference, maybe if you were using motion also then it would be useful.

 

[TheBMill]

Thanks guys. Yeah. I was thinking of upgrading to 4GB total ram. But, wasn't sure if I'd see any difference or not.

I was also contemplating doing a full system reformat and starting from scratch. I imagine there's a lot of junk on my computer. Is there a program out there you could recommend for clean up?

 

[SuperCompu2]

You might also try some basic system maintenance (streamlining system performance so precious Processor power isn't wasted)

Also, if you plopped in some speedy (10k+) hard drives you'd see a bit of a boost as well.

 

[SmurfBoxMasta]

rAmItBaMiTdAmNiT

mAxDaRaM4sUrE !

Also use at least 3 big, fast and seperate HDD's:

A) OS & Apps
B) rendering (scratch disk)
C) final project storage

I use the same set-up for Photoshop & it make a world of difference

 

[Mr. B]

Yeah, I agree with the previous poster, a scratch disk is the *Biggest* reason for your slowdown.

Get a good scratch disk and watch your speed jump!

(a large high rpm external hardrive with firewire 800, or an internal with high rpm. Internal is the much preferable choice.)

 

[weckart]

With regard to HD housekeeping, you could try the following:

Whatsize, which will show you how much HD real estate is taken up and where. Good for attacking the larger files wasting space (Garageband loops, iLife templates etc).

Application uninstallers such as Appdelete, which does pretty much the same as Appzapper for free.

System optimisers such as Onyx or Macjanitor to clear out caches etc.