Have you considered a processor upgrade or other options? Mine was a Nehalem 2.26 GHz octo refurb when I purchased it. But now it scores higher on Geekbench, BlenderRender, xBench and Cinebench than any other real 2009 Mac Pro and that's with Nehalem 3.2 GHz Xeons (the 3.3 's hadn't been released then). For about $3200 (i.e., $300 less than a Westmere 2.4 GHz Octo) and less than an hour of your time, you can slap in two Intel Xeon W5590 Nehalem-EP 3.33GHz 4 x 256KB L2 Cache 8MB L3 Cache LGA 1366 130W Quad-Core Server Processors BX80602W5590 (
http://www.ewiz.com/detail.php?name...-33GHz-6-4GT-s-1366pin-8MB-CPU-w-o-FAN-Retail ) and have a system about 38% faster than a 2.4 Ghz Octo and 47% faster than your current system). Then just sell the two 2.26 GHz Xeons on ebay or, do as I did, and build some cheap overclocked systems with them at your leisure. Each 2.26 GHz chip system can be overclocked to about 3.0 GHz on air and at a total cost for each system of about $1k. These two 2.26 GHz systems provided me a total of about 33% more rendering power than 8-cores of 2.26 GHz. I'm glad that I made the latter decision because for the past year I have had 8 cores of 3.2 GHz and 8 cores (2*4) of 3.0 GHz for a render farm for AE, Maya, C4d and Compressor. I have just upgraded the two 2.26 GHz Xeon quads to two non-Xeon 3.33 GHz 6 cores and overclocked each of them to 4.05 and 4.1 GHz
with TurboBoost active on both. Now each self-built system is faster than an octo 2.93 GHz system (See pics for 4.05 system when it was oc'ed to 4.03 - of the xBench tested systems - scoring 534.55 - only my Mac Pro is the faster real 2009 Mac Pro). By the way, the ATi 4890 really comes into its own on the self-built systems. The total cost of each self-built system, including CPU upgrade, was about $2.1K; but perks, such as SSD's, can drive the price up. Otherwise, I suggest you consider waiting for a refurb base 12-core (which I expect to be in the $4.0K - $4.4K price range and later upgrade the processors yourself when the price falls a little bit and software evolves and then place the old, slower 6 cores in self-built systems and overclock them) if you plan to become a serious video editor because Final Cut Pro and other pro apps that handle motion graphics will probably use all of the cores and GHz you can throw at them. That way you can sell your 2.26 GHz 8-core for whatever price you consider satisfactory (probably $1800 - $2200 minimum, depending on original purchase date and condition) to offset the upgrade to a very competitively priced and somewhat future proof refurb 2010 dual hexacore Mac Pro. Moral - Assess your current
and future needs, use your head and hands, do the math and don't take a jump until you're sure where you'll land.
