Upgrade options for my 5,1

[pianoman88]

I currently own an 8-core 2.4 Ghz MacPro 5,1 with 12 GB 1066 DDR3 RAM and 4 internal hard drives. I'm interested in upgrade suggestions so that I can extend its usefulness for another 5 years.

2.93 GHZ CPUs or Hex core?

PCI SSD options - leaning towards Samsung 830s - not certain about PCI cards
I'll use the SSIs for my sample libraries. Not certain about the OS

I use my Mac primarily for music production and light video work so I don't know if a graphic card is necessary. I have an ATI Radeon HD 5770 with 1024 MB.

I'm still running Snow Leopard 10.6.8. Too many issues with Logic and multiple displays the last time I checked. (I have two displays.)

I'm open to all suggestions.

 

[minifridge1138]

The honest answer is that we don't know.
You'll need to provide more information before anyone can tell you exactly what improvements to make and how much improvement they'll make.

For all intents and purposes, there are 5 things that could be a bottleneck in any system:
1) Number of cpu cores
2) Speed of the cpu
3) Amount of memory
4) Hard disk read/write time
5) Network

We'd need to know you use your computer in order to find out which one (or ones) of those is impacting you.

Numbers 3 and 4 are the easiest/cheapest to upgrade.
Numbers 1, 2, and 3 can be evaluated from using the Activity Monitor.