Upgrading my early 2008 with a SSD and 5770... need some help.

[Rychy]

I was thinking about selling my early 2008 Mac Pro and getting an iMac... but realized that I really like having some expandability. So instead of selling for an iMac I decided to upgrade a couple things, boot drive and graphics card.

1. SSD. My main issues are figuring out the SSD. I've been reading threads about installing a SSD and frankly I'm a bit confused about some things. TRIM? Why do there seem to be so many firmware updates? Possible issues with Snow Leopard? A lot of you seems to like OWC and OCZ.

Would it be better to hold off on this until Lion comes out? I'm perfectly capable of doing a few things to get the drive working, so that's not an issue, but things like my computer not sleeping properly or something cause of it would be.

2. Radeon 5770. Should be simple enough. I think I'll just get the Apple one, don't really want to deal with flashing and other potential issues. Students get a little discount too... so it's not quite as overpriced.....

Will it be a nice upgrade from the 8800GT?


Hoping these upgrades will keep me happy for another couple years. I've actually been really happy with my system, but I think after I got a MacBook Air going to the Mac Pro seems sluggish with everyday things (and yes I know why). I also tried playing Half-Life 2 on Steam not too long ago and the 8800GT in my system sounded like a freakin jet taking off. lol.

 

[TomKing]

Ive been doing similar research in to this,

TRIM is basically clearing a block of information properly, which your OS doesnt do, it just deletes it from your window and allocates the block to be written over. But when this happens on an ssd it means that it takes one cycle to delete the information properly, and one cycle to write what it wants in there.

Massively affecting the speed of the unit.

And all TRIM does is make sure the block is properly empty when it should be.

It is looking like Lion is going to have TRIM support anyway, just it 'may' only be for apple ssd's but there is always a work around, even now you can get a TRIM enabler on this forum.

Plus if its just gonna be a pure boot up drive like mine, and user folder is on mechanical drives, its not really gonna be rewriting anyway, just write once and then a whole load of reading.


And from what i can see the ssd is an amazing upgrade, you've only got to search youtube for "mac ssd bootup" and you'll see all sorts geeks showing off there new ssd speeds. lol.

Anyway. hope that helps.