Older Mac Pro users looking for speed, check this out!

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Hey all,

This is quite a bit off topic for webflow but I wanted to share a cool Mac Pro upgrade that is amazing. So I was lucky enough to get a 2010 mac pro 12 core from a client for a great price and I wanted to upgrade to an SSD. Issue is it has SATA II which is slow. So I first got a pcie card OWC Accelsior S Storage Expansion With a Speed Boost which let me mount a standard ssd into a card slot. Coolio. Here’s the benchmark.

919×516 100 KB

It was pretty fast but I really wanted speeds similar to the new macbook pros and mac pro that have pci flash storage.
That’s when I found this combo. This adapter http://www.amazon.com/Lycom-DT-120-PCIe-Adapter-Support/dp/B00MYCQP38/ and this pcie drive SAMSUNG SM951 M.2 2280 128GB PCI-Express 3.0 Internal SSD - Newegg.com
for a total of $180 yielded this result:

916×523 101 KB

Pretty crazy huh? Just wanted to share with anyone out there who has a 2009 or newer mac pro tower and is looking for a serious speed upgrade.

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I had the early 2010 12 core Mac Pro. I am going to pretend I never read your post.

Jokes apart, damn I really wish I had made some researches when I had it :smiley: Good job.

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Yeah man, you can also upgrade the processors to dual hex 3.46 and compete with the new Mac Pro any day of the week. They’re great machines.

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You have me really curious. I have one of these in a closet holding up my shrine to all the dearly departed mac devices I have ever owned. Think it has a bad power supply. Maybe I should take a second look.

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Dude, those things can be upgraded up to wazoo and compete with a new mac pro. OWC has an upgrade path for processors too. Not super cheap but better than a new machine. Dual hex core 3.46 processors start at just over a grand.

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I’ve still have a Mac Pro 2x3GHz Quad Core Xeon box here.

I think it’s a mid 2008 ?

Wonder if this would help speed the box up any more.

I use it primarily for encode 360 pano images.

Very slow when you are processing 12 sets of 9 (HDR) images to create a pano.

One pano will take 4 to 5 hours… and that’s if it finishes. Often it doesn’t.

I can’t upgrade the OS either - and Chrome will stop updating soon.

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I think with that system definition, OS X will be limited in what version it will let you install. You can upgrade the processor and other things but that won’t change that it’s a mac pro 3,1. With the 2009 version, it’s identical to the 2010 and 2012 and you can update the firmware to show up as a mac pro 5,1 even if it’s a 4,1. I don’t think thats possible with a 2008 unfortunately. Here’s a couple links I found on upgrades

http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/5004/can-i-upgrade-my-2008-mac-pro-completely

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Man Im I outdated. Im still running my q6600 cpu with only 6gigs ram. Its overclocked to 3.3ghz but its a dino now. Way back then when I sold a arm to get it, it was lightning fast and 4 cores were rare! My rendering buckets were on fire! Now… its just chugging along. I recently bought a 2 in 1 1000$ asus i7 laptop. Its 4x faster. Lol

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I got a 2009 Mac Pro from work recently and were looking into upgrade. The M.2 SSD was exactly what I was looking at! Also, considering a GPU upgrade with GTX 970 or GTX 980…

and a 4K monitor. I wish Thanksgiving/Christmas is here…

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Just make sure you get a mac flashed video card. Otherwise you will have no way of booting into multiple partitions. http://www.macvidcards.com has some good stuff.