$1400 before the CPU swap and the extra 16GBs of RAM. I found the average going rate for a bare bones 2x2.26 2009 MP to be about $750-$900 depending if they were part of a group of resold work MPs, or if it was a private seller who took great care of the MP. I was happy to find a true Mac user who had it loaded up just right and took great care of it.zuul-studios wrote:Follow-UpSteve Steele wrote:I bought a used 2009 2x2.26GHz 8-Core MP with 64GBs of RAM, three OWC sata SSDs, one OWC Accelsior PCIe 480GB SSD, and eSATA card and internal large HDD for TM. I then swapped the CPUs to the X5690s (3.46GHz 12-core) and my Geekbench score went from 14000 to 32000.
Total cost was $2000. No kidding.
Swapping de-lidded CPUs is almost as easy as swapping RAM.
Well. . . for good or for bad, I made the "investment" to purchase an entire refurbished 2009 Mac Pro that now has the 12-Core 3.33 Ghz CPUs. (It is still in the process of being delivered by UPS. I should have it by the middle of next week.) Of course, this means that I now have TWO Mac Pro computers. My reasoning is that should I need that extra computer for a "Master/Slave" set-up, I'll have it. Both Mac Pros should work fine for me for the next few years and my plan during this time is to purchase additional orchestral libraries that may require all the CPU power available.
Should it come to pass that I do NOT need a second Mac Pro computer, I will probably put my trusty 2009 Mac Pro with 32 GBs of RAM up for sale. I will probably include a couple of SSDs in it to help make the deal more enticing. Curious. . . Steve Steele. . . How much did you pay for your 2009 Mac Pro? I do not expect to get much for mine should I put it on the market.
I didn't look above but did you upgrade to the 3.33GHz Nehalems or Westmeres? I'm assuming you went through all that trouble to get Westmeres. You and I seem to be in a similar position. Over the past few years I've been using a 2008 8-core 3.0GHz with 32GBs of RAM and a few SSDs. It's a strong machine but when I have my full orch template loaded (LASS, VSL WWs, CineBrass, LADD, VSL perc, CinePerc, and a bunch of other stuff in VEP with MIR on the dry libs), I max out the available RAM, and ended up using about 5-8GBs of virtual memory, and then the CPU cores spike. Regardless how I adjust my workflow it slows me down.
So I figured an upgraded 12-core 2009 MP with 48 or 64GBs of RAM might be able to handle that template. I'd prefer to sell my 2008 and have the 2009 handle it alone but I decided to work with a host/slave for awhile to see how it worked out for me.
The reason I paid $1400 for the 2009 was because it was a 2x2.26 8-core that had 48GBs of OWC RAM, three OWC SSDs on the internal bus, an OWC Accelsior PCIe 480GB SSD, a 1TB HDD and an eSATA card. I bought the W5690s de-lidded and installed them myself and added 16GBs more RAM.
If I make sure Kontakt and Vienna Instruments are optimized the upgraded 2009 can handle my orch template no problem. But because I have vracks with all kinds of synths and other VIs, if I'm in a situation where I need to all of that playing at the same time, then it can start to get a little tight. Keeping the 2008 for synths and other non orchestral libs works out pretty good.
Anyway, if you have a well organized template and workflow you could probably get by with a single MP. Hope that helps. Let me know if you have any other questions.
Steve
