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zuul-studios wrote:

Steve 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.

Follow-Up

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.

$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.

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

Follow-up

The refurbished 2009 to 2010 Mac Pro was delivered today, complete with 12-Core 3.33 GHz CPUs & 32 GBs of 1333 MHz RAM. It rocks! The seller was fantastic. He answered all of my questions and addressed all of my concerns. Preliminary tests show speed and stability (as intended). I'm getting a GeekBench score (64-bit) of around 29,000. It is more then double than what I was getting with my old Early 2009 Mac Pro. My modest orchestral templet (still using VEPro to "house" the instruments) with DP 9 is functioning really nicely so far. I am a happy camper; glad that I made the investment. I hope to keep this aging yet faithful "2009/2010" Mac Pro for at least a few more years.

Ted

zuul-studios wrote:Follow-up

The refurbished 2009 to 2010 Mac Pro was delivered today, complete with 12-Core 3.33 GHz CPUs & 32 GBs of 1333 MHz RAM. It rocks! The seller was fantastic. He answered all of my questions and addressed all of my concerns. Preliminary tests show speed and stability (as intended). I'm getting a GeekBench score (64-bit) of around 29,000. It is more then double than what I was getting with my old Early 2009 Mac Pro. My modest orchestral templet (still using VEPro to "house" the instruments) with DP 9 is functioning really nicely so far. I am a happy camper; glad that I made the investment. I hope to keep this aging yet faithful "2009/2010" Mac Pro for at least a few more years.

Ted

Fantastic. FYI, mine has been running the most stable yet with OSX 10.10.4 and the current VEPB

If you have four DIMMs installed (8GBs x 4), if you install (8GBs x 2) for a total of 48GBs of RAM you'll get a small but noticicable speed bump because it enables triple channel mode (I'm not sure if all RAM brands support this). When I went from 48GBs to 64GBs there was a score decrease in Geekbench. The score dropped by about 1000 overall due to just the memory score decrease. I've read articles that say that it's not noticable. But with our workflow (lots of samples sitting in RAM traveling through the CPU bus), it's slightly noticable. Thankfully our CPUs are so fast it doesn't make much differnce.

So if you have 8GBs x 4, not 4GBs x 8, it's worth spending the $200 to get matching (same brand) RAM to up your total to 48GBs. You'll have more RAM which is great (avoiding Virtual Memory and turning off DFD in Kontakt), but you'll get the small bump in speed. Maybe 30,000 for you.

Congrats!

Steve Steele wrote: Fantastic. FYI, mine has been running the most stable yet with OSX 10.10.4 and the current VEPB

If you have four DIMMs installed (8GBs x 4), if you install (8GBs x 2) for a total of 48GBs of RAM you'll get a small but noticicable speed bump because it enables triple channel mode (I'm not sure if all RAM brands support this). When I went from 48GBs to 64GBs there was a score decrease in Geekbench. The score dropped by about 1000 overall due to just the memory score decrease. I've read articles that say that it's not noticable. But with our workflow (lots of samples sitting in RAM traveling through the CPU bus), it's slightly noticable. Thankfully our CPUs are so fast it doesn't make much differnce.

So if you have 8GBs x 4, not 4GBs x 8, it's worth spending the $200 to get matching (same brand) RAM to up your total to 48GBs. You'll have more RAM which is great (avoiding Virtual Memory and turning off DFD in Kontakt), but you'll get the small bump in speed. Maybe 30,000 for you.

Congrats!

I did not know about that about RAM. Cool! You've certainly given me food for thought!

I am glad that your system is stable, too. It seems that the upgrade was a most worthy investment!

Thank you for the information, by the way!

Ted

Do I want to buy and run Geekbench before I upgrade my MP? Is there any practical reason, or is it just to satisfy curiosity?

For me, I use Geekbench to satisfy curiosity. I purchased it on Apple's App Store. Don't remember how much Geekbench 3 cost, but it wasn't much. I just got a score of 30133 with my new system. (Before refurbishing my Mac Pro, I was getting scores between 13500 and 14200.)

dix wrote:Do I want to buy and run Geekbench before I upgrade my MP? Is there any practical reason, or is it just to satisfy curiosity?

You probably know that you can get the average score of your model Mac just by looking on the Geekbench website. Not too many reasons to own the app but it can help you understand a little bit about memory speed and how certain configurations vary slightly in score.

One test I ran was to fill up RAM as much as I could and then force Virtual Memory to factor in the score. You'll see you score vary. But overall, it's more out of curiosity than anything else.

Isn't the 32 bit version of Geekbench still free?

HCMarkus wrote:Isn't the 32 bit version of Geekbench still free?

Yes. The demo lets you test in 32-bit. Have to pay to the run 64-bit test.

Looks like Sierra will only be compatible with 2010 MPs and newer. Anyone know if the 5,1 firmware update those of us that did when we upgraded our older MacPros will allow us to install Sierra?

dix wrote:Looks like Sierra will only be compatible with 2010 MPs and newer. Anyone know if the 5,1 firmware update those of us that did when we upgraded our older MacPros will allow us to install Sierra?

You are golden:

http://forums.macrumors.com/threads/how ... g.1977139/

2008 (3,1) also work:

http://forums.macrumors.com/threads/mac ... a.1978005/

Per Netkas, who is close to all-knowing:

4,1 and 5,1 share same board-id.

but apple exluded name MacPro4,1 from supported list.

firmware update will save you guys

Meanwhile Macpro3,1 users will have to use this howto - http://forums.macrumors.com/threads/os- ... e.1761432/

Cool! Thanks for the info!