How to upgrade my 2010 Mac Pro.

#1

Hello,

I was planning to buy the new topmodel of the mac pro line, but cause of the price tag and the little rendering speed difference, I would like to know what the options are to pimp my current mac. without any hacks and no I don’t want a pc :wink:

I heard about upgrading the graphics card with the GTX680 but this doesn’t seem available anymore, also I would like to replace my old firewire drobo system with something faster as the Pegasus systems but these have only thunderbolt ports, should I go for the Drobo 5d then which has more ports then only thunderbolt, or should I upgrade my internal storage? I am a bit lost here, this is all to technical for me :wink:

basically it comes down to this:
C4D viewport too slow
Lightroom too slow loading 50mb pics from drobo system.
Vray faster rendering

Mac Pro Mid 2010 / 5.1
Processor: 2 x 2,93 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon
Memory: 16 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 ECC
Graphics: ATI Radeon HD 5770 1024 MB
Storage: 1TB Normal HD + 500GB SSD

  • External DROBO (firewire)

Thanks!

#2

You can upgrade many things on your “old” machine, you can swap the CPU with faster Xeon(3.46ghz), and put some more internal HDs. For faster internal storage you can look for PCI SSD cards but they are not cheap. Avoid the 680, I’ve heard nothing but bad things about that GPU and it will not be significantly better than your 5770 in C4D viewport according to benchmarks. Better to use a flashed PC card, probably for the same price you can buy a GTX 780 or an AMD R280. With all of that you can have a MP that will be nearly as fast as the new machine.
The point is, all of the upgrade costs a lot of money and I’m not sure if it make sense to invest that much on a 4 years old machine, but that’s up to you;)
You may want to consider an alternative, resell you old MP(and believe me you can sell a used 2010 for a lot of money) and invest in a new 6/8core-D700, add a couple PC render nodes and with a little money you will have very good viewport spinning, much faster single thread performance, much faster internal drive and huge render power compared to your old 12core.
I’m coming from an even older MP with a 5770, and the combination of the new machine/render nodes its just awesome, here is my setup:
http://forum.vrayforc4d.com/threads/cheap-rendernodes-for-dr.14214/page-2

#3

My Drobo is sloowww too. I think even the FW800 transferspeed on the drobo isn’t what it can be. So a USB3 PCI-card can bring some better transfer options if you buy a new USB/TB diskstation.

http://www.amazon.com/Release-Ports-Optimized-Inateck-Expansion/dp/B00I027GPC/ref=sr_1_9?ie=UTF8&qid=1392277820&sr=8-9&keywords=USB3.0+card+for+mac

odo

#4

Thanks for the tips guys!
And Sirio! How impressive is your set-up!! Do you do this as a service too?

#5

No I’ve done that just for myself, but if you need I can provide all the information to build some nodes like mine, it’s very easy;)

#6

I don’t dare touching those things :wink:

#7

A graphics card would improve the Cinema 4D viewport performance quite a lot. It’s just rubbish with the Radeon 5770. Faster storage would improve the load times for Lightroom but not sure by how much because some of that relies on the processor as well to make the thumbnails. Unfortunately there’s no way to improve the rendering performance of that machine for V-Ray. One option would be to setup a render slave to compliment the workstation.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/05/how-to-network-lots-of-dumb-computing-muscle-in-a-fast-efficient-render-farm/

#8

thanks Olson, and what Graphics Card would you advise?

#9

You can buy a GTX680 on eBay and there’s a few sellers on eBay that do processor or other hardware upgrades too.
I buy my stuff here
http://stores.ebay.de/createprosolutions/

#10

For the c4d viewport, you’re fairy stuffed. For the most part a slow viewport is caused by single core cpu and then gfx card speed. Given you have a 3ghz chip, even if you look at replacements, theres really nothing significantly faster that would be worth it, at best you could get a 20% speed bump but you’ll hardly notice it when your editor goes from 5fps to 6fps. The gfx card, although you could get a faster one, it will likely be bottlenecked by the cpu speed, so again, not massively worth replacing for c4d with such an old cpu driving it.

File loading speed, what speed does the drive get? use a disk speed testing app and get back to us. If you have the raid system set to raid5 then this could be the source of your problem, external raids are notoriously slow at generating the parity data.

#11

Interesting stuff! Thanks it is indeed raid5… it seems that the only reason I would go for the mac pro would be thunderbolt… Liking a lot the set ups with renderslaves but really want too avoid windows, would an iMac be an alternative as a renderslave? I know it’ll be an expensive one but I rahter spend some more then working with windows…

#12

Thinking about this:

Buying the 3,5 GHz 6 core 700 (not the slower GHz 8 core) as primary workstation + Pegasus2 R6 and use my current Mac Pro 2010 as a renderslave.

Does this makes sense?

Plus:
When the renderslave (MP 2010) needs to load heavy textures from the Pegasus, it needs to load this through the new MP (Cause of the Thunderbolt) right? Will this slow down the rendering?

Thanks!!

#13

An iMac slave it’s not a good solution, it does not make any sense to me unless you can use that as a workstation too. If you can live with only 16GB of RAM you can consider a few Mac mini slaves, but for the same money you can have a PC node twice as fast. I don’like Windows machine just like you, but when it come to cheap render power nothing beat a DIY i7 PC slave. The good thing about a wintel machine is that once you have all set up correctly you just turn on you node and push the render button, It’s easy as that, no need to mess with Windows. Following Dave’s article on Arstecnica make it also easier and more power efficient. If you don’t like ugly PC box around your studio you can always put your slave in a closet(or chose an old G5 case like me). That being said if you really want an OSX only environment your best bet is to keep your MP as a compute node and use a nMP for work, but if in the future you will need more render power I strongly suggest one or more PCs.
About the nMP speed, since the single core turbo speed(3.9ghz) is the same between the 4-6-8 core models you will get always similar results, the 8 core has a slight advantage due to more cache(all the detail here: http://www.marco.org/2013/11/26/new-mac-pro-cpus ), but the 6core is much more cost effective and you can always put a 8-10-12core CPU in the future if you really want to. While the nMP is not a great render machine, is indeed a very good workstation to work on, also the silence and portability are a big plus.
Since the Pegasus is very fast(even faster than many local SSD) I don’t see how it can be a problem for DR, the latency will come mostly from the Ethernet connection between the two machine but I think you can live with that. I’m using a cheap gigabit switch for connecting nMP and my 4 slaves. Working on simple scenes there’s almost no latency, you click the render button and see all the render buckets in a few seconds, for big scene(like 2/3 GB including textures) you can easily wait a couple minutes before the render starts, so that really depends on what you do.

#14

Again Thank You Sirio very useful info!! Appreciate it!