Please be aware that while the 3,1 Mac Pro has the same GPU compatibility as the 4,1 or 5,1 that the older hardware of the 3,1 will result in some comparative. Installing A New Graphics Card In My Mac Pro Recently, I have been suffering some screen re-draw issues on my Pro Tools computer - a Mid 2010 Mac Pro which had an ATI Radeon HD5770 1024MB graphics card in it.

It's about time I did some upgrades to my 5,1 mid 2012 Mac Pro. I've done a lot of research and have some ideas, but I'm hoping to get some feedback and help identifying where possible bottlenecks may lie. This machine is used mainly for video and photo editing in Premiere, After Effects, Lightroom and Photoshop. The current specs are as follows.

• 2 x 2.4GHz 6-core Intel Xeon • 24GB 1333MHz DDR3 • NVIDIA Quadro 4000 2gb • Samsung 850 EVO SATA 500gb (OSX Sierra and applications) • WD Black 1TB (Current project files/media) • Numerous backup drives for triple redundancy (not relevant here!) I will definitely be doing an overhaul of the hard drives. I will replace the current project files/media drive with an SSD first.

Depending on budget/if there will be a real world difference between SATA3 and PCIe speeds, I'm planning to add: • Samsung 950 Pro M.2 256gb, PCIe via Lycom DT-120 • OR • Samsung 850 EVO SATA 500gb, PCIe via OWC Accelsior S Then I'll dedicate a separate space for the scratch disk/media cache/preview files. I already have these two drives lying around anyways, and running them in RAID0 doesn't worry me since there won't be anything important on them. The price of the Sonnet adapter is the only reason I haven't already done this. • 2 x Sandisk Extreme II 120gb in RAID0, PCIe via Sonnet Tempo I'm debating whether it's worth taking my current 850 EVO out of the SATA drive bay and getting it into a PCIe adapter as well.

Not sure if I'll see much of a difference since it's just holding OSX and my applications. I would love to hear some thoughts on this plan, or how you would do things differently. Also wondering if there are any other obvious bottlenecks I've overlooked or should consider upgrading next!

The x5680 is the best bang for your buck CPU wise. The SM951 pcie drive is the way to go for true speed. I have one, and it's absurd. Realtime playback of 14 bit uncompressed 1080 fast. If you go this route make sure you get this model MZHPV512HDGL.

It is the only AHCI compliant blade I've found. The lycom adapter board is great. For video cards I'm not sure what the perfect choice is right now. Mac app for vector autotrace. With the newest generation of cards not supported on either side it is hard to recommend buying anything just yet.