I have an opportunity to pick up a mid 2010 Mac Pro 5,1 for a reasonable price. Of course it is very expandable and upgradable and has firewire ports. My question is, has it been eclipsed completely by current machines, or will it still compete with a processor upgrade? It comes with the 2.8 GHz Xeon quad core processor but could be upgraded to a 6 core Westmere or dual processor 4 core or dual 6 core processors.
Mac Pro 5,1 History. Before looking at why the 5,1 is presently the professional system of choice. Lets look at where it came from, and the design features that allow it to dominate even in 2015. Initially released in 2010 the Mac Pro 5,1 was the pinnacle of the classic Apple tower design. 5 top ways to run Windows on a Mac. Visit Computerworld's Facebook page. ] Performance isn’t the issue. Is not supported for my Mac Pro 5,1 (2012) test platform, Windows 10 can still be.
Would these upgrades be a waste of money? I am just looking at this being 5 year old technology and wondering if I would be better off with a modern machine or if performance has levelled off. Thanks for your comments. RobBobW wrote: I have an opportunity to pick up a mid 2010 Mac Pro 5,1 for a reasonable price.
Of course it is very expandable and upgradable and has firewire ports. My question is, has it been eclipsed completely by current machines, or will it still compete with a processor upgrade? It comes with the 2.8 GHz Xeon quad core processor but could be upgraded to a 6 core Westmere or dual processor 4 core or dual 6 core processors.
Would these upgrades be a waste of money? I am just looking at this being 5 year old technology and wondering if I would be better off with a modern machine or if performance has levelled off.
Thanks for your comments. Even without the processor upgrade, that's a capable machine. I think you'd get a better performance boost by keeping the CPU it has, and replacing the hard disk with an SSD. RobBobW wrote: I have an opportunity to pick up a mid 2010 Mac Pro 5,1 for a reasonable price.
Of course it is very expandable and upgradable and has firewire ports. My question is, has it been eclipsed completely by current machines, or will it still compete with a processor upgrade? It comes with the 2.8 GHz Xeon quad core processor but could be upgraded to a 6 core Westmere or dual processor 4 core or dual 6 core processors. Would these upgrades be a waste of money? I am just looking at this being 5 year old technology and wondering if I would be better off with a modern machine or if performance has levelled off. Thanks for your comments. What is the reasonable price?
I depends what you use it for. As a server, sure. And there are a variety of PCI solutions to get fast drive access, so in combo with an SSD at a reasonable extra cost you could still do some photo work at fast speed. A problem could lie in mounting costs for other connectivity; even USB 3 would mean an expense for the board, and also there's a graphic card issue; not sure what this comes with and what monitor you already have. Plus wifi if you need it.
So expandable, but if you were to fit it out with similar specs to a current iMac say you'd be investing a bunch more money in it. It still probably has compatibility through a bunch of systems though. I'm not sure I'd go for it if it were my only Mac, in lieu of a new machine. But for many uses it would be terrific, and if you don't go overboard trying to morph it into a contemporary computer it could serve for years in a more limited role.
Just as a backup and file server it might be worth it, since a RAID or even four regular HD enclosures would cost up to half that. And be far less versatile. And you could offload tedious processing chores like video processing to it. But hey, I still have a mirrored drive door Mac running here.and I like old cars.
So I'm biased. RobBobW wrote: I have an opportunity to pick up a mid 2010 Mac Pro 5,1 for a reasonable price. Of course it is very expandable and upgradable and has firewire ports. My question is, has it been eclipsed completely by current machines, or will it still compete with a processor upgrade? It comes with the 2.8 GHz Xeon quad core processor but could be upgraded to a 6 core Westmere or dual processor 4 core or dual 6 core processors.
Would these upgrades be a waste of money? I run an older Mac Pro. You should first figure out what you're going to use this Mac Pro for and then upgrade it appropriately. You'll want to look at the whole picture, depending on what applications you want it to crank through. What is the real bottleneck? Some applications will need a lot more RAM than processor.
Some will need faster disk access, which means SSDs or a RAID. Others will need a new graphics card in the Mac Pro's GPU slot. You might find out that the first upgrade you need is not the processor. Also, a USB 3 expansion card is increasingly useful to put in a Mac Pro, though some models state they are not Yosemite compatible. RobBobW wrote: I have an opportunity to pick up a mid 2010 Mac Pro 5,1 for a reasonable price.
Of course it is very expandable and upgradable and has firewire ports. My question is, has it been eclipsed completely by current machines, or will it still compete with a processor upgrade? It comes with the 2.8 GHz Xeon quad core processor but could be upgraded to a 6 core Westmere or dual processor 4 core or dual 6 core processors. Current Macs easily outperform that Mac Pro. My 2012 iMac easily outperforms it. Would these upgrades be a waste of money?
I am just looking at this being 5 year old technology and wondering if I would be better off with a modern machine or if performance has levelled off. I would go with something newer, like a refurbished Mac. You'll get better performance and Thunderbolt and USB 3. Consider your total costs of upgrading that Mac Pro, and the time and hassle it could be, resale value, etc, to simply buying something like a refurbished iMac from Apple with a new warranty and better support for the future. Thanks for your comments.
Agreed you have to weigh in what can be upgraded and what cannot. In my case I still FW800 which go between my Macbookpro 2012 but not my iMac 27' as it has USB 3.0. So one of the portable drives has both FW800 and USB 3.0 beside eSATA. On the graphics card you can use a PC Graphic card Radeon or Nvidia as Apple has most drivers YOU just do not have a boot up screen until your login.
No single user or anything that uses that type of screen. I use a Nvidia GT630 that has Dual DVI and HDMI and all outputs work with Apple drivers. If you do a search you check out Mac Vids that will flash your card or you can buy one already flashed. Even though I have 2012 imac I have JBOD box that has 4 drives something I had with a tower and I do miss that but that just ME.
So thats what you have to think what its worth as the digital landscape is always changing with new ports and devices. An example I saved 4 5 ¼ Floppy Disc drives to hook up with a Tandy Color Computer to find out the drives did work but half the floppies did not.
I did keep my second computer but gave all the stuff away wondering why I kept it that I should have updated any text files to new media but did get bit in the but.
Speed issues forced me into retiring my old Mac Pro. Unable to afford one of the new ones I went for an iMac and this is a short review on how the all-in-one stacks up against my faithful old silver beastie. Many thanks to my daughter Lizi for her help with filming and her top tips on how to behave like a proper “YouTuber!”:-) iMac Spec - iMac (Retina 5K, 27 inch, Late 2015) - Processor: 4GHz Intel Core i7 - Memory: 32GB - Graphics: AMD Radeon R9 M395X 4096 MB - Operating System: macOS Sierra - OS Drive: 3TB Fusion Drive (PCI) Mac Pro Spec - Mac Pro (Early 2009) - Processor: 2.66GHz Quad Core Intel Xeon - Memory: 12GB - Graphics 1: ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB - Graphics 2: NVIDIA Ge-Force GT 120 512MB - Operating System: OS X El Capitan - OS Drive: 256 SSD (SATA).