Best upgrade for increased mac pro speed

Hey guys,

I want to speed up my mac pro and was wondering which option will increase the speed most. I have an early 08 mac pro tower with the following specs:

Processor 2 x 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
Memory 10 GB 800 MHz DDR2 FB-DIMM
Graphics ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT 256 MB

Will a better graphics card, SSD hard drive or RAM help most? I don't see RAM making a huge difference...

Thanks for the help!

Kevin

Welcome to the forum, Kevin!

RAM will most likely not be the bottleneck on that system.

What are the main uses of the system?

A SSD upgrade will help with overall performance. A GPU upgrade will help with graphics-specific performance.

Thread moved - please read the forum descriptions before posting..

Before you look to upgrade you need to figure out what is slowing things down, assuming that it was faster than it is now.

So first, what version of OS X are you running? Have you run a program like OnyX to clean things up? Have you repaired disk permissions recently? Have you used Activity Monitor to gauge your RAM usage and CPU usage based on what applications you run?

What sorts of apps do you usually run?

Thanks!

I thought I included uses, sorry about that. Im using a lot of the adobe CS suite but recently more photoshop than anything else. My primary need to increase the speed is for graphics.

Raz0rEdge,

Sorry about posting in the wrong place. I meant to include that my work is with graphics so it seemed like a good place to get suggestions from those who are knowledgeable of the work flow.
Ye, I run Onyx and drive genius. Ill check out activity monitor. It's been a while since ive looked at it.

Other than the CS suite I use final cut pro (although not as much any more) and other graphical creation programs.

With graphics intensive application and the type of media you are playing with, having a good amount of RAM will make things a lot better. But do look in Activity Monitor to figure out where your memory and CPU cycles are being spent as you use your machine..

Raz0rEdge said:

With graphics intensive application and the type of media you are playing with, having a good amount of RAM will make things a lot better. But do look in Activity Monitor to figure out where your memory and CPU cycles are being spent as you use your machine..

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Will do. Thanks for the help!