Gaining speed in a new(er) Mac; configuration choices, graphics cards (and RAID)

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m getting a new(er) computer, a Mac Pro. The one I have is a Mac Pro 2.66 dual core. I already know which one I am getting, an 8-core Nephalem.That part is settled. (No, really…settled. I don’t need to open that question up again.)

I’m buying used, so it becomes a matter of bang for buck in the configurations available, and what I can add cheaply if it is not included.

My #1 goal is to maximize the speed and responsiveness. I run LOTS of programs simultaneously - usually three browsers, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Bridge, Toast, Quicktime and many more. I will also be doing a lot more video work.

I also use lots of add-ons in my system that really do add value, that’s why I use them, but they also subtract speed and responsiveness. So in making my change, my goal is as much zippiness as I can get on my budget with my use habits. I dream of having a computer that responds like something on the showroom floor AFTER I transfer my account and applications and start real-world use. I could cry seeing how fast things can be…as long as you don’t actually do all that much or confine yourself to doing one thing at a time, but that’s just not me. (If I ever have any kind of major financial windfall, I intend to buy THE fastest Mac ever made and add THE fastest and biggest drives and fastest graphics cards and then max out the memory. I figure $20K will cover it.)
Anyway, I know well that everything else being equal, the three keys to freedom from the Spinning-Ball-From-Hell are:

  1. memory
  2. Lots of memory.
  3. And finally, several boatloads of memory.

To my delight, memory has finally become reasonably priced for the newer Mac Pros! Couple hundred bucks buys 24 gigs! And not only that, we are no longer chained to matching pairs! Will wonders never cease…

But I see upon closer investigation that a good graphics card has a processor and memory of its own that somehow eases the burden on the system as whole in certain kinds of applications. Hmmm. Interesting. This could really boost the spinning-ball blocking considerably…

Or does it?

How much difference does it really make in non-gaming use? Will all the graphics across all applications render that much faster? Will Photoshop open gigantic (20mb) files a blink and render the changes that much faster? Will grahic-intensive web-pages load faster and easier? Does the computer really know when to hand off certain tasks to the graphics card to do to give the rest of the system more breathing room? Without getting too technical, I would love to understand this better.

Another thing that has come up is RAID. Having lost a huge drive with lots of stuff and finding myself constantly struggling to keep Timeline working by excluding things… what is this all about, really? I’m told that it really is a wonderful thing to have but I feel I’m still pretty much in the dark about it, so I’d again, without too much in the way of techitude, get a better understanding of the value of this. I need some kind of hardware (in addition to the drives) and then what? how does this differ from regular backups?

Thanks!

2

You want to load as much ram as you can afford, of the highest bus speed you can afford. Go with higher speed rather than quantity.

Next, you want solid state drive to load applications and data quickly.

The graphics card will have no impact in how quickly photos open, but when applying filters and such color adjustments you should see an improvement.

3

I would disagree about the RAM. Having more RAM is better than having faster RAM, because as soon as the system has to go to disk for something, it doesn’t matter how fast the RAM is, it will grind to a halt. After saying that, I just bought 16GB of 1600 RAM for $80, so you can have both pretty cheaply.

But I completely agree about the solid state drive. That will speed things up more than any RAID ever could. The trouble is SSDs are small compared to hard drives. I suggest an SSD that is large enough to hold your OS, applications, and your current working project. With hard drives as slow space to hold photos, mp3s, videos, your non-active projects, etc.

RAID is primarily designed to provide redundancy, in that the failure of one (or more) drive(s) will not cause data loss. Sometimes that comes with the benefit of speed, for example a RAID 1 (two drives which mirror each other) will generally improve read performance. RAIDs can be configured to stripe data across two or more drives with no redundancy, which will usually provide a big speed boost, but at a much greater chance of failure.

Anyway, don’t get a RAID for performance, but for safety. A RAID is not a backup, but it will protect you from drive failure. If you have reliable backups (but it sounds like time machine is letting you down) then you can choose to not do a RAID, and accept that if your drive fails you’ll have to restore from backup.

4

RAM is good, but the best boost my Mac Pro ever got was a solid state boot drive. I got a 240Gb, which was the barrier between “obscenely expensive” and “too small” at the time – you want it big enough to hold your system and applications – the rest of the stuff you can move out to a RAID or just a plain decently-fast hard drive.

I notice this particularly when I go to work and have to work on the Mac Pro there (several generations newer than mine) that doesn’t have an SSD – everything just takes longer to start and run. I didn’t expect it to make such a difference, but I’d never go back.

5

Given that you are doing graphics work, yes the graphics card is vital. My partner upgraded from CS2 to CS4 a couple of years ago and had to also buy a new iMac because the graphics card just wasn’t up to the extra demands of the new software. Now we’re on CS5 and CS6 is on the horizon; I buy the biggest fastest GPU you can find.

I also second the SSD recommendation for your boot/apps drive.