I can tell from the amount of traffic I get about upgrading the 2006 Mac Pro that there is alot of interest. So I thought I’d give you an update.

First and foremost, my Mac Pro has been stable. It has not wobbled once since the upgrade. I was originally worried about the heat before I did the upgrade but the temperate has remained the same, even when pushed by HandBrake or Final Cut Pro 2. In the first month I ran a battery of real world stability tests by opening up multiple applications while copying multiple files and folders to my drobo and to other internal hard drives. The heat only went up a few degrees.

The speed increase has been amazing, especially when my applications utilize multiple processors! The following isn’t very scientific but I’ll do my best.

  • Handbrake – uses multiple cores. Speed increase isn’t quite halved, but realistically I just leave that running and do something else. I don’t tend to sit there watching it. It is noticeably faster.
  • Final Cut Pro 2 – uses multiple cores. Rendering previews is much quicker, I would say again it almost halves the time which is damn important as I do alot of rendered previewing when I’m editing. When I try to view the edits with effects, then it does drop frames alot (which is why i render). However, when I edit HD material then it really does struggle, I can’t view the previews properly unless I render.
  • Photoshop CS4 – recently composited some magazine covers for a band at full resolution. I could see all 8 cores doing something but I couldn’t tell if anything felt quicker.
  • Parallels – just for a test I wanted to see if Half Life 2 would run in Parallels which was running Windows XP. It ran fine. Also in the background I ran a YouTube video and a BBC iPlayer video simultaneously all running in the background. I could see no lag while editing photos in Lightroom. I believe a faster HDD would make a siginificant difference.
  • LightRoom 2.0 – editing individual photos show no significant increase in speed, if anything Lightroom hits the Hard drives harder than the CPU. However, when bulk exporting files it does feel alot faster than before. Since I work in Lightroom 80% of the time this was well received.

Without doubt, it’s a worthy upgrade. If you have any questions, then leave comments below and I’ll do my best to answer them.