X58a-UD3R i7-960 to Xeon Upgrade Advice

[victoroni]

Hello all,
I thought I'd post here to get some feedback. I came here because I'm currently running this setup that i built about 5 years ago, and my boot times and overall performance have felt sluggish as of late:

-GA-x58a-ud3r rev 2.0 on the FH DSDT i believe
-i7-960 with a Thermaltake frio heatsink (CLP0564) - originally planned to overclock but never did.
-OCZ Vertex 2 120 gb Sata II for boot drive
-1 TB HDD probably Western Digital and most likely sata II
-GeForce 9500 GT video card
-6 GB of G.Skill Triple Channel (F3-12800CL7t-6GBPI to be exact)
-ANTEC Sonata III case with Earthwatts 500 PSU

My boot drive only has 15GB available so I figure that may be a culprit for less than stellar performance and slow booting lately. I have been dying to take advantage of SATA III so I intended to upgrade my SSD to something double the capacity and top notch. My machine was originally built as my home recording studio workstation, where I do light to medium sized projects. It has kept up pretty well, but it is now dated and I would love to upgrade the speed as I have some cash available.

I should first mention that I just inherited a 2008 MAC PRO with No Ram or HD, but has original Motherboard, PSU and some kind of Radeon ATI graphics card. Does anyone have advice on how to best take advantage of this case, to make the USB/FW Ports compatible if possible. Is it as simple as plugging them in to my UD3R? Will this motherboard/build even fit into the MAC PRO case? I'm trying to put together a shopping list, but I don't know if my current heatsink setup will fit as it all looks pretty tight in there. Maybe go for liquid cooled? Would be great to be silent.

Question about the Xeon 5650, 5660 or 5670. They are all available at great prices, but are they all compatible with OSX? Is it worth the extra thirty dollars or so to go for the highest tier, or should I just overclock the 5650?

TLDR/Goals:
-Xeon 56xx - possible overclock
-At least 16 to 24 GB of RAM - depending on the price, do i have to scrap my G.Skill triple channel to accomplish this?
-Upgrade Video card preferably under $300. suggestions?
-I recently began working with Photoshop and Adobe Premier and I'm quite frankly tired of not having HDMI ports.
-I also have a Cooler Master GX650W Power supply laying around, if i can/need to make use of it?
-SanDisk Extreme Pro 240 GB sata III - open to other suggestions
-1TB+ Sata III HDD storage drive.

Not sure if its better to buy to separate drives or use one big drive for recording purposes. I've read that for optimum performance each drive should have an isolated function Storage/Read /Write. I work with sound libraries and would like to optimize performance in this area if possible. Open to all suggestions. I am only beginning to research this project and would like all the help I can get. I will continue searching and reading about MAC Pro Case builds with x58a-ud3r and XEON processors. If anyone can chime in and point me in the right direction I will be grateful. Thanks a lot for reading everyone.

 

[Going Bald]

Hello all,
I thought I'd post here to get some feedback. I came here because I'm currently running this setup that i built about 5 years ago, and my boot times and overall performance have felt sluggish as of late:

-GA-x58a-ud3r rev 2.0 on the FH DSDT i believe
-i7-960 with a Thermaltake frio heatsink (CLP0564) - originally planned to overclock but never did.
-OCZ Vertex 2 120 gb Sata II for boot drive
-1 TB HDD probably Western Digital and most likely sata II
-GeForce 9500 GT video card
-6 GB of G.Skill Triple Channel (F3-12800CL7t-6GBPI to be exact)
-ANTEC Sonata III case with Earthwatts 500 PSU

My boot drive only has 15GB available so I figure that may be a culprit for less than stellar performance and slow booting lately. I have been dying to take advantage of SATA III so I intended to upgrade my SSD to something double the capacity and top notch. My machine was originally built as my home recording studio workstation, where I do light to medium sized projects. It has kept up pretty well, but it is now dated and I would love to upgrade the speed as I have some cash available.

I should first mention that I just inherited a 2008 MAC PRO with No Ram or HD, but has original Motherboard, PSU and some kind of Radeon ATI graphics card. Does anyone have advice on how to best take advantage of this case, to make the USB/FW Ports compatible if possible. Is it as simple as plugging them in to my UD3R? Will this motherboard/build even fit into the MAC PRO case? I'm trying to put together a shopping list, but I don't know if my current heatsink setup will fit as it all looks pretty tight in there. Maybe go for liquid cooled? Would be great to be silent.

Question about the Xeon 5650, 5660 or 5670. They are all available at great prices, but are they all compatible with OSX? Is it worth the extra thirty dollars or so to go for the highest tier, or should I just overclock the 5650?

TLDR/Goals:
-Xeon 56xx - possible overclock
-At least 16 to 24 GB of RAM - depending on the price, do i have to scrap my G.Skill triple channel to accomplish this?
-Upgrade Video card preferably under $300. suggestions?
-I recently began working with Photoshop and Adobe Premier and I'm quite frankly tired of not having HDMI ports.
-I also have a Cooler Master GX650W Power supply laying around, if i can/need to make use of it?
-SanDisk Extreme Pro 240 GB sata III - open to other suggestions
-1TB+ Sata III HDD storage drive.

Not sure if its better to buy to separate drives or use one big drive for recording purposes. I've read that for optimum performance each drive should have an isolated function Storage/Read /Write. I work with sound libraries and would like to optimize performance in this area if possible. Open to all suggestions. I am only beginning to research this project and would like all the help I can get. I will continue searching and reading about MAC Pro Case builds with x58a-ud3r and XEON processors. If anyone can chime in and point me in the right direction I will be grateful. Thanks a lot for reading everyone.

If the Mac Pro works put some RAM and a drive in it and use it.
I would not swap the i7 960 for a Xeon. Not enough upgrade to justify the expense.

Precisely what are you trying to accomplish? A total new build or a refurb?

 

[LiteGaming]

Xeon overclocking is no good because Xeon aint made for overclocking and isnt really a good upgrade since you can just get like a 4690k and it will run better thats what i saw in scores and overclock that

 

[victoroni]

Hey thanks for stopping by guys.

My original plan was to upgrade my hackintosh. Then I got the Mac Pro, I just figured that it being a 2008 model A1186, that it probably wouldn't be up to par as far as upgrade capability, like Sata III speeds for multiple Hard Drives. Maybe I was wrong? I just read a thread on Mac Rumors suggesting an upgrading the two dual cores to a pair of 3.2Ghz X5482 SLANZ processors for 8 cores. That sounds very appealing as a pair runs about $120 on ebay for the Mac Pro.

The reason for the Xeon upgrade was to jump to 6 cores, I don't know much about overclocking it I just read that people have successfully. There are Xeon 5650 chips being parted out of servers on ebay for ~$70 on ebay, I read they run cooler and use less power, that's why I was considering it a worthwhile upgrade? is that not worth it, for $70 dollars? Also with my Mobo I can get USB 3.0 and Sata III working as well hopefully.

Now i'm considering upgrading the Mac Pro as is, per your suggestion GoingBald, but I would like to be able to run Sata III speeds if possible. Is there any way to do this? I also wanted to upgrade the GPU, I'm sure the Mac Pro GPU isn't bad by any means, but now its a question of upgrade options. I will continue to research upgrading the Mac Pro.