{"id":19935,"date":"2013-09-04T13:32:10","date_gmt":"2013-09-04T18:32:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/eshop.macsales.com\/blog\/?p=19935"},"modified":"2014-05-22T13:23:50","modified_gmt":"2014-05-22T18:23:50","slug":"making-your-current-mac-pro-performance-better-than-new","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eshop.macsales.com\/blog\/19935-making-your-current-mac-pro-performance-better-than-new\/","title":{"rendered":"Making Your Current Mac Pro Perform Better Than New"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Last week OWC Larry posed the query – Why Wait For The New Mac Pro?<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0and he touched a bit on the myriad of performance upgrades<\/a> that are available.<\/p>\n

But why should you upgrade aging technology rather than saving up for the new shiny toy?<\/strong> Simple – It just makes good financial sense to buy the current units<\/a> and upgrade (or even less just to upgrade your existing 2009-2010 Mac Pro). Pricing has yet to be announced on the new Mac Pro, but I tend to agree with many of the experts out there on this one – the entry level price is probably going to exceed the $2,500 entry-level price tag that Mac Pro owners have gotten used to from Apple. I’m actually expecting it to exceed the $3000 mark.<\/p>\n

Add in the cost of adding external components for your storage as there are no internal upgrade bays for your existing data storage, and it’s a bargain to make your existing Mac Pro new again.<\/p>\n

The fact remains that today’s Mac Pro models are still very viable workhorses in the professional computing arena<\/strong>. And they offer at least a few advantages over the new Mac Pro that will be released later this year – mainly in the immediate availability of upgrades including the OWC Mercury Accelsior PCIe SSD<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Simply put, an upgraded 2009 or 2010 Mac Pro is by far no slouch when it comes to computing speeds.<\/p>\n

\"stopwatch\"Take for example Boot Time.<\/h2>\n

A stock Mac Pro with a single 7200RPM drive takes roughly 1 minute 40 seconds to fully boot (give or take a few seconds depending on which model Mac Pro you have, which OS you’re booting to, and which items you have loading at startup). Add a single 3G SSD and that time drops to 55 seconds. Install an Accelsior PCIe SSD and watch that time drop by more than half again to a mere 24 seconds.<\/p>\n

Ok, so that’s booting – what about actually using<\/em> the machine?<\/p>\n

Storage Performance<\/h2>\n

A similar progression in speeds can be found during usage too. Take, for example, Aperture and open 100 RAW 18-megapixel images and time how long it takes to complete the task. With the stock HDD our test took 69 seconds. With a 3G SSD only 41 seconds – but with the Accelsior PCIe SSD it took less than 20 seconds to complete.<\/p>\n

Use Aperture then to create thumbnails out of those same files and on a 3G SSD you’re looking at 45 seconds to complete. Time drops to just under 30 seconds with an Accelsior installed.<\/p>\n

As they say, seeing is believing<\/strong>, so if you’d like to watch that test – we filmed it:<\/p>\n