How can I best improve my MacPro's performance with video editing applications?

Question

I have a MacPro at work (I'll list the specs below), and I just got 8 dimms of 4GB RAM, so that I now have 32 GB total. I mainly run Final Cut Studio and related apps (After Effects, etc).

Maybe I'm mistaken, but the recent upgrade from 4GB to 32GB of RAM hasn't made an enormous noticeable difference. Is there anything else I'd need to do to increase its speed, particularly in rendering and exporting HD video?

MacPro specs:

3GHz processor

Dual-Core Intel Xeon

2 processors, 4 cores

L2 Cache per processor: 4MB

Bus Speed: 1.33 GHz

500 GB hard drive

Graphics: ATI Radeon X1900 XT (?)

Am I maxed out as-is? And yes, I realize I really have NOTHING to complain about--this is a great setup and things run very well; I just wanted to check and see if there's anything else I could do. Thanks, let me know if there's any important information I didn't include!

Answer 1

Video uses a lot of ram to do any kind of rendering especially After Effects but since your maxed out there's not much else you can do I would say getting another hard drive and using a RAID system may help  

Answer 2

getting 32gb of memory was a huge waste. its not going to do much to imporive speed with rendering video. you need a solid video card for that, and the x1900 is a old and slow graphics card. upgrade that to a 8 or 9 series video card and u will see a big difference. i render and export video with a similiar set-up, with my mac pro, but i have 8gb of memory, and a nvidia  fx 5600 graphics card.

on a side note, how much did u spend for 32 gb of memory ? that must be around 4k.

Answer 3

Personally, extra RAM is pretty much useless if you don't run too many programs, tasks, etc. 32 GB RAM is a lot of RAM. What you should do in the middle of all your intensive tasks is to open Activity Monitor Application and see how much CPU and RAM it is using. My first speculation is that you are not using much more 4 GB of RAM.

Another speculation is that your graphics card may be a bottleneck to additional performance. Perhaps you should look into getting another or two GPU for additional performance.

In my opinion, I don't see why anyone would need 32 GB of RAM today. I think 8 GB would have sufficed, for what you seem to be doing today. From your hardware specs, the only thing you can actually improve is your GPU system.