MacPro Tower Upgrades

Over the weekend, I decided to upgrade some of the components in my MacPro Tower. The first thing that needed to be changed was the ATI Radeon HD 5870 from 2010. At the time, it was a great card when it comes to video processing and graphics work, but fast forward seven years, and it's no longer pulling its weight.

There was a point in time where graphics cards for Mac computers were expensive and didn't have a lot of variety.  However, earlier in 2017, graphics card manufacturer NVIDIA announced that their new Pascal graphics cards would support PC and MAC. I finally decided to install an EVGA GTX 1070 on my Mac. The price point was good, and the 8GB of video memory, combined with the CUDA compute cores, which programs like Premiere Pro and After Effects take advantage of, would be a welcome upgrade.

The second upgrade I made was to the system memory. Previously, only 16GB of memory had been installed. When I buy parts for my Mac, I always go to MacSales.com since you can search for upgrades via your specific Mac model, and I decided to upgrade to 64GB of memory.

Switching out these two components was pretty easy, and when I benchmarked the system performance afterward, I was happy with my decision. In my test project, with my old setup up, it took roughly 30 minutes to export. When it exported the same project again with the new upgrades, it took about 5 minutes.