In any computer, there is a bottleneck. The processor, the amount of memory, the bus to the hard drive, etc.
I just ordered a 2010 MacPro, 12 core, and although the 12*3.33 GHz cores should give me more than 3x the performance of my quad 2.8 GHz, I understand it probably won't. I am wondering what the weak link will be and how to improve it. The first thing I'm considering is a PCI card with 2 SSD RAID 0 to run the OS. On my old Pro, I saw amazing boot times from a shift to SSD.
The Mac will have 32GB of RAM, I'm assuming that's enough.
Update – One example of an intensive process is video encoding. How do I find whether writing to the hard drives is the slowdown, i.e. that raid 0 for the hard drives would help the speed?
Any other advice? How do I identify the bottlenecks once this machine is running?
Best Answer
The "biggest" bottleneck will be the I/O, as that is the slowest bus on the system (in comparison with the CPU and memory buses).
Because you're willing to use PCIe, even the 2.0 version that's on the MacPro from that era, you should be able to get closer to the SATA 3 speeds (6Gb/s) of modern SSD's (afaik, the onboard SATA bus is SATA II -- 3 Gb/s).
Your best bet for looking at bottlenecks is taking a look at the specifications (I believe there is a 3.3Ghz CPU with matching memory speeds that will also give you a little less bottleneckage).