2009 & 2010 MacPro upgrading for today´s Video-editing (Premiere Pro CS6 & After Effects)

Question

I have now two  MacPro´s: MacPro4,1 (Early 2009/Nehalem) and MacPro5,1 (Early 2010/Nehalem) and I was wondering how to get the best of them for video-editing with Premiere Pro and After Effects (CS6 or later CC) for todays standards.
The specs of the machines:
MacPro5,1
Early 2010 Nehalem
(http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_pro/specs/mac-pro-quad-core-2.8-mid-2010-nehalem -specs.html)
2.8GHz     Quad-core Xeon W3530 (256k level 2 cache, 8 MB of "fully shared" level 3 cache)
32GB RAM "1066 MHz DDR3 ECC SDRAM" (PC3-8500) modules (4 x 8GB)
ATI Radeon HD 5770 with 1 GB of GDDR5 memory is installed in a double-wide, 16-lane PCI Express 2.0 graphics slot.
single 1 TB (7200 RPM, 32 MB cache) Serial ATA 3Gb/s hard drive.
+ I have added a 480GB SSD-drive via PCIe (http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/PCIe/OWC/Mercury_Accelsior/RAID )
The 480GB PCIe SSD-drive is now the boot-drive and gets writes over 500MB/s and reads over 600MB/s testing with "BlackMagic Speed Test"-application. The 480GB SSD-drive that is connected via PCIe-card has also two eSATA ports on it. How could I take advantage of them? Is this just a bottleneck, what would you think. Would I get the same results if I had just Samsung 840 SSD installed with adapter-device to the internal drive bay 2.5" SATAII connections?
What about the graphic card?
What would you suggest to do for the setup to maximize it´s potential (For now it´s working fine)? Would it be good idea ome 7200rpm hard-drives for media and cache storage or do I need that or can I see significant improvements over it since there is still 3 3,5" internal hard drive bays with SATA II connections (and the two eSATA ports).
MacPro4,1
(Early 2009/ Nehalem)
(http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_pro/specs/mac-pro-eight-core-2.66-early-2009-neh alem-specs.html)
- 8-cores: powered by two2.66 GHz Quad Core 45-nm Xeon X5550 (Nehalem) processors with a dedicated 256k of level 2 cache for each core and 8 MB of "fully shared" level 3 cacheper processor.
- 34GB 1066 MHz DDR3 ECC SDRAM
-NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 with 512 MB of GDDR3
A lot like the MacPro5,1 but does have a bit different graphic cards and more memory and cores.
Any ideas?

Answer 1

jsssi wrote:
What about the graphic card?
What would you suggest to do for the setup to maximize it´s potential (For now it´s working fine)? Would it be good idea ome 7200rpm hard-drives for media and cache storage or do I need that or can I see significant improvements over it since there is still 3 3,5" internal hard drive bays with SATA II connections (and the two eSATA ports).
First and foremost: keep an eye on that 480G PCI-E SSD that you dumped a lot of money into.  Those OWC drives aren't known for their robustness or reliability (OWC folks will argue with that statement.  Ignore them).  Since OS and apps are easy to re-install, it may not be a big deal.  But don't put any of your projects on it, even though it's a fairly quick device.
Second, start adding SATA drives to the other 3 bays.  Fill them up with the biggest drives you feel comfortable buying.  Make one of them a 10k RPM drive for your scratch space.  The others can be 7200RPM drives; since you're limited to SATA2, there's not much use in trying to crank serious disk bandwidth through the system.
Video cards.  Get rid of those OEM garbage cards.  Drop them into a chipper/shredder, in fact.  Contact this guy about getting flashed nVidia cards that will work in both Macs, and will help with Pr and Ae.  Dave can sell you a flashed GTX780 that will boot (with grey Apple screen) and run in the Mac just fine.  And it'll outperform anything Apple has ever sold for those Mac Pros.