Building the ultimate Mac Pro for Lightroom

I am looking at upgrading my current Mac Pro or buying a new Mac Pro with the specific goal of making Lightroom faster.
My problem is that I use a PhaseOne P45+ back and rendering each file at 100% takes approximately 12 seconds. I could do a blanket 1:1 render but then my catalogue would be huge.
Here's my question; which part of my Mac Pro is most involved with the rendering?
Processors
RAM
Graphics card
Hard disk
I currently have a first generation Mac Pro and was thinking of either doing the following upgrade:
Increase ram from 7GB to 16GB.
Create a RAID 0 hard disk from 2 of the Intel X25M solid state drives (new G2 models) and have the catalogue and cache on that drive (obviously it will be backed up frequently)
Replace my graphics card with a Radeon 4870.
If I bought a new Mac Pro then I would still carryout the above modification but I would have the benefit of 8 cores instead of 4 and the RAM is faster. However, I am reluctant to spend the additional capital if the increase in performance is minimal.
My second question therefore is; does Lightroom 2.4 take full advantage of a new Mac Pro's 8 cores?
Thanks!

A single OWC Mercury Extreme Pro RE SSD will pretty much max out a SATA2 port so any caddy that puts two of those SSDs on one port becomes pointless.
There are two extra unused SATA ports on the motherboard that could be used with the Trans Intl. DX4 Mounting Station. This is probably your best option for maximizing as many of your internal SATA ports for storage HDs as possible.
I don't know if its true for the 2009 and later Mac Pros, but in the 2008 and earlier ones the limiting factor for RAID bandwidth was the Enterprise Southbridge Interface which was limited to 1 GB/s.
http://developer.apple.com/legacy/mac/library/documentation/HardwareDrivers/Conc eptual/MacPro0704/Articles/arch.html
Message was edited by: Martin Pace

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landing page at OWC for Thunderbolt products.
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