CC 2014 Update Makes My Mid-2012 Mac Pro Worthless

Question

Hi All,
I've been a big fan of working in Premiere Pro for about a year. Sure there have been hangups and frustrating technical issues, but nothing you wouldn't experience using Final Cut or Avid. However, the latest big 2014 update has rendered my workstation completely useless. I'm not even sure how to describe all the the things that are happening. Crappy, digitally broken renders, unusable exports, barely existent playback, and crashing. My god, the crashing. Some projects won't even function for 5 minutes before wrecking the system, or even downright shutting down the computer. As in, the computer is running, and then literally 10 seconds later, the computer shuts down entirely on it's own without me touching anything. It's always nice enough to flash a jagged, pixelated render malfunction of some sort right before this happens. I've never experienced such horrifying software problems. And while I have by no means given complete or cohesive scientific descriptions here, I'm just curious if anybody else's life has gone to hell since this update? What and I doing wrong? My computer is only 2 years old! There's no way it can be obsolete already! Below are my specs. Any and all advice/consolation is appreciated.
Mac Pro (Mid 2012)
Processor: 2 x 2.4 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon
Memory: 24 GB 1333 Mhz DDR3 ECC
Graphics: AMD Radeon HD 7950 3072 MB
Software: OS X 10.9.4

Answer 1

Glad to know I'm not alone, Yonkondy. One thing I just tried that seems to be helping performance a lot is to hold down the Shift+Option keys while the project is loading up. This clears the preferences. It won't look like anything happens initially (there's no dialogue box or anything to tell you that the preferences have been cleared), but I was finally able to save my project without it crashing! Baby steps I guess, haha.