"I've made a huge mistake." The laments of a new mac pro and ridiculously slow AE renders

Question

I just purchased the late 2013 model of the Mac Pro with the following specs:
Processor: 3.5 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon E5
Memory: 12 GB
Graphics: AMD FirePro D700
It barely squeaks out a faster render than my early 2008 Mac Pro (which has the following specs):
Processor: 2 x 3.2 Ghz Quad Core Intel Xeon
Memory: 16 GB
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT
I obviously did NOT configure my new Mac Pro with the best features for AE CC.  I still have time to return the machine, and try again. I would appreciate advice from someone who can ID where I went wrong - and direct me toward a machine that will churn out faster renders. Thanks so much!

Answer 1

Sorry, I'm out of the loop on the newer chipsets so would have to defer to others in that respect.  There's a lot of reading to be done on multicore rendering in after effects; but you're best off running some test renders to see if its helping or hindering your comps and then base your decision for number of cores vs core speed on that.  Either way multicore rendering does require a lot of RAM. You should be getting OK render speeds if you're not using the ray trace renderer, certainly should beat out the old box, that might be something to look into.
I can't advise using those thunderbolt pcie chasis to add an nvidia card to the new mac pro trash can; the sonnet ones we bought have been finicky with our AJA cards and I can only imagine a full graphics card under load being worse performance wise.
I built my hack a few years back on an ivy bridge i7 with 32 GB of ram.  They have some newer guides for hardware choices and methods at http://www.tonymacx86.com/home.php
Although my build has been extremely stable, I will caution that putting together a hackintosh can be quite a pain even if you're an experienced system builder / knowledgable with *nix.  If Windows is an option that can be considered, I've heard good things about the HP Z series workstations but Quadro cards seem overpriced IMO compared to the Geforce series for the cuda cores / ram size (though purists will surely encourage you not to go the budget route).