Mac Pro 2012 Refresh Quandary

Question

Hello All
I have a Mac Pro 2008, 3,1, 2.8ghz 2xQuad core. It is over 4 years old. I'm editing in Premiere Pro CS5.5 and I have a NVidia Quadro 4000 card and 24GB of RAM and SSD startup drive and multiple RAID 0 internal and eSATA RAID 5 Qx2 enclosures and eSATA PCI cards. I believe I've maxed out the performance. I was waiting for the new Apple Mac Pro update to make buying a new Mac Pro a good decision. I really don't want to go over to Windows, not to mention the hugh amount of software I'd have to convert over.
However, Apple's update seems weak and outdated and leaves me undecided. Many mention the 6 core as the 'sweet spot', in price vs performance, but I'm wondering really how much of a boost I'll get over my current system. I'm also contemplating building a super high end Hackintosh but that doesn't seem appealing either as doing it in Xeon will be prohibitively expensive not to mention possibly flakey with Mac OS X. I suppose I could also wait for HP or Dell to come out with their E5 offerings and try to put Hackintosh software on that, but again, seems like asking for trouble.
The good thing about updating to a newer Mac pro is that my internal drives, RAIDs PCI cards and peripherals will just work, I will have minimal down time when I switch. Bad thing is 2 year old technology with brand new tech in the G5 Xeons just around the corner.
Right now I really want Premiere Pro to be smooth when natively playing back a combination of AVCHD, H.264 and other files and effects. It's just on the cusp of being too sluggish with my current configuration. From what I can see, I may  double the performance if I go to the single 6 core 3.33, which seems to be a good deal as of the refresh. However, I'm not sure if doubling is what I want considering the money and trouble spent on a new system. At the same time I have heard reports that Premiere Pro and Mac OS X don't do too well with more than 12 cores, the multi-threading isn't taken advantage of and can actually slow down the system. So I am still in a quandry.
Any advice is much appreciated
Regards,
-Keith

Answer 1

I had the exact same conundrum about three months ago. After TONS of research, I decided to build my own PC and I am extremely happy I did. The CS5.5 Master Collection runs beautifully and I FINALLY have control over my hardware. You can put whatever Quadro card you want, whatever processor, RAM, and the list goes on...
And did I mention that I saved loads of money building it myself?
If you aren't afraid of a little bit if work, you can save a lot of money not having to buy overpriced Apple hardware. Also, with Adobe Cloud, you no longer need to worry about what platform you operate under (Windows 7 is a good operating system).
Just my two cents. I hope it helps!
-Keith (a differnet one)