Upgrading 2009 Mac Pro Processors for Premiere

[smm4774]

Hi,

I'm pretty new to Premiere and learning a lot.  I have a 2009 8 core Mac Pro with 64mb of ram, all SSD drives and an NVIDIA 980 TI from Mac Vid Card. 

I am a full time editor, primarily in AVID but also in Premiere.  New machines are very expensive and I want to get as much life out of my old mac as possible.  The only upgrade left, is to upgrade the firmware to 5,1 and replace the processors with dual 2.66 12 core processors.  In theory, this should double it's processing power but I'm a little concerned about the upgrade.  I'll be running an unsupported franken-mac and I want to avoid problems.

Has anyone else done this and have suggestions?  I'm looking to have a company in LA called Ibuildmac do the processor upgrade.

Thanks,

[smm4774]

Anyone?

[RoninEdits]

i don't have a mac to give feedback on your exact situation, but in general you may not see as big of a boost as you are thinking with 2x performance boost. your current cpu's would have to be running really low clock speeds, like under 1.8ghz, to get nearly 2x raw cpu performance gains with the new cpu's you list. and even then, it would depend if premiere is actually using 8+ cpu cores with your projects, media and timeline to use all 12 cores of the new cpu's. if premiere is using near 8 or less with your projects, then the only performance gains you would see is if the new cpu's have higher clock speeds.

[smm4774]

How do you know how many cores premiere is utilizing?  Is there a maximum number?

[RoninEdits]

premiere has many different functions, and each function can use different amounts of cpu cores. it seems past 12 is where it really falls off from using more cores, but can also top out as early as 4-6 in some situations. watching the cpu usage can give clues for how many cpu cores premiere is using, but its not always perfectly clear. ideally premiere should be able to max out all cpu cores during an export, but if some cores show near zero utilization or all cores at medium to low utilization, those are signs premiere isn't currently using all cpu cores available.

[smm4774]

Thanks...are you on the Avid discussion boards too?

[RoninEdits]

nope