View single post by Robert

Posted: Tue May 10th, 2016 16:42

Joined:	Sun Apr 1st, 2012
Location:	South Lakeland, UK
Posts:	4066
Status:	Offline

I'm finding the D300s and D3 images a bit heavier work for the computer than the D200 output was. My Mac mini works well enough once the images have loaded but they are slow to load, especially in Library mode in Lightroom. That's where I first noticed it with the 600 odd D3 exposures I took at Donington Motor Racing Circuit. Going through them quickly to sort the wheat from the chaff was a slow process, I reckon each image took over three seconds to load to the screen and come up to full resolution/sharpness. That adds up and is very frustrating.

So, I bit the bullet and browsed eBay for something to speed things up. Eventually I came across a 2009 four core, Mac Pro 4.1 with a pretty basic spec. In theory it's actually slower than my Mac mini but in reality it's much faster. The Mac mini has 2.5" 5400rpm drives which are pretty slow. OK I could upgrade to an SSD but getting the drives out is not easy and the possibility of damaging the internals of the computer is ever present. On the other hand the Mac Pro has 4 slide out sleds for full size drives plus two other locations where an SSD or two could lurk in the redundant optical drive bay.

I have upgraded the stock video card to an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 1Gb card. I have upped the RAM to 32Gb (4x8Gb), although I may drop that to 24Gb (3x8Gb) It seems the RAM works more efficiently with three slots not four. Time will tell.

The final master stroke will be upgrading the processor to a six core. I have been told it's a doddle, well I wouldn't call it a doddle but it's doable even by an old codger such as myself.

Part of the process is to update the firmware to the Mac Pro 5.1 spec, which I have now done. I am not going 'the whole hog' but just taking it to a point where it should be comparable with equivalent current six core Mac Pro 6.1's or at least not too far behind, at a tiny fraction of the cost. The huge benefit of the aluminium 4.1/5.1 Mac Pro towers is their massive storage capacity and ready supply of cheap upgrade parts.

I realise this isn't much interest to many people but hopefully for the odd one who is interested it may be a valuable resource and open up powerful computing for people on a tight budget.

I will follow with some screen shots and a detailed explanation of how I updated the firmware, which up to now was the toughest part of the project.

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Robert.