Apparently I can’t leave well enough alone. After upgrading my Mac Pro 4.1 to a 3.2GHz quad core Xeon from the originally installed 2.66GHz quad core Xeon, I read about some who had upgraded their Mac Pros to the six core W3680 Xeon CPU. I did some checking on Ebay and the time, these CPU’s were going for around five to six hundred dollars. Doing some more research, I found out about the slightly faster version of that CPU series, the Xeon W3690, a speed bumped version of the W3680. This CPU can be found on Ebay for much less, and they are clocked about 200MHz faster. So, I picked one up off of Ebay and installed it into my Mac Pro. Overall, the system seems faster, and considering its a five year old machine, it’s a good investment. I frequently use Handbrake to encode ripped Blu-Rays and it does work well for this task. Handbrake makes use of all the cores for encoding and this CPU with hyperthreading displays as 12 threads. All in all, this Mac Pro is running smoothly now, and should be usable for a few more years. I considered installing a PCI express based SSD from Macsales, but for the time being I settled on a standard Samsung SSD. Even thought the Mac Pro is limited to a 3GB/second SATA interface, it’s still much faster than a spinning platter disk.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
