Is my 2010 Mac Pro sufficient for Adobe Premiere?

[mohalia]

I recently acquired a Mac Pro (Mid 2010) and am running High Sierra with the following specs:

Processor: 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon

Memory: 24 GB 1066 MHz DDR3

Graphics: ATI Radeon HD 5870 1024 MB

I tried running the latest version of Adobe Premiere and it ends up performing ridiculously slowly, eventually I get the spinning wheel of death and have to force quit. I know nothing about graphics cards and such. Do I need to update my graphics card to be able to use Premiere? Or would it help to run a previous version of Premiere instead? Any input on what I can do to my comptuer to get it to run adobe properly is much appreciated. 

I traded a 2015 iMac with 32GB of RAM for this Mac Pro and now I'm wondering if I should have kept the iMac instead. It seemed to run Premiere just fine. 

[Peru Bob]

The graphics card doesn't meet the minimum requirements:

https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/system-requirements.html

Have you tried proxies?

https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/how-to/proxy-media.html

[RjL190365]

You should have kept the iMac instead, in this case:

You actually downgraded in both performance and compatibility with newer programs when you did the trade. That single quad-core CPU is actually slower and weaker overall than even a cheapo dual-core CPU of recent times. And that HD 5870 is not Metal-compatible, so you have absolutely no GPU acceleration at all whatsoever.

[typ41072781]

The 2010 Mac Pro is very expandable. With a few upgrades (particularly CPU and GPU) you'll be able to get this thing performing much better than your former iMac. Do the research, there is lots of threads and YouTube videos on upgrading these things. 

[RjL190365]

But then, the discussion starter would be very limited in the CPU generation. The 2010 Mac Pro's CPU socket cannot accept anything newer than a Westmere Xeon X56xx series in the long-obsolete LGA 1366 socket. Newer workstation CPUs require LGA 2011 of two different generations, and later LGA 2066. None of those sockets are at all compatible with one another.

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi,

Maybe this was viable some years ago. However, let's be honest. No one should be using 10 year old computers for current Adobe software.

Thanks,
Kevin

[RjL190365]

I agree with that. In fact, I saw a recent result in Puget System's public benchmark database of a system that's equipped with a 9-year-old Sandy Bridge i7-2600K and a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti - and I had to laugh out loud at its really puny result. The RTX 2080 Ti is severely bottlenecked in that system, not just by the CPU, but also by the PCI-E 2.0 bus that Sandy Bridge used. In fact, its GPU score in PugetBench for Premiere Pro is actually lower than my GTX 1650 SUPER had achieved in my now-in-storage i7-7700 Kaby Lake system. Not surprisingly, that i7-2600K/RTX 2080 Ti's overall PugetBench Premiere Pro score using the Standard preset was barely half that of my i7-7700/GTX 1650 SUPER system. This was a classic case of a severely imbalanced build - way too much GPU and way too little CPU. The owner of that system would do best to retire everything in that system except for the GPU, and then build an entirely new entry-level build around that GPU to replace that 9-year-old relic. While Sandy Bridge was a solid mainstream CPU for its time, it is now uncompetitive and obsolete in today's computing world.

And the Z77 chipset that i7-2600K system was using wasn't being utilized to its fullest because Sandy Bridge could only transfer its PCI-E controller at PCI-E 2.0 bandwidth. Ivy Bridge, the architecture that succeeded Sandy Bridge, introduced PCI-E 3.0 support. However, the top Ivy Bridge CPU that was available for LGA 1155, the i7-3770K, would still have bottlenecked the RTX 2080 Ti, just not quite as severely as the i7-2600K did.

And I was mostly correct in my hunch that the 2010 Mac Pro is a retrograde from the 2015 iMac. This is one case where a top-end CPU from 10 years ago can barely keep up with an entry-level enthusiast CPU that's five years newer (as far as overall processing power is concerned) although to be honest, most iMacs of that vintage (2015) used mobile CPUs rather than true desktop CPUs. And forget about a new GPU for that 2010 Mac Pro: Anything that's current, especially the higher-end Radeons from the Vega and the RX 5000 series (not to be confused with the much older HD 5000 series), will be heavily bottlenecked in that old Mac Pro - if not by the CPU, then by the ancient PCI-E 2.0 bus that the chipset on the motherboard uses.