Mac Pro Not Using all Available RAM?

There are no problems with your computer. The fact you have only 652kb of page-outs from virtual memory means you have ample RAM to support your tasks.

Export/render is CPU, GPU and source drive intensive, it uses little RAM except as a frame/working buffer.

If your render times are limited by drive throughput and you have ample RAM free, make a RAM disk.

5GB

diskutil erasevolume HFS+ "RamDisk" `hdiutil attach -nomount ram://10485760`

Man page for the diskutil command:

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwin/Reference/Manpages /man8/diskutil.8.html

BitterCreek is correct here. The fact that the RAM is not be maxed out is actually a good thing. I would only worry if I knew XX amount of RAM was installed and only a portion of that was being shown as total available.

Another approach that I advocate is to make sure your are running your production FROM one disk drive, and writing the output TO a different destination drive. This avoids the "traffic jam" of waiting for the drive heads to shuttle back and forth from destination area to source area again and again and again, throwing away 20msec of dead time or more for each move (times thousands of reads and writes).

If it was 64-bit mode and 64-bit process, you can do more efficiently if you do not need to rely on disk I/O and can use virtual volumes caches instead like CS6 to manipulate images and video while in memory and grab 24GB. But they don't. They don't even effectively use all cores do they? And did they take into account only systems with less memory? even now iMac maxes out at 32GB and laptops less, mini at 16GB officially so I assume MacBook Pro too.

RAM not being used is RAM going to waste.

Forget the 5870. Wait and look for a GTX cards - go visit Barefeats, he tested a large number of tests, apps, and there are half a dozen GPU related articles from March to now. GTX 680 and AMD 7950 are top dog probably, both are Mac Edition cards too and more VRAM and cores for gpu/gpgpu.

It may be more a matter of budget than anything and from what you have now yes the 5870 would but at $449 is where I wonder if the price is right. I would up your budget on GPU actually to $500, tackle that after your storage needs are in order to make enough difference from the 5770, which is working and makes this more of a "nice to have upgrade option" rather than a "must have" or something.

http://www.barefeats.com

Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 Mac Edition 3GB DDR5 HDMI/DVI-I/Dual Mini DP PCI-Express Graphics Card 11196-15-40G

Disk drives: I would be looking into PCIe SATA/SAS 8x card that might even support SATA3 6G and that lets you have 4 x 2TB drives and 400MB/sec if that is what you want.

Even the SSD only Sonnet Tempo Pro for two internal SSDs. You could use one for system and one for scratch. RAID for the system doesn't do all that much and means you only need a smaller 120-240GB SSD for the system and easier to deal with that RAID0.

I am glad it runs smoother and better and yes holds more in memory. Every disk drive volume takes a small amount of cached memory, plus most frequently accessed and edited files. Zero is a good thing!

FW800 will throttle and cause any hard drive to not run at its rated speed, and in fact you should look at SATA3 cards.

Answered the gpu related in your other thread, but they will, they are Mac Pro builds. And no there is 75W per PCIe slot plus 75W (at least) from each of the two 6-pin aux power cables (your 5770 uses one, these cards use two).

So before you worry more about GPU, take a look at this, then look for a hard drive case for 4 direct connect hard drives.

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Firmtek/SERITEKQ6G/

You will get this thing off the ground and flying better!

And look and see what ideas about external storage, or even whether you can redo your internal storage might be cheaper by using different capacity and mix of drives.

I would put your system on an SSD for one thing. And use Sonnet Tempo SSD or the Tempo Pro SSD ($149 vs $289) for your system.

Then use 4x2TB for a large fast media project array.

Then some 3TB WD RED drives for backups. They are NAS certified drives.

WD Red 3 TB NAS Hard Drive: 3.5 Inch...

If you need to grow 3-6-9TB of backup storage these are what to go with.

Antonline is good as is IcyDock.... so yes a basic SATA box.

You can go with any SATA drive, so WD Black would be fine, so would those RED NAS drives (which are better if you plan to use in an RAID array).

And much better than FW800 - and Firewire ports and its bus on Mac Pro are not w/o a problem now and again.

I have worked with Firmtek products from the first stirring of SATA 1.0 back in... well this time of year 2003. They were ready before the rest of the community and before the G5s hit the streets in August with SATA drives for first time in a Mac.