Got rid of my Mac stuff!

Finally took the plunge. Got rid of my 2012 Mac Pro and MacBook Pro. Tired of struggling to accommodate a GTX 1080 TI in the old aluminium box and endlessly waiting in front of a black screen. Invested in a Dell XPS 15 9560 and an Alienware Aurora R6 with dual GTX 1080 TI and 64Gig.

After resolving the initial hurdles (faulty ram on XPS 15 and Windows 10 not loading for some reason on the Aurora) Resolve 14b4 is absolutely buttersmooth with 4.6K raw media from my old RED Scarlet and my new UMP on a 3k gaming machine without compromise.

So happy, I love it. No regret....

Tired of struggling to accommodate a GTX 1080 TI in the old aluminium box and endlessly waiting in front of a black screen.

A few questions and specifications here should have solved your problems imho.
Right drivers and cuda panels and go... (of course, short black screen at boot because no EFI in it and because you don't have any 2nd/alternative EFI GPU to see the apple at launch)

Right drivers and cuda panels and go...

Its a little bit more complex than that; in the braver new world of UHD and beyond, the older Mac Silver Towers (aside from all the driver issues) don't feature enough power supply or distribution to keep these more advanced build-outs happy. Add a full complement of raided 4x4TB+ hard drives (on top of pulling out the optical drives and replacing those with SSD or whatever) and Resolve will happily want around 2 KWatts on maximum render exertion. At that point, get the GPUs out of the mainframe and into an external chassis with its own power supply. And so on.

jPo, CSI

No no no... Excuse me jp, but that's not correct...
I totally understand what you're talking about, BUT my statement really did take that into account and moreover, I'd say it may be one of the top assets of the cheesegrater at the end of the day.
I'd say : just do it, and you will see it just works (and quite great).
Drives - from 500 GB to 4To, it's quite the same - don't suck power which would be assigned to PCIe instead.

Yes, 2008 MP had a total amount of 1400 W and its successors had 1000 only, but check out priorities in Apple HW spec, for any MP : 1st, HDs in slot one and 2 (regardless to it's a ssd or not), the rest shared by GPU(s) and global consumption.
Replacing optical hard drive by anything - I mean any HD, 7200, 10 000 rpm or SSD - makes anyone feel smart, but actually it's not such a great idea, because OSX won't use it before slot 1 and/or 2 anyway. Why not for a 4 To backup instead. But I know a bunch of mates who put their system on it : no, definitely it's not a good idea, even when any SSD shows good results/perf. It could be better.

Resolve will happily want around 2 KWatts on maximum render exertion

Hmmmmm... Resolve needs quick access to system disk, quick access to cache disk, quick access to footage; those can consist in 3-4 HD, including internal RAID0 of SSDs. Just a cheap (including in terms of watts consumption) 4 lines USB 3 in a PCIe slot can make it aside.
Anyway, like components temperature, if your computer shows sudden switch off, now you can understand you've reached - and gone beyond - the MP consumption limits But relax, I've never seen that, and the whole concept is around "switching off before you really break".
Ok, now you think I'm too confident, event totally naive, but I don't think so.

Of course, if your MP has a westmere basis, an external enclosure cannot be a bad idea at the same time

No no no... Excuse me jp, but that's not correct...
definitely it's not a good idea, even when any SSD shows good results/perf. It could be better.

Are you saying drives are a lot faster in the HD slot 1 position than in the optical drive position?

I do.
Though "a lot faster" may be discussed.
More specifically, a friend of mine - an apple store tech, when it had another name a few years ago like "whatever reseller" or something like that - told me about that, when I was thinking about building a tower in the smarter and more relevant way.

I wanted to optimize any room inside, especially in terms of HD (PCIe slots were the next steps), and of course, as anyone owning a legacy MP has ever thought about, we came to a point where the optical bay was at stake.
He told me Apple made it so that in case of really huge bandwidth requests, HD slots 1 and 2 had priority over anything else.
Of course, "priority" doesn't mean the rest is literally paused, and moreover reaching a point where every HD demands are so huge that this question of priority occurs must be rare, but I was given advice to preferably put something like 4 or 6 To backup drive there, instead of the system (insisting on an internal Raid0 SSDs solution btw).

So that was my 2 cents; honestly I don't think the perf gain should really be perceptible, but when you want to optimize the best you can, the optical bay remains the last in line in term of this very priority. Some put backup drives, some straightforwardly forget about a drive and use the OB power supply to feed something else.
(again, sorry for my english, hope you understood the point of view )

Cool info, Sam. I'll have to try it out sometime. Always amazes me how much life the old Mac Pros still have.