Resolve slow on Mac Pro trash can - upgrade time?

Hi all,

I'm an amateur (at best) so I appreciate the time anyone takes to chime in here. My situation:

- I'm filming some instructional videos using 4 domestic cameras (Panasonic HC-VX1), producing 4k 25fps mp4's. Overall bit rate per file is around 60 Mb/s
- These are being imported to Resolve (studio, latest version) and I'm creating multicam clips so I can change angles efficiently. All good there.
- No processing in place other than a basic colour grade.

The issue is very sluggish performance all round - Resolve won't play sometimes, or stutters etc. Render time is painfully slow too.

My system:
- Mac Pro 6-core (late-2013), 64Gb RAM, AMD FirePro D500 3 GB
- video files live on an external 4Tb Lacie (spinning disk) drive connected via TB2
- project files, and audio cache data on another similar drive connected via USB3
- internal 500Gb SSD is not much use, it's full of other stuff and I already have about 3Tb of footage.

Not a particularly powerful setup, but what can I look at / do to improve performance?

Next - where should I look first for hardware upgrades? The trash can is what it is, and performs well for my other work. Maybe an eGPU setup? SSD external drives? I don't think a more powerful CPU is really an option.

Apologies if this is not enough info to go on, I'm a newb.

I'm afraid the GPU doesn't even support hardware decoding for that codec.
To find out without any further investment, try to transcode some files to ProRes and see how it works. You don't need the highest quality for those files, so possible issues with throughput are avoided. And then, with 3 GB VRAM in that card, forget 4K/UHD. VRAM is not additive in DR. 8 years are an eternity in computer technology.
With all its thermal problems, a new machine might be the better solution. Even the Mac mini M1 should outperform it. If you can wait a bit and don't need portability, a newer Mac mini might be around the corner.
IMHO, eGPUs are a dead-end street by now. The new Macs don’t support them anyway and on the PC side there are strong GPUs to be found even in laptops.

Many thanks for the feedback, I'll look into this.

Yes the trash can is long in the tooth, maybe it's time!