Scott Simmons at the Pro Video Coalition takes a look at extending the life of the old Mac Pro Tower.
I have been trying to do the same with mine. Have not yet been able to afford an SSD boot drive, or an NVIDIA K5000 (though I do have a PC GTX 670), and have added USB 3.
Would love to have an expansion chassis, but it almost begs the question of is it worth it to stay Mac. I would love to be able to get a MacBook Pro to keep me Mac and then build a huge PC tower with all the expansion and ports I will ever need. Thunderbolt is great, but it is expensive, and not as fast as PCI, and I would rather have all the internal storage I could have than have to get external storage.
Great post Jonah! I have an early 2009 MacPro dual quad and I upgraded my boot drive to a 500 GB Samsung SSD for $235 and it works great! I also put a smaller SSD in the second optical drive bay for PPro and AE cache. I have a GTX 780 card which has 2300 CUDA cores and 3 GB of VRAM and it also works great with AE and PPro. Only drawback is I dont see the apple start up screen but Im ok with that. I also put in an esata card and a USB3 card too for better IO. I really like being able to put drives inside and it is super convenient to switch out drives for each project. A new MacPro would be great but they are still overpriced to me… The other option for cards is to put 2 680 cards and connect them together with the bridge cable. I really wish Apple had continued the tower models but I read that there was an issue with energy compliance in Europe so they went with the new model.