What can I do to increase the performance of my Mac Pro? I have a stock early 2007 Mac Pro (8GB RAM, 2 x NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT (256 MB). It has a RAID0 bootdrive and is running Lion. I've had it for >5years and I really love it.

However, recent attempts to do stuff, including running WebGL demos, has led to a realisation that its actually now quite an old machine. This isn't a problem for me day-to-day - its still a monster able to rip CDs, play DVDs, run a Windows VM simultaneously without breaking a sweat - but as a developer I'd like to stay abreast of current tech like WebGL and whatever other else.

I'm not prepared to spend thousands on a newer machine, mine is just fine for day-to-day purposes, but I would like to soup it up. Upgrading GPUs has been mentioned, but I was wondering if other parts of the system could be swapped out with newer ones.

Does anyone have any experience of upgrading older Mac Pros?
You have few options:


CPU: Now you have two two-cores XEONs. You may upgrade them to two 4-cores XEONs. Here is a crowd-sourced experience on this. AFAIK the best you can add is X5355 or even X5365. Here is a good discussion on this matter. And these are pictures.
SSD: Just put in the place reserved for second ODD(Can't remember if your model have wires in place already). Or buy 3.5" adapter like IcyDock 2.5" to 3.5" SSD &amp; SATA Hard Drive Converter or OWC's MountPro. Yes, it is much faster for boot drive than conventional HDD, RAIDed or not.
GPU: look at this blog and forums there if you are interested in flashing cheap PC card for your Mac.
Memory: You may add as much as much as 32Gb with 240-pin PC2-5300 (667MHz) DDR2 ECC fully-buffered DIMM (FB-DIMM) (matched pairs) 4GB modules. If you need them.


Right now I would choose SSD. And then I would check if prices for those CPU are stable or keep falling and then decide on time and need for CPU upgrade.