I was in the same position and went ahead and upgraded my Mac Pro 2.66 GHz Quad (1,1) to a 3.0 GHz 8 core (2,1) by swapping out the CPUs. I also went ahead and bought an Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT 1GB VRAM from Macvidcards on ebay. The ebay auction states that this will work with 2,1 Mac Pros and with the CUDA hack for GPU acceleration.
I would recommend to the OP to do this, HOWEVER, I've come across a little problem.
I updated to the latest cuda drivers from Nvidia. The latest Nvidia driver (256.02.25f1v1) will not install on my computer (states: This computer will not support this NVIDIA graphics solution). This makes sense since the driver is for Mac Pro 3,1 and up, as stated by Nvidia. I also found on some forums that I don't need to update to this as it's already bundled with the OS. So I skipped this step. I proceeded with the hack, followed the instructions perfectly. In Terminal, I got the "1 device supports CUDA" confirmation. I went to modifiy the cuda_supported_cards.txt file in Terminal, and nothing comes up. No list of supported cards. I added my card's name anyways, and Terminal tells me that the txt file doesn't exist.
Fired up Premiere Pro CS5.5 (master collection) to check this and yep, the Mercury Playback Acceleration software only is greyed out.
Any ideas out there? many thanks.
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Mac 2.66 GHz Quad Intel Xeon
OSX 10.6.8
FCS2
CS5.5
8GB RAM
ProAvio 8TB RAID 5 Dual Mini-SAS
Blackmagic Intensity Pro
ATI Radeon X1900
RocketRAID 4322 via dual MiniSAS
Panasonic Lumix GH2, Canon 5DMKII, 7D, Panasonic HVX200A, Panasonic DVX100A
