mother .... board! [Archive]

Deanan

12-19-2008, 05:01 PM

yeah - pretty sure 8x gen 2 PCI-E slot has the same bandwidth as a 16x gen 1 PCI-E slot - Deanan?

It is, however I don't know how well a particular pci-e gen2 gpu/mobo combination will be affected by the difference. It would be good to know since it looks like a great board.

One of the down sides though is that the spacing means you lose one slot with a double wide GPU card.

Im' really looking forward to the dual processor ones.

Mark L. Pederson

12-19-2008, 05:27 PM

Im' really looking forward to the dual processor ones.

hell yeah .. dual socket Ci7 is gonna be the freekin' ticket to ride ...

Tai Wah Lim

12-19-2008, 05:41 PM

http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon3000/X58/X8ST3-F.cfm

not too shabby.

Mark, I am using a Supermicro Desktop with this board with the I7 extreme CPU and 12 GB (just 6 slots to take two sets of 6GB DDR3) and Vista64 to test the Adobe CS4 workflow. So far it is looking good. Lim

Mark L. Pederson

12-23-2008, 10:17 PM

Mark, I am using a Supermicro Desktop with this board with the I7 extreme CPU and 12 GB (just 6 slots to take two sets of 6GB DDR3) and Vista64 to test the Adobe CS4 workflow. So far it is looking good. Lim
are you overclocking? 920 chip?

FYI - here's a good post on i7 overclocking -

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showpost.php?p=3495431&postcount=877

Roberto Lequeux

12-24-2008, 12:32 AM

Mark, I am using a Supermicro Desktop with this board with the I7 extreme CPU and 12 GB (just 6 slots to take two sets of 6GB DDR3) and Vista64 to test the Adobe CS4 workflow. So far it is looking good. Lim

Please start a thread or post a little update on this... I am wondering if I should consider Adobe, something I once never thought I'd think of doing.

I would like to see what this board can do with the i7 series!

Also, I take it you guys are exited about the mobo because of storage posibilities? Are you guys looking at RAID-5? I thought there were no southbridges able to keep up with R3D footage? Are you expecting to be able to use the MoBo for the footage drives and edit 2k?

Jeff Kilgroe

12-24-2008, 09:26 AM

It is, however I don't know how well a particular pci-e gen2 gpu/mobo combination will be affected by the difference. It would be good to know since it looks like a great board.

Exactly. And as of right now, there are no PCIe gen2 graphics cards out there. So for any consideration of dual cards, there's only one x16 slot on this board. And the spacing that you mentioned as well.

Im' really looking forward to the dual processor ones.

Hellsyeah.

Mark L. Pederson

12-24-2008, 03:20 PM

Exactly. And as of right now, there are no PCIe gen2 graphics cards out there. So for any consideration of dual cards, there's only one x16 slot on this board. And the spacing that you mentioned as well.

Hellsyeah.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcDztfFXPww

Roberto Lequeux

12-24-2008, 03:25 PM

Yea, but will FC, Premiere and the other usual suspects take advantage of the cores? Where are we at with that? I am only considering Premiere and FC, btw, I think.

And could someone explain the RAID thing? Will you actually edit from an internal RAID5 setup on the MoBo?

JanneJansson

12-24-2008, 03:33 PM

Just got a i7 mobo this.
http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/Motherboard/Products_Overview.aspx?ProductID=2958

Have not tested it yet, but seems very good. My plan is to make it my "bus" to my new linux red-renderfarm.

Mark L. Pederson

12-24-2008, 05:01 PM

Mark L. Pederson

12-27-2008, 08:25 AM

anyone rockin the Asus Rampage II Extreme (http://www.motherboardpro.com/Asus-Rampage-II-Extreme-Intel-X58-Core-i7-Socket-1366-6-DDR3-3PCIEX-16-2GB-ATX-Motherboard-Retail-p-1040.html) ??

Bob Gruen

12-27-2008, 08:57 AM

The integrated SAS is a real nice touch. I don't understand the reasoning behind the SAS RAID-5 support being an optional configuration though.

NEVER use motherboard based RAID. NEVER NEVER NEVER. The BIOS configuration systems are always immature and I've never seen one that properly implements S.M.A.R.T. If a disk goes bad I'd put it at less than 50% that an average user could get a new drive in there and get the array rebuilt. Besides, they are not dedicated processors and actually depend on the computer's CPU to do work. Internal RAID cards with dedicated processors cost hundreds of dollars, so how could a $350 motherboard actually have a real RAID solution? Go with 3ware if you want to do internal RAID.

The real use for SAS on a motherboard like this would be for a tape drive and for fast working drives. So you could render from a large internal RAID array to a working disk. If the working disk fails you don't actually loose anything and being able to read from one subsystem and write to another will greatly speed up performance.

All this being stated, you guys think small:

http://www.tyan.com/product_board_detail.aspx?pid=631

Bob

Adam Glick

12-27-2008, 08:59 AM

All, in my experience, I've never seen an on-board RAID5 controller that was usable (fast enough) for our purposes. If you want to have fault-tolerant, direct-attached storage for editing and VFX work, you will need to :

1. add a RAID controller card, or
2. buy an external e-sata/SAS or FC array with built in hardware RAID controller.

*I would stay away from 3WARE. Consider using a card that makes use of the intel iop348 processor such as ATTO and Adaptec now use for their SAS/SATA controllers. They are much faster than the 3WARE stuff.

***Our next generation redBOXX will provide 6 (six) PCI-E 16X (gen 2) slots for maximum flexibility in configuring the system to integrate nicely into your existing plant/infrastructure.

Mark L. Pederson

12-27-2008, 11:55 AM

***Our next generation redBOXX will provide 6 (six) PCI-E 16X (gen 2) slots for maximum flexibility in configuring the system to integrate nicely into your existing plant/infrastructure.

Hurry up!

Adam Glick

12-27-2008, 12:03 PM

Trust me Mark, You will be the among the very first to know.

;)

Stacey Spears

12-27-2008, 12:12 PM

And as of right now, there are no PCIe gen2

Really? I own one. The Quadro FX 5800 is a gen2 card. NVIDIAs website claims they have been shipping gen2 cards since October 2007.

Here is an example press release stating one of their cards is gen2. http://www.nvidia.com/object/io_1199782737524.html

Stacey Spears

12-27-2008, 12:13 PM

I had a lot of bad luck with the 3ware 9690 SAS card. I have had great luck with both the 3085 and 5085 Adaptec cards.

Tom Lowe

12-27-2008, 12:23 PM

hey guys, just a quick question here. i have a Dell XPS 710 system that is already washed up. i was wondering if i could simply drop a new motherboard into that tower with a new Core i7 chip? what all is involved in doing that?

laguun

12-30-2008, 12:44 AM

We are using 5 workstations with core i7 since months, iirc the first units arrived here in october.

MSI Eclipse and the Gigabyte GA-X58-DS4. Vista 64.

They are working excellent.

We are using, since years, mainly onboard raid controllers, mostly Adaptec and Intel.
The typcical X58 onboard intel ICH10R raid controller allow matrix raids, mixed raid 5 and raid 0.

Typical transferspeed on the onboard ICH10R is 500-600 Megabyte/sec on RAID 0 read and write. 200-250 write/300-400 read on RAID 5.

We are using the MSI for the dual PCI-E 2.0 x16.

Lets see how well the dual i7 xeon scale. Few applications in red-land so far are able to fully use the hyperthreaded 8 cores of an core i7.

yorick von krogh

Richard Andrewski

12-30-2008, 04:51 AM

Anyone using 3 Way SLI and is there any benefit to that in RED workflow? I doubt that it would be useful for anything but CGI/Games but just checking. Also, with a 3 WAY SLI, can you do two large screens for computer desktop and 1 hdtv display for editing output?

Roberto Lequeux

12-30-2008, 05:42 AM

Tom, you could recycle the tower and hard drives, the video card, all provided you have enough slots for them, but I think you'll need DDR3... not sure cause I haven't been looking for a long time now but chances are there aren't DDR2 MoBos with the socket for the i7 out there.

I did a little reading and found several i7 920's clocked up to 3.7GHz, on air cooling and stable. You will need a MoBo that allows you to override the voltage cap, however you'll only need a tinie more voltage, not much at all. And temperatures are ridiculously low.

For RAM I bumped into the OCZ Reaper 2GB sticks, apparently excellent overclockable DDR3 with low timings: $130 for a pair AMR http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227293

I better stop looking till I can build a new one.

Roberto Lequeux

12-30-2008, 06:15 AM

BTW, I am still waiting for one of you guys to explain the whole excitement behind the on-board SAS... are you planning to edit R3D from a MoBo based RAID-5 or RAID-0?

Adam Glick

12-30-2008, 08:09 AM

me too. ;)

Roberto Lequeux

12-30-2008, 09:00 AM

I am thinking the best buy might be the ASUS P6T Deluxe...but I have barely looked around so far. It has the X58 northbridge and the ICH10R south bridge. I am sure I'd get rocking numbers our of two RAID-0s for the OS and target drive to render to and use an external RAID-5 for the footage. Also there are tons of kids blazing through Crysis with their 920 i7's over 4GHz with water cooling and hordes of them running 3.8GHz on air. It is all about the memory you get.

Then again by the time I have to build I might be so lucky as to be able to use two 920's on one board... I could only hope and try to get myself to that point.

I wonder if anyone has ran Mac OS on these yet? Or how Premiere would run in XP-32 or 64...

anyone have a pile of cash lying around that they don't need? Or two?

laguun

12-30-2008, 09:13 AM

BTW, I am still waiting for one of you guys to explain the whole excitement behind the on-board SAS... are you planning to edit R3D from a MoBo based RAID-5 or RAID-0?

We are editing a lot from the Intel Mobo Controllers on several systems.
R3D datarates are pretty low compared to uncompressed HD or 2K.

Onboard we use sata, sas we have dedicated controllers - but that should not be necessary for r3d-editing which is only ~40-45 Mbyte / sec.

laguun

12-30-2008, 09:16 AM

Anyone using 3 Way SLI and is there any benefit to that in RED workflow?

SLI and multi-gpus are EXTREMLY powerful.
Most desktop-class softwares as adobe, speedgrade, scratch, combustion, redcine etc dont use it yet, so for red the software manufacturers have to catch up.

I doubt that it would be useful for anything but CGI/Games but just checking. Also, with a 3 WAY SLI, can you do two large screens for computer desktop and 1 hdtv display for editing output?
We are using it for exatcly this. 5 and 6 screen rocks.
I am typing this on a 24 24 24 42 quadmonitorsystem.

Tom Lowe

12-30-2008, 09:25 AM

laguun, show us some pics of your setup!

Jeff Kilgroe

12-30-2008, 10:01 AM

Like others have said, onboard controllers are not great for performance RAIDs in most cases. But they are still useful. It's nice to see new boards offering SAS connectivity. Dual 15Krpm SAS drives in a RAID-0 for the primary OS volume is a wonderful thing and is very convenient and cost-effective with the onboard SAS. Not all onboard RAID is crap, it typically is for SATA, but in the good ol' Pentium II/III days, Tyan and SuperMicro and others would incorporate some rather nice Adaptec SCSI controllers with the option of RAID / cache daughtercard add-ons. We used these for pumping multiple streams of uncompressed SD through the Video Toaster NT and other uncompressed solutions. ...Did this back in '99~'00. Onboard SAS has other uses too, most of which don't fit into the BOXXlabs workstation paradigm, or at least not to my knowledge, but many of us out here find useful. It also remains to be tested to see if the onboard SAS is actually worth a crap or not. Most late model boards have pretty decent RAID 1 capability with their SATA interfaces. Which is quite useful when building low-cost, mission critical processor nodes for clusters or render farms. Some of us are happy to see integrated SAS in these lower cost, more mainstream boards. Some of us don't see the value and are not excited over it... Honestly, I'm not so excited over single CPU boards, I personally won't build me a new workstation until I can put together dual Nehalem Xeons. Same with render nodes... It's all about power per watt and single processor boards just don't cut it.

Back on the subject of graphics cards, I obviously shouldn't have said that no cards support PCIe gen2. But we're still waiting for full support for it, especially when it comes to using multiple cards. I'm in agreement with laguun on the multi-card issue. Unfortunatly, the pro graphics world is very slow at adopting this tech, but it seems to finally be changing with CUDA and nVidia now pushing their own workstation with multiple cards. As for multiple cards and monitors now, I have two workstations running 3 displays, one system has dual 30" DELL LCDs and a 50" Panasonic 1080p plasma (connected via DVI to HDMI cable) and the other system has a 30" LCD plus two 24" LCDs.

Roberto Lequeux

12-30-2008, 10:36 AM

We are editing a lot from the Intel Mobo Controllers on several systems.
R3D datarates are pretty low compared to uncompressed HD or 2K.

Onboard we use sata, sas we have dedicated controllers - but that should not be necessary for r3d-editing which is only ~40-45 Mbyte / sec.

I guess this goes to show how ignorant I am about the Red work flow... :watsup:

When I say R3d I thought I meant the full Red RAW... I thought R3D files were the Red Code 36 files... am I horribly wrong about that?

I am hoping to be able to edit single camera features shot on Scarlet, hopefully S35, or Red One. All I need is my two 24" and one production monitor, hopefully a 1080p, for color grading. I won't be doing any fancy render farms, one computer is all I'll get. I am thinking about Premiere or FC... I am hoping there will be a way to edit in Windows... I guess it would be Premiere with a Quadro card? I am definitely only thinking of Blu-Ray as my final... but I want to be able to do it right... and for me that would mean being able to have real time 4:4:4 1080... 2k would be sweet too of course, and anything above that is, by far, overkill for me. I don't know if that is even possible with only one computer but it doesn't sound that far off... I've been reading as much as I can hereon Reduser but obviously not everything sticks yet... so I don't mean to be a little third-grader pulling on you pants asking to have you guys explain quantum physics in terms I will grasp but... well I am. Help, pls. :watsup:

BTW, I am also seriously going to consider recording FF1080 or FF2k to use in a 1080 timeline if that is possible.

JanneJansson

12-30-2008, 02:11 PM

IMO raid-5 is false safety. ALL raid-5 I have seen that have faild, have also corrupted data in some way that was totally fubar, so in the end, it was just to re-do lost work.

Best performance vs price vs safety is just a raid-0 that is rsynced to an another raid-0. It just copies the difference, so the more often rsync is run, the faster it goes.

And another good info, is avoid use normal desktop drives in raids. Some desktop drives get stuck in internal error correction and stop responding, and falls out of raid sets. After a reboot all is fine, but if you have bad hair day, maybe 2 or 3 drives of 10 hang, and then your raid-5 may be toast.

Richard Andrewski

12-30-2008, 03:02 PM

SLI and multi-gpus are EXTREMLY powerful.
Most desktop-class softwares as adobe, speedgrade, scratch, combustion, redcine etc dont use it yet, so for red the software manufacturers have to catch up.

Are you sure? I stumbled across this during my research for a new system I want to setup (like what you've got).

http://www.nvidia.com/object/builtforadobepros.html

Says, faster work and optimized for Adobe CS4. Of course, the catch is that we have to buy a Quadro CX which is in the $1700 range each. 3 of those needed I think to do the 3 way SLI correctly. Or, could you use just one of them and a lesser card for the other two and still get the same processing?

We are using it for exatcly this. 5 and 6 screen rocks.
I am typing this on a 24 24 24 42 quadmonitorsystem.

Yes, we'd love to see pictures of a 5 monitor setup! The Gigabyte seems to be the best motherboard right now as you can do 3 way SLI with it. Haven't seen another i7 motherboard that can do that, plus its got two x16 and one x8 PCI Express slots

http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/Motherboard/Products_Spec.aspx?ClassValue=Motherboard&ProductID=2957&ProductName=GA-EX58-EXTREME
.

Tai Wah Lim

12-30-2008, 05:00 PM

are you overclocking? 920 chip?

FYI - here's a good post on i7 overclocking -

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showpost.php?p=3495431&postcount=877

Mark, Nope. But is really happy with using this with Adobe CS4 and Red. Will experiment on the overclocking someday.

Lim

Jeff Kilgroe

12-30-2008, 05:13 PM

Adam Glick

12-30-2008, 05:51 PM

SLi support is not needed for a motherboard to handle multiple GPUs/multiple screens.

When people reference the term "SLi" they typically are referring to a mode of operation where multiple GPU's work together to provide maximum 3D frame rates single to a single monitor for their games.

If you just want 3 or 4 (or 5 or 6) monitors, you don't need SLi support. But you probably want to have at least an 8X PCIe slot for each GPU.

Richard Andrewski

12-30-2008, 07:11 PM

That's true. I forgot you don't need to tie the boards together for more monitor support. So if you chose the Quadro CX, would there be a benefit to having two of them to get even more processing power for CS4?

laguun

12-30-2008, 07:43 PM

SLi support is not needed for a motherboard to handle multiple GPUs/multiple screens.

Thats correct.
SLI adds the possibility to foucs several the power of several GPUs to one of the multiple screens, which non-SLI setups can´t.

Also, the newer flagships of ATI and Nvidia are SLI on one board.
Examples would be the Nvidia 9800GX2 or the ATI 3870 X2.

These cards have two processors SLId on one card. So, if 2 of those cards are SLId, 4 processors works on 2 cards.

When people reference the term "SLi" they typically are referring to a mode of operation where multiple GPU's work together to provide maximum 3D frame rates single to a single monitor for their games.

Games are using SLI best so far, but SLI supports most decent programmed OpenGL / DirectX - intense Application and strongly improves the available memory bandwidth GPU-GPUram.

If you just want 3 or 4 (or 5 or 6) monitors, you don't need SLi support. But you probably want to have at least an 8X PCIe slot for each GPU.
8x PCIe 2.0 or better 16x PCIe 2.0 per card is necessary, SLI is additional, not necessary, correct.

The price/performance sweetspot right now is a combination of:
Intel core i7 920 (~250€)
Motherboard X58 based (tested and good here are MSI and Gigabyte) (~200-250€)
12 GB Ram (~250-300€)
Nvidia GTX260 (~250€)
This is ~1000-1100€ total.

Add 6 or 8 Samsung Spinpoint F1 (~80€ per 1 TBb) or Seagates Barracudas (~120€ per 1.5 Tb) for 6-12 Tbytes of Storage for 400-960€. Regarding the Seagates, make sure to get the correct firmware, the elder firmwares had glitches.

Add a decent 8-12 bay case (80-400€) and a very good powersupply (80-100), Vista 64 and for 1500-2500€ you got a system which is outperforms most octas on dual xeon base for many applications.

OSX support on the X58 chipsets (and the ICH10R) isnt perfect yet.

laguun

12-30-2008, 07:46 PM

The Gigabyte board looks nice. Seems that there are some complaints about 3-way SLI with it though and front panel connector positions relative to the x8 slot.

These motherboard manufacturers are designing these boards to offer SLI, but are not adding extra space between the x16 and x8 slots to accommodate wider video cards or additional cooling.
yes, its often a PITA. thats one of the advantages of the MSI eclipse. It has 6 (Intel) + 4 (Jmicron) + 2 (Jmicron wirth port replicator) SATA interfaces which can be used even with a fully loaded rig. The internal Jmicons however arent as fast as the Intel ICH10R. The Intel ICH10R delivers solid 500 Mbyte/sec and up using onboard raid, the jmicron gets maxed out at ~300 Mbyte/sec.

laguun

12-30-2008, 07:56 PM

IMO raid-5 is false safety. ALL raid-5 I have seen that have faild, have also corrupted data in some way that was totally fubar, so in the end, it was just to re-do lost work.

Janne, i have to disagree.
Raid 5 alone isnt good enough. Raid 5 + backup is minimum.
But when we install raid 5s, we intentionally kill / power off drives to make sure the array keeps alive, and the intel ich10R just works fine here.

Best performance vs price vs safety is just a raid-0 that is rsynced to an another raid-0. It just copies the difference, so the more often rsync is run, the faster it goes.

Here i fully agree, but we never let mission critical data on raid 0 alone.

And another good info, is avoid use normal desktop drives in raids. Some desktop drives get stuck in internal error correction and stop responding, and falls out of raid sets. After a reboot all is fine, but if you have bad hair day, maybe 2 or 3 drives of 10 hang, and then your raid-5 may be toast.
Cant confirm this (running >100 desktop drives in raid) at all.
Of the ~50 1Tb and 1.5 Tb desktop drives in use here since 2008, we had 2 failing.
Both raid5s went into degraded, worked on, lost 0 bits, drives were replaced, intel autorebuild, perfect again.

BTW: A Raid 5 rebuild on a 6 Tby array on motherboard Intel Raid Controller takes ~7-8 hours with samsung spinpoints, a 10 Tb ~11-12 hours.

If you drives dont startup always and dont work perfect always they are defect, overheated or you have bad sata connectors.

laguun

12-30-2008, 08:00 PM

Are you sure? I stumbled across this during my research for a new system I want to setup (like what you've got).

http://www.nvidia.com/object/builtforadobepros.html

Says, faster work and optimized for Adobe CS4. Of course, the catch is that we have to buy a Quadro CX which is in the $1700 range each. 3 of those needed I think to do the 3 way SLI correctly. Or, could you use just one of them and a lesser card for the other two and still get the same processing?

The Quadro CX so far only has *very* few uses for a red workflow. In fact, the only thing it really speeds up for Adobe Premiere CS4 is H264 encoding. Also it offers a 10bit Displayport Interface - but most professional monitoring systems as DCI, Sony BVM etc use HD-SDI. So, a Decklink HD or an AJA might be better solutions and offer additional in/out.

Besides these functions the Quadro CX is a Nvidia 260 and shows pratically identical performance for 600% the price.

Lucas Wilson

12-30-2008, 10:31 PM

The Quadro CX so far only has *very* few uses for a red workflow. In fact, the only thing it really speeds up for Adobe Premiere CS4 is H264 encoding. Also it offers a 10bit Displayport Interface - but most professional monitoring systems as DCI, Sony BVM etc use HD-SDI. So, a Decklink HD or an AJA might be better solutions and offer additional in/out.

Besides these functions the Quadro CX is a Nvidia 260 and shows pratically identical performance for 600% the price.

Laguun is right.. the only thing the CX really does for CS4 workflow is accelerated H.264 rendering. Of course, if that's your thing, then you'll be happy. : )

Lucas

Roberto Lequeux

12-31-2008, 07:54 AM

Well this is EXCELLENT news... I wanted to get me a 260 to pwn n00bs on COD anywhhhay! :D

Plus it REALLY makes building a Red station much more likely $-wise!

So let me ask one specific one more time... is .R3D the RedCode file? The files right out of the camera? I thought that's what it was but I am not so sure so I ask even though it might make you guys laugh at me.

I am hoping to work with RC80 from a S35, and I am planning on using an X58, gladly get a 260 or two, and overclock a 920 to about 3.6GHz or so... but when you say to stack up the RAM i guess you mean XP-64bit right? Or are you running Vista?

Will that give me real time color graded previews with 2k? I certainly don't expect it to... but please clarify what kind of performance to expect from such a setup.

Tom Lowe

12-31-2008, 07:56 AM

Lol, USlatin, you have the same theory as me: why spend a ton of money on a computer if you can't pwn noobs with it. :)

Tom Lowe

12-31-2008, 08:00 AM

This is why I always laugh when people try to get me to switch to Mac.

Roberto Lequeux

12-31-2008, 08:00 AM

Lol, USlatin, you have the same theory as me: why spend a ton of money on a computer if you can't pwn noobs with it. :)

HAHAHA... I knew there would be someone that would understand my conundrum :devil:

But I am ecstatic to hear that I don't need to pony up thousands for the video cards when I can pick a 260 up, overclock it and only spend like $230.-

Roberto Lequeux

12-31-2008, 08:03 AM

Oh sorry Tom, I deleted my last post and re-posted it...

I was ready to switch to FC, but I think I'll put up with the Adobe interface if I can color grade 1080 online... I am really hoping that Lagun will answer to my post with some heart warming good news about the expected capabilities of that rig...

and the beauty is that you'd be able to sell your X58 MoBo for a very good sum of $ when the dual CPU boards come out and all you need to buy is an additional 920 i7 an a second CPU cooler.

Adam Glick

12-31-2008, 08:15 AM

I hate to burst anybody's bubble but I don't think anybody is going to be doing any realtime grading of R3Ds @ 1080 resolution in CS4 any time soon.

I hope to be proven wrong but i havn't seen this so far...

Tom Lowe

12-31-2008, 08:30 AM

what about realtime pwning of noobs at 1080? :)

Roberto Lequeux

12-31-2008, 08:52 AM

I hate to burst anybody's bubble but I don't think anybody is going to be doing any realtime grading of R3Ds @ 1080 resolution in CS4 any time soon.

I hope to be proven wrong but i haven't seen this so far...

Yea, don't worry I didn't blow up a bubble of hope for that... I am still trying to wrap my head around the RC workflow. Just to exhaust all avenues: Could it be done in FC?

And what would we be able to edit in Premiere? 4:2:2 2k should be no problem... I can almost edit 4:2:2 1080 in Vegas with my Q6600 and in XP-32bit so I am currently residing within a bubble of hope that I'll be grading 4:2:2 1080 and 2k. Is that one bursting?

What should I expect with that system out of Premiere and what would I get out of it running FC?

Tom, I am prety sure we'd be able to get COD maxed out and still get like 90fps at 1920 x 1200 :)

Adam Glick

12-31-2008, 09:11 AM

I think all the answers to your questions will be coming out sooner than later.

;)

Roberto Lequeux

12-31-2008, 09:18 AM

^ hehe... are we there yet? :)

Thomas Mathai

12-31-2008, 08:26 PM

This is why I always laugh when people try to get me to switch to Mac.

I seem to enjoy working on OS X more than Windows. Then of course I also like using the Terminal. Guess I can't waste all those years working in Unix.

Thomas Mathai

12-31-2008, 08:27 PM

So how much power are these new boards going to need? Will I need to buy a generator for my tiny apartment? :)

Richard Andrewski

01-01-2009, 03:56 AM

I see they are selling 1200w power supplies for triple SLI. Probably won't be too long before we need that for all the things we do and add to systems.

Roberto Lequeux

01-01-2009, 06:54 AM

you can run an overclocked system with two cards with much smaller PSUs too, just make sure to look at the reviews to get an accurate description of what they are capable of

I use a power and cooling 750w which is an excellent performer but I think three would be a bit too much for confort... the cool thing is that CPUs and GPUs need less power per pwnage index each day

Tom, are you going to use a 1080 TV? I still don't have one so I use my LCDs. Hopefully soon enough.

I really want to know if I'd get more speed out of MacOS... we could always set up a dual boot off a single drive :)

laguun

01-01-2009, 06:58 AM

I seem to enjoy working on OS X more than Windows. Then of course I also like using the Terminal. Guess I can't waste all those years working in Unix.

OSX doesnt support the current intel hardware (as X58, ich10r, core i7) out of the box. Should be available in Q1/2.

laguun

01-01-2009, 07:18 AM

^ hehe... are we there yet? :)

yes. computers using multi-cpu nehalems as the one boxxlabs is hinting/announcing to sell are already availabe, but for endusers is will take some more weeks.

boxxlabds is probably referring to the tylersburg/nehalem EP platform.

I suppose they are waiting for the cheaper series 5 cpus, as the series 7 cost quite a bit.

If you want to see the timeline, here is intels roadmap as pdf:
http://download.intel.com/pressroom/kits/events/idffall_2008/SSmith_briefing_roadmap.pdf

here is one of the dual nehalem ep/tylersburg board from october.
http://www.dvhardware.net/news/foxconn_nehalem_ep_server.jpg

The prices will be pretty low, ranging from the smaller 2core €5502 (~200$), the sweetspot will be probably the energy efficient L5520 and at the top the W5580 at 3.2Ghz.
http://techinsight.tv/articles_54.php

boards seem to mix in the 300-500$ range.

laguun

01-01-2009, 07:23 AM

So how much power are these new boards going to need? Will I need to buy a generator for my tiny apartment? :)

they are pretty efficient in idle (~like a core 2 dual) and go up to ~80-130 watts in the standard thermal design.

If one uses multiple graphics cards however, power requirements are easily ~250 watts per card.

we are mainly using 750W & 1 KW PS.

Whats amazing is how much the systems scale. idle at ~150/200Watts, SLI/multigpu load 700-900W. (12 TB internal SATA raid storage, dual Nvidia 200, decklink HDs on these stations).

Their low prices are making these platform pretty attractive.